MEDICINE RIVER TRADING COMPANY

Small town non-academic historians ought to be registered somewhere. Dorothy Floerschinger in Shelby and Olga Monkman in Choteau were great favorites of mine, with boxes of records from just yesterday and books that were invaluable but never made any money. I suppose I’m on the list now. But I’m not the only one in Valier.

Yesterday I was trying to find out when the Christmas gift bazaar was scheduled and trotted down my street a couple of blocks to the Medicine River Trading Company (www.medicineriver.com) to see what he knew. Turned out it was everything but when the bazaar was, but we had a good time talking anyway. If you go to his website, you too can pick up some historical gossip, plus some good funky Christmas stuff, in case you expect to have money to spend. Jack and I do not. He has a whole collection of local photos on that website.

It’s been a punishing year and we’re all a little stunned. The news pundits keep gasping, “It all happened so fast! No one saw it coming.” Right. Us neither. The crops were really good this year, and most ranchers held onto them a while to wait for prices to get better -- but instead they tanked. Now they have to sell at a loss or feed cows while they tough it out. At least they COULD eat the cows. Jack’s best-moving inventory is custom gear for re-enactments of mountain man or Civil War stuff. Lewis & Clark was a boost for him. He does a white buckskin beaded wedding dress that Vera Wang would die for.

I won’t pass along the best gossip because it’s all secret, but Jack’s background in radio, Methodist lay ministry, and buck-skinner doin’s means that we have just enough overlap in what we know and care about to get some good controversies going. I mention the crooks and he already knows they ARE crooks. Both of us tell stories so many times that we have a repertoire of “put-a-nickel-in” spiels and in fact Jack takes his around as performances for schools and organizations.

One of the things we share is love of cats so Jack has two “store cats.” One is a small flat-faced cat, a sort of Victorian lady in her black silk dress with a little lace fichu in front. The other is a big white-with-butterscotch former tomcat with a half-length tail and slanty eyes. He used to have a twin -- some reprobate dumped them as kittens -- but Jack only took in this one, whom he calls “the bridegroom,” because it dearly loves the little black cat and sits next to her with his “arm” around her. I’m not making this up. The rejected twin grew up but stayed a street cat and a fighter until he disappeared. I used to see him walking down the sidewalk, mewling and moaning and complaining to himself. He wasn’t shy. Maybe someone took him home, but that’s a fantasy that encourages people to dump kittens in Valier.

Jack is a lay preacher with the Methodist church and tells me that the Valier church was actually founded by the pre-merger denomination, which still has a small vestige that refused to be reconfigured, though it has since been run as a United Methodist church. This presents some interesting possible surprises in the future in terms of who owns what. Methodists are the same hierarchical polity as Catholics and Lutherans, which would lead a person to expect some bureaucrat would be more careful about such details, but Browning Methodist has some of the same problems: missing records, ownership ambiguity, quandaries of allegiance, and -- as is often the case these days -- a shortage of well-prepared ministers. Methodists, like priests, are assigned their parishes, but smart bishops don’t force assignments -- just hope for an approximate fit.

When I first returned, the Methodist minister here was a dynamic and committed community-support sort of minister, a man who had worked long and hard to make life better in Valier, doing an Easter sunrise service, a Christmas bonfire, and cherishing funerals for nonmembers. Only once that I know of he provoked a firestorm by refusing to marry two ill-prepared teenagers. They found someone to do the ceremony -- divorced months later. He finally got the reward he wanted, which was an assignment in a town upscale enough to have an espresso coffee shop. What Jack misses is the “theology discussion group” where he maintained he was a “pagan Christian.” I told him his explanation sounded more like a “pre-Hebrew” and he agreed that was fair. He recommends a book called "The Pipe and the Cross" which reconciles Christianity with Native American ideas.

But then he explained his doctrine of spirits. His conviction is that when people die but are too young to be clear about what just happened to them or old enough but confused by the suddenness of the shift or maybe with too much unfinished business to want to move on, then they hang around where they used to be. (There was a ghost in his own trading post.) So he says getting them to leave is a matter of explaining to them what happened and persuading them to step on into their “next” world. This is not a matter of a revolving head or puking pea soup, like the movies, but rather an issue of dignified diplomacy and good advice.

Last summer one of the Beutler Brothers of Cody rodeo stock people showed up on my doorstep looking for arrowheads. I sent him to Jack who may have given him more than he bargained for. Jack’s collection of flint-knapped tools includes handle-less flensing blades, arrow-scrapers with graduated sizes of notches to go from de-barking to final polish, and something I’d never seen before: two inch flint hooks. They weren’t for fishing but for hooking the edges of hides while working on them so you didn’t have to punch holes in the hides to stretch them.

My favorite artifact from Jack’s shop is a “case fork” just like my mother’s, her favorite tool for whipping up things. With its slender sharp steel prongs, it’s good for handling things in a frying pan but would also make an excellent weapon. Don’t startle the cook!

If you come through Valier, Jack’s gallery is right by the blinking light. I'm a couple of blocks to the south.