DAN CUSHMAN'S MEMOIR: "Plenty of Light and Air"

In the course of doing background reading for an essay about the East Front drainages of the Rockies as refuges and sanctuaries, I’ve been reading about the little community of writers who had cabins in Blackleaf Canyon. Ripley Schemm Hugo’s memoir of her mother, Mildred Walker, (“Writing for her Life”) was most helpful since Ripley grew up in this nest of scribblers. Her father, a physician rather than a writer of fiction or history though he wrote about his research in treating edema, was in some ways the backbone of the group. James Kinsey Howard was clearly the soul and I’m not sure I should try to place A. B. Guthrie, Jr. in any anatomical metaphor. It was Dan Cushman who was at the heart. Yet he has been neglected. Why is that?

I’ve only read “Stay Away, Joe” -- that infamous and rollicking pop hit that even Elvis Presley couldn’t embody -- and “The Great North Trail” which is the key to the whole east slope since it is about what some call "The Old North Trail,” a title already taken by Walter McClintock a generation earlier. When I began to look around, I discovered Cushman’s autobiography, “Plenty of Room & Air.” Self-published, signed, first edition, borrowed from the Havre Public Library.

This story is only slightly less dramatic than the vicissitudes of Hill 57 where the potent Joe lived in an abandoned car. And it’s far far too politically incorrect for any academic to touch. But it is the same raw material that C.M.Russell knew, though he grew up prosperous back east, and that Wallace Stegner transformed through the alchemy of fiction into “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and other novels, all struggling to come to terms with Stegner’s parents, a mismatch of educated lady and barnstormer bootlegger. In Cushman’s case, his father -- though an entrepreneur who moved easily in barroom circles -- was reliable and resourceful and his mother was more of a “land’s sake” worrier who exclaimed “Godie” in hopes that adding the diminutive would make it less profane. Dan, Jr. just goes ahead and uses the original exclamation. The cross-match of his parents produced a big brother who was a cowboy and a big sister who did well for herself, besides Cushman himself, the newspaper man and writer of Westerns and adventure tales. He was more prolific than Zane Grey, who cheated anyway since the latter’s wife wrote his books part of the time.

The tales in Cushman’s memoir could have happened anywhere along the High-Line and yet they are unique. I don’t recall ever before reading so much about chickens, which his father loved and raised in quantity, and certainly nothing like the epic battle between a hawk and a big red hen who, to protect her chicks, went to battle and won, though she literally lost half her head in the skirmish. Enough was left of her small brain for her to herd the babies together. Dan Sr. had to give the hen’s body “Christian burial” -- flinging her remains far enough out in the sagebrush to keep his wife from seeing the coyotes. The wife put the chicks into a box with mash and a blanket over the top where, with typically humorous brutality, Dan Jr. remarks they soon forgot their brave beloved mother.

“Humorous brutality” just about sums up a lot of things in the lives of homesteaders. His anxious mother drove a big nail into the wall next to the door higher than a child could reach even on a chair, and hung a revolver up there, which she was prepared to use on any strange man who came into the yard. “Stop right there!” she would shout, brandishing her weapon, and they did. Later, as the pressure of hard times raised the incidence of violence, she was backed up by a pit bull. For a while the father had fantasies of raising pit bulls to get rich, but the bitch he borrowed was too ancient to reproduce, though energetic enough to attack the father when he returned after a trip that had lasted long enough for the dog to forget that he belonged there.

Much of the story revolves around WWI and the general struggle to understand war, frame explanations of the concurrent drought, and cope with new ideas about patriotism and ethnic origins. Were Germans enemies who impaled infants on bayonets or were they the friendly neighbor who was so generous? They finally decided there were two kinds of Germans and that the good kind had all migrated to the US where they were super-patriots. And the Germans saw the wisdom of not arguing with that theory.

“Politically incorrect” doesn’t quite cover the reality or Cushman’s blunt account of it. Coon, darkie, squaw, buck (this was a time of blackface burlesque -- he gives a fascinating account of the Assumption of Little Eva into Heaven with the help of lights and wires), slacker -- yes, slacker was an epithet even then -- and every other off-hand slang stigma are just there on the page. He knows damn well they are wrong, racist, painful and destructive. That’s what he’s SAYING, all the way through.

In 1998 Cushman received the H. G. Merriam Award for Distinguished Contributions to Montana Literature, but I think a lot of folks peg him as merely a pulp writer, so I shall assign myself to read and review those books as they turn up. Besides Westerns there were tales of the South Pacific, the Congo and the Yukon. He died in 2001 -- if I’d have known he was still alive, I’d have made a pilgrimage to Great Falls.

“Plenty of Room and Air” is tucked full of small details invaluable for writers and historians trying to get a grip on homesteading, but rarely recorded in more dignified venues. Honesty and obviousness are not always valued, much less little things like kinds of coal, the uses of clinkers (shale expanded by the heat of locomotive boilers), and how to start a fire in a stove with kerosene without blowing up your house into an inferno. (Put kindling on some newspaper on the floor, sprinkle a bit of kerosene on, stick the potato stopper back on the spout of the kerosene can, put the can far from the fire, then roll up your starter bundle and put it in the stove to light.)

This book was self-published. Jimmie Welch blocked Cushman’s inclusion in “The Last Best Place” anthology because of “Stay Away, Joe” and I’m not surprised since the compendium (used as a canon by some) is a Missoula-origin book and Welch would never have had a social life there again. Literary taboos are that strong. But up here in John Tatsey country, it’s simple reality and we still love to be told a helluva tale.