Catharine Calk McCarty, born into an aristocratic Kentucky family, followed relatives to Montana. Although she had taken secretarial courses by correspondence, she decided to homestead near her brother in a remote area 20 miles from Jordan, Montana. Although homesteaders had to live on their land a designated number of months a year to prove up, most of them sought employment elsewhere for part of the year. During World War I Catharine was asked to be executive secretary of the state Livestock Sanitary Board and was also clerk of the legislature. Then she was asked to return to Glendive to work with the Red Cross and was chairman of the Home Service Office. She worked for the Red Cross for over 50 years and helped soldiers in several wars. She married in 1921. She was elected to the legislature in 1922, one of 4 women in the Montana legislature that year. She gave birth to a daughter in 1924 and was once again elected to the legislature. In 1956 she was named Montana Business Woman of the Year. Decades later when she wrote her book Blue Grass to Big Sky, she did not know of another mother of an infant who had been elected to the legislature.

Catharine McCarty lived until the age of 107. She became friends with the Indians and they gave her the name Winona, which means 'mother" in the Sioux language. Mr. and Mrs. McCarty donated land to Dawson County to establish Maco Sica State Park, which for spelling and pronunciation purposes was changed to the scientifically equivalent Sioux word "Makoshika". So in effect, you could say Catharine McCarty is the mother of Makoshika, for without her gift of the land, Makoshika would not have been born.