The change in elevation on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains creates an “ecotone,” which is an area that is a transition between one ecology and another. In that case the shift is between the peaks with their subtly tinted parfaited sediments and the flatlands where the the braided path of the Old North Trail passed through the grass, leaving still detectable marks. At the end of the millennia-ago time of the glaciers that came down from the north and also from the mountains, crashing torrents of melt-water carved valleys across the foothills, each with a persisting stream still wandering through its flood plain. These near-canyons provided refuges for people and other animals just as the counterpoint line of igneous peaks running to the east had risen above the ice along the east-west line that became the Canadian border. Plants elsewhere destroyed by ice still grow on the tops of the Sweetgrass Hills.
Among the refugees in the east slope valleys were writers and historians, including the famous colony that included Joseph Kinsey Howard, author of the two landmark books “Montana, High, Wide and Handsome” and “Strange Empire”; the family of Dr. Frederick Schemm, who wrote about a revolutionary treatment he developed for edema; his wife, Mildred Walker, who wrote a series of best-selling novels including the classic “Winter Wheat"; their daughter Ripley Schemm Hugo, a poet married to the poet and professor Richard Hugo; and A.B. Guthrie Jr. famous for writing, among many others, “The Big Sky.” Dan Cushman, author of “The Great North Trail” and the notorious “Stay Away, Joe,” was part of the group.
The older generation is gone but Ripley Schemm is still living today. At least some of the cabins still stand. Dr. Schemm, Cushman, Howard and occasionally Guthrie enjoyed each other in Great Falls homes, but it was up the North Fork that they could really relax or find the solitude to work intensively. This was a WWII-and-after group in the mode of hard-drinking, chain-smoking, Manhattan-published authors with agents and Easterners coming for short restorative stays. They badly needed and greatly cherished their cabins with porches and fireplaces to sit around while talking.
The next generation, now retirement age like myself, grew up in the foothills or on the nearby prairie but found them wanting, blind canyons. Ripley Hugo and James Welch Jr. gravitated to Missoula where the University of Montana offered a different kind of refuge. (James Welch the Senior is buried in the little wild-strawberry knoll that is Dupuyer’s cemetery.) Ivan Doig ended up in Seattle where he writes about Montana. Peter Bowen came and then left again in the metis nomad way.
Less luminary and usually self-published, if that, is a host of historians and storytellers. Percy Bullchild (“When the Sun Goes Down,” published by Harper & Row) lived in Heart Butte. Olga Monkman’s husband was a county commissioner. She never published her many boxes of historical materials but she grew up on a ranch in one of those East Slope valleys. Her nephew was an academic historian on the faculty in Bozeman. Her father, a staunch humanist, was buried by A.B. Guthrie, Sr., acting as a secular pastor. Marion Trexler Brandvold was another girl who grew up on horseback but nearer to Bynum where her son, David Trexler, would become a paleontologist and publish books about climate change. Scotty Zion’s ranch adventures and later ventures into all sorts of enterprises begin to cross over into a new media when he was interviewed on videotape. Historian Nancy Thompson is the present chair of the “Friends of the Old Agency” who collaborated with the Zion brothers to preserve the history of the early “Four Persons Agency,” the second Blackfeet agency. A visit to the location was filmed on videotape with the help of Darrell Kipp, a Blackfeet educator whose refuge was the St. Mary’s valley, another place that sheltered metis since it reaches down from the north. One hardly knows how to classify David Letterman, celebrity host of a television talk show, but surely he takes refuge in this terrain. Clearly the stories once told, then written, are now preserved digitally.
Living on the east slope means that the sun comes up on the flatlands early and descends behind the mountains also early. Writers don’t need daylight so much these days, but there is a psychological rhythm in the light that can be helpful. Now and then I work on a novel called “Both Sides Now” which is placed on the east slope and I find that I make much of the feeling of having one’s back against a protective wall while being able to see a long ways in case of danger approaching. My first experience with the canyon refugia of the east slope was in 1962, horseback hunting with Bob Scriver up Blackleaf Canyon. After a perilous ascent in an overloaded pickup on an icy road, we arrived at first light before color, though anyway everything was white snow and black trees. It was ten below zero. There were so many deer that the season was “double and does,” meaning that each hunter could take two deer of either sex. I tell the story again and again because of its transcendence, all the more penetrating when high on adrenaline.
In 1990 while teaching at Heart Butte, it became clear to the Montana writing community that A.B. Guthrie, Jr. needed to be honored with a feschtshrift. In fact, he was already too ill to attend when one was organized. I took four of my best writing students to the event at the Choteau High School. All were Blackfeet but nevertheless wary of James Welch who was one of the speakers. They preferred to be hidden. Jimmy himself was warm and generous. I vividly recall Mary Clearman Blew joshing with Ralph Beer over co-opting the work of their students but I’d have to look in my files for the names of the other writers. One wrote a novel about small town basketball that included the immolation of a wooden cigarstore Indian at a mainstreet crossroads. The four students fell madly in love with that storyteller. In fact, since he was teaching high school in Cody, I suggested we do a jobs exchange for a week to satisfy my students’ endless curiosity. It didn’t work out. But I think that’s the same man who taught a writing class at the Bellview School up one of the East Slope valleys one summer. I’m not sure his novel was ever published. So much of the East Slope life is not exactly hidden, but certainly elusive. Sometimes with good reason. It is a place of refuge.
No comments:
Post a Comment