Some people are always saying that the youngsters need “grammar.” That’s not really what they mean -- they are talking about usage, the local conventions of expression that don’t conform to mainstream American/English (which doesn’t conform to mainstream European English). In trying to enforce usage, they end up killing all the energy, color and motivation of writing. So, by example, I’m writing here ways to look at writing by CONTENT.
Just before spring green-up
GEOGRAPHICAL
The Blackfeet reservation is about the same size as the Serengeti but it is on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains with the Canadian border also serving as the northern rez border. Because it is a slope, there is a long incline of land that is foothills and escarpments at the west end and flat wheat fields with a few badlands on the east end. This means that the difference in altitude and kinds of soil has sorted out the members of the tribe into different kinds of folks, with the old timey people choosing their place up high where there is still game and the grizzlies still prowl, while the modern and prosperous folks settled on the flat land where a person can raise grain and it's close enough to off-rez communities to get jobs there.
A road runs from Heart Butte to Browning. Some call it “the inside road.” A branch goes off towards the mountains to East Glacier and it is at that junction you will find Palookaville, except that it’s not there. There were never any buildings but temporary tents. It is essentially a campground.
HISTORICAL
The Blackfeet were fortunate in that their reservation was on the land they had occupied for a long time -- at least centuries and some say millennia -- but big as it is (fifty miles on a side) it is still only a scrap of the lands the Blackfeet once roamed. In the early days it was clear to even those who tried to make farming peasants out of these tribal nomads that they were better suited to a pastoral life, that is, herding animals. The Blackfeet themselves preferred sheep to cattle, maybe because sheep can be worked with dogs rather than horses. The relationship between Blackfeet and dogs has always been interwoven.
WWI had a huge need for wool uniforms, so there was an excellent market. The Conrad brothers, early entrepreneurs, at first ran sheep close to Heart Butte, and, of course, they had to be sheared. The place where the shearers came with tents to camp while they worked the sheep was called Palookaville because a palooka is a guy who shears sheep. It’s hard work, harder than harvesting wheat which is also done similarly with moving custom cutters, because the sheep have to be manhandled and that can wreck backs.
The Navajo had taken to sheep on their high plateau, and added value to the raw wool by setting up looms under the junipers in their dry windless country to weave blankets to use and sell in the way that Blackfeet had always treated bison robes. The latter never tried weaving: their one-room cabins had no space for a loom and the outdoors in this part of the world is full of extreme weather.
Considered one of the ten best memoirs of the West
LITERARY
Ivan Doig, whose parents contracted to herd sheep in various places, has written about the event that changed his life. His mother had died when he was very young so he was raised by his father and grandmother. In “This House of Sky” he and his father had a herd of sheep north of Birch Creek, not too far from the cliffs on the north edge of the valley which in the old days were used as piskuns, buffalo jumps, meant to kill the animals. A major thunderstorm arose and the sheep panicked, heading straight for those high steep drop-offs.
Doig describes vividly the desperation of running to head off these stupid animals and trying to steer them into brush where they’d have some shelter. He fell on ground quickly turned to sticky gumbo in the heavy rain, and though they did succeed in saving the animals, he vowed while lying there on his face that he would never herd sheep again. He quit, went back to the white ranching community, and cut hay the rest of the summer. In fall he started school at Northwestern University, majoring in journalism.
Doig describes vividly the desperation of running to head off these stupid animals and trying to steer them into brush where they’d have some shelter. He fell on ground quickly turned to sticky gumbo in the heavy rain, and though they did succeed in saving the animals, he vowed while lying there on his face that he would never herd sheep again. He quit, went back to the white ranching community, and cut hay the rest of the summer. In fall he started school at Northwestern University, majoring in journalism.
Mary and Bob Scriver
PERSONAL
Bob Scriver’s father came to the Blackfeet Reservation in 1903 and hired on as a clerk at the Sherburne Mercantile. He was a small man but very nimble and once won a race with a horse! The secret was that the distance was short and it took a while for a big animal to build up momentum, but Thad was already on his way. Within the decade he had founded the Browning Mercantile across the Town Square from the Sherburne Mercantile, with old Mr. Sherburne’s support and blessing. (J.L. Sherburne was a different story.) Bob was born in 1914. I arrived to teach English in 1961 and soon attached to him.
The rez unfolded to me as I rode shotgun in the old Chevy pickup, sometimes on two-track ranch roads, sometimes on the as-yet-unpaved market roads, and sometimes just out across the prairie. We went out to Heart Butte on some errand I don’t remember. I had students from there, including someone with the family name of the character in the recent movie, “Jimmy P.” -- that is, “Everybody Talks About Him.” School buses had a hard time getting out to that part of the rez because of the roads, so most kids came in to live at the boarding school for the school year. They were shy and didn’t like it, so they had to be more or less caught and forced. The boarding school itself was benign compared to some of the older mission and government schools.
