Wibaux Wanted
There are two towns named Roubaix in the world: there is Roubaix in the North of France, and there is Roubaix in the Western U.S. The American town was named after a textile industrialist who had traveled from Roubaix to try his luck in the Wild West. On one side of the Atlantic was a family embracing the industrial revolution and on the other, a famous cowboy, rancher, and banker from Montana, who owned a gold mine, and was a lifelong friend of President Theodore Roosevelt. These two towns, on these two very different lands, are intertwined with the fate of one person: Pierre Wibaux, a young man of good family who left his hometown in 1883. With a town and a country that bear his name, his exceptional success in the American West is even remembered on the map of the United States. As told by Pierre’s great-great nephew, Wibaux Wanted rediscovers the storied existence of the Wibaux family’s cowboy, finally setting Pierre’s history in stone. Starting in Paris, along a sort of road trip, the film’s Producer/Director set off in the footsteps of his ancestor. The journey takes us from the Roubaix spinning mills to the Clover Leaf Gold Mine in South Dakota. With the encounters we make along the way, on both sides of the Atlantic, we gather information, cross open expanses of land, and retrace the epic story of Pierre Wibaux. A wealth of unpublished correspondence found along the way, including more than 350 letters between Pierre and his brother Joseph, reveal what life was like in Montana as well as the doubts and worries of the man who was to become one of the greatest cowboys in the United States of America.