Snip Snap!

By now I think I’ve posted enough information for most teachers of Blackft history to get some idea of what might be “out there” and what books would be useful to acquire. As summer deepens into the need for shade and a slow pace, I think I might make a switch to unpublished fiction about Blackft for a while. But I won’t start until tomorrow.

Today I want to note a book by Ray Djuff, an Alberta journalist and free-lancer writer who worked at Waterton Peace Park in the Prince of Wales Hotel and never wanted to have to leave. Now he lives in Calgary where his family is growing up and devotes as much energy as he can to accumulating information about Waterton and Glacier National Parks and any connected material. His subject has an interesting geographic schematic which in some ways imposes separate but intersecting worlds: the Park itself, which looks to outsiders like one big connected world, is actually split into “east side” and “west side” which are very different in terms of style and population. (Management is on the “white” west side. The east side suddenly tips into reservation.) The split between Glacier and Waterton might be more expected if less tangible, but sometimes the Britishisms of the Waterton side take one by surprise. Bone china and so on, doncha know.

Ray and his writing partner, Chris Morrison, write one book about the Park and then find that they have enough material left over for two more! But it becomes increasingly arcane and even peculiar, so this time they created a kind of scrapbook to clean out the files. A pastiche, a bricolage, a slumgullion.

The photos are plentiful and quite startling. Here’s a lady who appears to be waltzing with a bear! It’s Clare Sheridan, in a suit and fedora, a student of Winold Reiss at his St. Mary art school. Her lifespan was 1885 to 1970, but in the photo she is 52, which proves something, but I don’t know what. She was so in love with bears that she acquired a cub and put it in a cage built onto the back of her Ford V-8 while she headed up into Alberta looking for things to paint and sculpt. Finally reality set in and she let the bear go in time for it to find a place to hibernate. (I wonder if Marian Engel knew about her.)

There is no photo accompanying another bear story. An unwelcome camp raider needed to be driven off non-violently. The cook made a nice big open-faced sandwich loaded with a pile of cayenne pepper. The bear was delighted -- for a few seconds. Then took off and never returned.

There’s a wonderful photo of Dick Sanderville and Two Guns White Calf addressing the crowd at the opening of the Going-to-the-Sun road in July 1933. Sanderville, short-haired and mustachioed, wearing a Metis sash, is the “interpreter,” while Two Guns, braids and beaded white buckskin, stands nobly by. Actually, Two Guns spoke perfectly good English.

There is no photo of Jerome Hill (1905-1972), a member of that infamous family whom I know very little about. (“My” Hill was Sam Hill, who built the Maryhill Museum not far from where George, the rock-band venue in the Columbia Gorge, was later built.) Jerome was Louis W. Hill’s son. He was an artist and filmmaker who “won an Academy Award for best Documentary Feature of 1957 for his movie “Albert Schweitzer.” That’s about when I got my own Schweitzer fixation -- I was a senior in high school in 1957 but can’t remember whether I saw the film.

Louis W. set up two foundations: the Jerome Foundation and the Camargo Foundation, meant to help artists and scholars. Jerome’s son, Louis F. Hill, is the chair of the Glacier Fund which provides money for National Park Service projects otherwise neglected. These men are NOT in the mold of what we’re used to thinking of as typical Hill family members.

Another surprise to me was the plan to have built TWO Museums of the Plains Indians, one to have been actually in the Park. The one in the Park was supposed to have been more of a concessionaire commercial project to sell crafts to tourists, and, in fact, the little shop in St. Marys’ is probably connected to this project.

Though I knew many of the faces and tales in this book, I was surprised to recognize two creatures: the fur-bearing fish and the wimpuss. Bob also mounted a fur-bearing fish, a much bigger and glossier one than the historic specimen pictured, but also caught at Iceberg Lake, through the skillful use of wooly ice-worms. The one in this book was evidently mounted by one of the Karstetter brothers and presented to Irving S. Cobb at a 1925 State Fireman’s Convention at the Big Hotel. Bob sold many a postcard showing his version.

But until I saw these drawings of the Wimpuss, I had never read an account of what was described to us as “water creatures.” The old Indians who came by to examine the one that Bob was asked to repair (it was a very old specimen) told us that they were part of Blackft lore and that they were very scary. The description given by Hoke Smith, an early “naturalist,” was that they “grow about as big as a hoogle-bug” [the drawing shows them as big as the man they are confronting, who is defending himself by reading out of a joke book], “but it has a long tail like a collywop and has wings like a bearcat. It lives in the top of high trees, whence it flies down to attack defenseless travelers.”

The old Indians claimed it lived at the bottom of lakes and pulled people to death by drowning. Warren Hanna, a more sensible witness, said they were “part fish and part bird, with an odd cranium like that of a monkey surmounting its body.” I don’t know where the one Bob repaired finally ended up, but there were two and the other is in a maritime museum in Seattle.

This is a great book to take in the car with a bunch of kids old enough to read short entries out loud to each other. Good bibliography and index.

“Waterton and Glacier in a Snap! Fast Facts and Titillating Trivia” by Ray Djuff and Chris Morrison. Copyright 2005. Rocky Mountain Books, #108 - 17665 66A Avenue, Surrey, BC V3S 2A7, Canada. www.rmbooks.com. Distributed by Heritage House Publishing, Co., Ltd, same address. greatbooks@heritagehouse.ca ISB 1-894765-56-7)