× Thanks for reading! Log in to continue. Enjoy more articles by logging in or creating a free account. No credit card required. Log in Sign up {{featured_button_text}}

There will be about a hundred of them in all from a dozen or more states, traveling by car or train or airplane, and when they gather in Montana at the end of this month it will be to celebrate another kind of journey — the one their families made by ox cart a century ago.

As John Gutierrez, of Northridge, Calif., explains, it was 100 years ago, in 1916, that several related Ukrainian families — having left their homeland behind when they moved to Canada a few years earlier — made the trek across the United States border. They homesteaded on the open prairie some 40 miles from Malta, the nearest town of any size.

“We’ve really got to remember these people and the sacrifices they made so we could have what we have today,” Gutierrez said. “It was a tough place because you’re totally on your own — it’s entirely up to you to succeed or fail. There’s no doctors, no medicine, nothing. You’re 40 miles from the nearest town. You lived in a tent until you built that first two-room house and then you’re working in the fields. It just took a lot of stamina and endurance and hope.”

A centennial reunion of the Obach-Wachula and Ivanovitch-Walchuk families will celebrate the legacy of those immigrants when the descendants gather June 24-26 in Malta.