Heart Butte was very small in those days, just a handful of cabins, on the hillside a little log church with emerald doors, and a log “roundhouse” built as an octagon where dances and other events could be held. The elementary school was small but had tall windows because the electricity was undependable. The post office and general store were combined, both run out of the home of Mrs. Thompson, a white woman with a Blackfeet husband, whose son became an educated leader.
We stopped at Palookaville to look around in case someone had dropped an artifact and just to enjoy the place. We looked at the leaning remnants of the corrals, which were still occasionally used for something -- maybe catching horses. I only drove out that road clear to East Glacier once, many years later and by myself in my little pickup. Just exploring, I didn’t realize how much the road had washed out until it was nearly gone and I could barely keep from high-centering or being pitched into the creek that ran alongside. Aspen groves and big brush patches of chokecherry, plus rough terrain, meant that I couldn’t travel parallel. I never went that way again.
Dawson Falls
SCENIC
The elevation along the inside road is just about at the most usual edge of spring and fall snowfalls, maybe 4,000 feet, with a lot of brightly glittering aspen in among the twisty dark bull pines that are tough enough to endure wind, like evergreens along a coast. In the fall when the aspens turn to gold coins, the color is spectacular, but only the berry bushes -- both chokecherry and sarvisberry -- will show red. The “inside road” is paved now but I don’t think the branch to East Glacier at Palookaville has been. Still, many more people live out that way now and they would demand that the road be better maintained. Cell phones might or might not work.
Keep an eye out for grizzlies who will be searching for berries dried onto the bushes or anything relatively high calorie like fat grubs. There are unlikely to be elk or even deer because people out this way are likely to be unemployed and hungry. In fact, if you hear shooting, move on.
MELODRAMA (fiction)
Usually my sheep-shearing crews were a peaceful bunch, too tired to do much but work and sleep. But this year I had two younger men, Basques, working for me. They were high energy, very productive, but they were emotional and competitive, so they got into arguments. Worse, they were knife-men. Words went to fists went to the drawing of knives and even some slashing of air. So far there were no wounds, but I kept my .357 magnum pistol beside me even as I slept, just in case. I had bought it for bears, but a person does what they must.
The emergency that arrived in the night was not from the men. The dogs were going wild, the sheep were throwing themselves against the fence so that its creaking mixed with their desperate bleating, and I knew it was a bear, probably a grizzly. We were all up, but the confusion was too great to understand what to do. Shadows and movement swirled everywhere.
I ran to the pickup and put on the headlights. Yup. A griz, standing, sweeping its great claws in arcs. The dogs were darting in and out. I cursed myself for not keeping the bear spray right with me -- I knew it was in the pickup, but where? Glove box? Under the seat? I would have to use the gun, though it would mean a lot of trouble from game wardens.
Before I could get a focus, two big shadows converged on the bear, one from each side, their knives flashing. The bear couldn't shrug them off, couldn't decide which way to swivel, and soon it was too late. One brother cut the carotid artery under the bear's ear and the other reached around to get at its heart. It was almost like a dance, as though they had practiced. The bear dropped on its face and the brothers walked right up on top of it, as though it were already a rug. Now they WERE dancing, awkwardly and hanging onto each other. I could not resist shooting in the air in order to join the celebration. Damn the authorities.
MELODRAMA (fiction)
Usually my sheep-shearing crews were a peaceful bunch, too tired to do much but work and sleep. But this year I had two younger men, Basques, working for me. They were high energy, very productive, but they were emotional and competitive, so they got into arguments. Worse, they were knife-men. Words went to fists went to the drawing of knives and even some slashing of air. So far there were no wounds, but I kept my .357 magnum pistol beside me even as I slept, just in case. I had bought it for bears, but a person does what they must.
The emergency that arrived in the night was not from the men. The dogs were going wild, the sheep were throwing themselves against the fence so that its creaking mixed with their desperate bleating, and I knew it was a bear, probably a grizzly. We were all up, but the confusion was too great to understand what to do. Shadows and movement swirled everywhere.
I ran to the pickup and put on the headlights. Yup. A griz, standing, sweeping its great claws in arcs. The dogs were darting in and out. I cursed myself for not keeping the bear spray right with me -- I knew it was in the pickup, but where? Glove box? Under the seat? I would have to use the gun, though it would mean a lot of trouble from game wardens.
Before I could get a focus, two big shadows converged on the bear, one from each side, their knives flashing. The bear couldn't shrug them off, couldn't decide which way to swivel, and soon it was too late. One brother cut the carotid artery under the bear's ear and the other reached around to get at its heart. It was almost like a dance, as though they had practiced. The bear dropped on its face and the brothers walked right up on top of it, as though it were already a rug. Now they WERE dancing, awkwardly and hanging onto each other. I could not resist shooting in the air in order to join the celebration. Damn the authorities.
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