Browning, Montana

April 5, 2005

Browning, Montana

Not everyone is fond of Browning, Montana, the capital of the Blackft Reservation which belongs to the Amskapi Pikuni Siksika (otherwise known as the South Piegan Blackft). Sandra Dallas, who wrote the copy for Ned Jacob’s art book described the town thus: probably quoting Ned, she says it was “a tough, squalid Indian town. Set at the edge of the awesome grandeur of Glacier National Park, Browning had all the beauty of a prairie chicken squatting in the grass. It was treeless, cold, drab as its name, with unadorned, raw board buildings, many of them bars. But for Ned Jacob, Browning was the real West.” I felt pretty much the same way. Ned was there straight out of high school, between 1956 and 1960. I was there straight out of college (I’m a year younger.) between 1957 and 1973. Both of us, though we’ve never met in person, were deeply shaped by our experience and, in fact, I came back. Ned went to Denver to become a famous artist, especially known for his fine drawing. Now he’s in Santa Fe, in theory, but he’s quite a “fiddlefoot.”

[Ned’s book is called “Sacred Paint,” by Sandra Dallas, copyright 1979, Published by Fenn Galleries Publishing Co. ISBN 0-913504-50-5. It’s a beautiful book, prize-winning, with a silver dust jacket. You can find it on the internet, though it’s expensive. My copy came via Abebooks from a bookseller in Australia.]

The prairie chicken squats along Willow Creek in what was originally a flood-plain swale. Once the daughter of the man whose Indian-allotted land it was told me she used to love to wake up in the spring mornings and gaze out at the sheets of wildflowers: buttercups, wild iris, glacier lilies, shooting stars. They say the location was chosen for the agency because of this beauty.

At the chicken’s head (north) is the ridge with the hospital on it (inevitably “pill hill”) and at the chicken’s tail (south) is the ridge with the row of schools on it. The town’s real main street is stretched along the chicken’s spine and bisected on the perpendicular by Willow Creek. The creek runs underground in a culvert now, but it used to be bordered on the hospital side by Government Square, a big grassy area suitable for horseback cavalry drill (Originally the town was Fort Browning and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was in the Department of War) and bordered by the government housing. On the south side of the creek was the town square, which used to have a pond suitable for watering horses, but now has a park. That’s where the bank, the post office, the bowling alley are, in the real center of town.

All the little creeks that used to wander through the townsite were gradually put into drain pipes and storm sewers under the streets and buildings, but when the year is wet, they come back. Few buildings have basements and those that do must keep their guard up. In the 1964 flood, the Museum of the Plains Indian that is on the west side of the west boundary road (which is in fact a dike) had part of the foundation pushed in and valuable artifacts destroyed in their preservation drawers. When the high school basketball court gymnasium was built just before I came, the pond under it returned and the floor became into a roller coaster. Some engineering was necessary. You can’t have Indians without a basketball court.

I’ll steal a story from Ned. When he first arrived, he fell in with a bunch of boys his age (eighteen) who were getting high on wine. He drank with them, even contributed money, until they moved on to drinking “rub.” (Rubbing alcohol.) Finally they crashed in a tent pitched in the yard of one boys’ house. Since Ned had refused rub, he woke first and stuck his head out of the tent to see where he was. He saw “an Indian man next door in a shapeless dark suit, a felt hat with an open crown on his head, and a red silk scarf around his neck.

“’Hungry?’ the Indian asked.

“’Yeah.’

“Well, come on over.’”

Breakfast was boiled coffee, frybread, and a big chunk of a boiled beef heart. They were on Moccasin Flats, which was a piece of land that ran along behind the schools. Once I looked out the classroom window in time to witness a drunken man flat in the dust while his equally drunk romantic interest tried to run their old car over him. Luckily the car had a lot of clearance and he mostly just bounced around under there, while his “old lady,” who recognized the problem, tried to get a wheel to go over him but was too drunk for proper calculations. Someone intervened before it became a murder.

Moccasin Flats had begun in about 1900 as an emergency project of log cabins for old people who were living in tattered tents, nothing like the felt-thick hides of oldtime lodges. Once the old folks moved in, their children could not be denied. By the time Ned and I got there, the place was a tangle of abandoned cars, trash, crazy TV antennas, and all the other Dogpatch paraphenalia you could think of. Many people think this is hilarious and the true preference of Indians, but in fact it amounted to abandonment by the Indian agent who should have been seeing to the tilted privies, sagging electrical wire, missing garbage service and widely spaced water spigots on the street. On winter mornings the place rang with the buzzing of chainsaws because everyone heated and cooked with wood. The people there were living a 19th century rural life because they had no choice. Shortly after I came, JFK stepped in and things began to change.

The school had been assuming that Moccasin Flats was trust land, held for protection by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and therefore not taxable. The law allowed for the federal government to pay the equivalent of property taxes for all land in trust or owned by the US Government, like military bases or reservations, and they had been doing that for Moccasin Flats and for the new border patrol homes up along the highway where the officers put up a sign that said “Moccasin Heights.” Then one day we discovered that Moccasin Flats had belonged to some white absentee landlord all along. All that federal money would have to be paid back. I don’t remember how it was resolved.

The Dawes Act, which split up reservations into allotments the same way homesteading did, had another very dark side. When the first owner died, his allotment was divvied up among his descendents. When they died, the land was divided again. By this time, some city lots are owned by more than a hundred people, some of whom hadn’t been seen or heard from for decades. Some of the land was put back into trust by regular owners, so they wouldn’t have to pay state or county taxes, but land with so many owners could only be handled by keeping it in trust and any profits sent to the various owners. Only there weren’t any profits. And if there were liabilities, everyone ducked.

Part of the reason Browning can look pretty derelict is that no one can get enough of a grip on the old buildings to do anything about them. But the present mayor has really bitten down on the problem and his constituency agrees with him, so this year fourteen rickety old firetraps were burned to the ground by the fire department. Legal instruments like condemnation were used, I think. Also, persuasion and threats. Few, if any, of the buildings had foundations. Strangely, people were sentimental over each shack -- myself included -- remembering how it had been, what had happened there, what the dreams about the place had been.

Getting back to the water problem, the present town supply has a strange characteristic. The manganese in it reacts with germ-killing chlorine to make a black sediment. The water can’t be used by the hospital dialysis unit, which is crucial because so many people have kidney failure from advanced diabetes. In fact, it turned out that this very wet place has the least water in its drainage of the other originally considered locations. Now a huge project that will pipe water down from Two Medicine River in Glacier Park is underway. It will serve several communities and supply lots of good quality water -- until the glaciers are all melted. Then Browning, like Katmandu and the cities of Peru, will have to think again.


COMMENT on 4-04-05:

A reply from Nancy Curtis (Wyoming author, editor and publisher): “A footnote to your review of Alvin Josephy's book. His daughter is Diane Josephy Peavey, who lives in Idaho with her husband John Peavey, a sheeprancher. Diane is a writer and a Idaho Public Radio commentator and she and John really got the Trailing of the Sheep Festival going.” She has been active in the Idaho Council on the Arts. “Diane's book of essays-- ‘Bitterbrush Country’ -- was published by Fulcrum, and I think her work is in all three of the anthologies Linda, Gaydell, and I edited.” (All those “wind and grass” anthologies of Western women’s writing.)
Idaho Arts Council on if she was a citizen board member.