Any history of the reservation in the twentieth century would be seriously crippled by the omission of the railroad. This is the force more than any other that dragged the reservation into the Industrial Revolution. The location was a little too far north for successful shipping by steamboat, as those sending government commodities discovered when their goods and supplies were constantly intercepted, diverted, substituted. Browning badly needed a dependable efficient supply route. But that’s not why the railroad located on the reservation.
The government generously gave the railroad all the grass for their horses, timber for ties, stone for ballast, water -- Blackfeet assets -- plus a right-of-way twice what was stipulated, all without bothering to seek Blackfeet consent or compensation. But the single asset the tribe had that gave them the upper hand, if they had known it, was access to the only feasible pass through the Rocky Mountains. Marias Pass was a railroad pass only. Automobile roads were built later. To cross the mountains in a car, one loaded the vehicle onto a flatbed car, chained it down, and rode in a passenger train car to the other side. I suspect that Glacier National Park was in part a way of guaranteeing access to that pass, the Suez Canal between the two distinctive sides of Montana.
Whoever laid out the path of the railroad did not take it through the actual town of Browning but up on a ridge a few miles away. I don’t know why this was, possibly to avoid the treacherous flood plain where the town stands, but the effect was to spare the town the disruptive traffic of trains through its middle as well as the warehouses that often cluster at a depot, to say nothing of the “wrong side of the tracks” syndrome of locating the downtown and better housing on one side or the other. Other Highline towns constantly struggle with these issues, even now. On the other hand, the wind hits the trains broadside up there and regularly tips them over.
Glacier Park was made a destination by the fashionable resort hotels and is still accessible by the railroad that bypasses roads where tourist businesses depend on automobiles. If one arrives in Browning via train these days, someone must be alerted to meet it. There is no taxi. It’s a downhill walk and not unpleasant in good weather, but luggage will have to be carried along as the depot is locked.
When I came to teach in 1961, I arrived by train -- as schoolteachers do in movies -- and dressed the part, as envisioned in “Rick O’Shay,” the beloved comic strip by Stan Lynde. A little boater hat, a “shirtwaist,” a “carpet bag” and a cardboard hatbox in which -- for some benighted reason -- I carried all my underwear, an unglamorous assortment that had gotten me through college. The temp was above one hundred, the wind speed was approximately the same, and just as I stepped off the train, the string on the hatbox broke. My introduction to the gracious Mormon superintendent, Phil Ward, his lovely wife Kitty and his gleeful kids, was that they helped me to pick my underpants out of the sticker weeds.
In those days the Depot was open and occupied by station agents 24/7. Since Bob’s part-time bookkeeper was Esther Becker, who was a station agent, we were often visitors. Esther was a resourceful single parent, red-headed and lively with two kids of the same stamp. Once she went to open the door to the platform to wave a freight train through just at the very moment a stock truck crossed the track without paying attention to the screaming locomotive. Esther was amazed when a cow went flying past the door frame in front of her -- a moment later and she would have been killed.
Once a farmer ordered a breeding pair of rabbits but when they arrived a series of spring storms closed his roads. The amorous rabbits were separated in their crate by a wooden partition but they made short work of that. Esther went down to the grocery stores to beg wilted produce for the two rabbits, but they were soon MANY rabbits. She threatened to eat a few of them as compensation.
Conductors would walk through the passenger trains, collecting clutter, and then push it out onto the platform for Esther to dispose of. If any of it was reading material, she saved it for the slow times. The taste of the travelers was not elevated and we learned many amazing things about sex from reading through the rumpled and stained pages.
In those days there was still a sawmill by the depot with an old-fashioned tipi burner such as the ones that used to fill the Willamette Valley with smoke from burning sawdust. I thought of it nostalgically, but the fire often escaped and the wind always tore at the sheet metal on the sides. At some point the sawmill and logs became a far more formal “industrial park.” It’s my understanding that the current use is for the development of very specialized space-age materials, beyond plastic, still experimental but highly promising.
But the project that captured everyone’s imagination for a while was the pencil factory. This capsule history is from the Internet: “In 1968, Chief Earl Old Person of the Blackfeet Indians of Montana, and other tribe members, sought the aid of the Small Business Administration in setting up a new company. The Blackfeet Indian Writing Company was established in 1971 and employed over 100 tribe members while it was 80% tribe-owned. It closed in the late 1990s after the company was transferred to private hands in 1992. The company produced wood pencils and pens, and introduced the 'Earth Pencil', an eraserless pencil produced entirely from natural products, including soy ink for imprinting.” When I was working off the rez, I would sometimes go to the supply cupboard and find Blackfeet Writing Company pencils. People are quite sentimental about them.
Even after the pencil manufacturing ended, I’d get a nice jolt of cedar smell from the sawdust outside the building. It wasn’t burned. I thought it would make excellent sachet for closets and still regret not at least collecting a double handful for myself to sew into a calico bag. At least I saved a box of pencils.
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