Glenn County was carved out of Colusa County in 1891 and named for a prominent wheat farmer, Hugh Glenn. Behind those rudimentary facts, however, lies one of the West’s most dramatic sagas – one of ambition, steely persistence, greed, conflict and even homicide.

Hugh Glenn was my cousin, both of us descendants of George Glenn, who immigrated about 1730 from what is now Northern Ireland, one of countless thousands of Scots-Irish Protestants who found a home in the American South prior to the Revolutionary War. George Glenn was Hugh’s great-grandfather and my 6th great-grandfather.