Beyond people I met around Browning in the course of the day, there were a few that I worked with at what I liked to pretentiously call “the Scriver Atelier”, meaning to suggest that we were in a French art studio, very romantic, rather than working carefully on both taxidermy and sculpture. Taxidermy gets a bad rap, suggesting both a blood-thirsty but non-eating way of cutting up and “stuffing” animals and overtones of arsenic, which was the original poison used to keep bugs out of the organic hides and feathers. In practice, it was quite different. Bob's startlingly lifelike full-mounts in the Museum were beautiful. But in the end he concluded that it was the portrait of the animal that was more expressive than the “mounting” of the hide on a papier maché shape with glass eyes.
if done properly, taxidermy can be an art form instead of a moldering artifact of a childish desire to capture. Both art forms were a matter of understanding the making of molds, shapes recorded as negatives capable of creating positives, and the use of parting compounds to separate the two. Perhaps it is more familiar for people of a certain age to think of classic photography negatives making positive photographs with light as the intermediary.
This particular "atelier" employed as few as three or as many as a dozen, depending on the size and nature of the project. It could not have been done without the native American employees, partly because they knew the animals both in life and as resources, and partly (let us be honest) because they would accept the low pay, a dollar an hour. It was the early Sixties and there was not much to buy. I worked for the same pay as the others and did the same things. Most of it was meticulous work, sewing hides, cleaning clay out of small details in molds, mixing and cleaning and coating.
My mother worried that I would become infected, imagining dead and rotted animals from her farming past. But we worked bloodlessly and unrotted, using the same preservatives as the Egyptians used to preserve mummies, mostly borax. The shop had a bathtub built at a waist-height for washing the hides after they had soaked in a mild acid for months to eliminate all the glue and fat in them. When I first started, the men managed to convince me that I had to wash differently colored hides separately so they wouldn’t stain each other. Nonsense.
These jobs were quite different once we began to cast bronze, using the original lost wax process, also called Roman block casting, in which the heat-resistant plaster molds, the size of furniture, had to be baked for days in preparation for a scary climax of melting bronze and pouring it into the molds. Once those cooled, we began the long process of knocking the plaster back off and picking the remnants out of the details. Raw strength became vital, plus care about the heat.
The main worker, Bob’s right hand man, was Carl Cree Medicine, a handsome father of young kids who came with his wife Carma at the end of the day to take him home. Carl had a serious drinking problem and when he got started on a bender he would be missing for a week, which made major trouble if we had something scheduled. Bronze pouring had to happen just as the molds were ready and not after, when they would begin to crumble. The worst was that when the accelerant of alcohol was added to the hot stress of a young marriage, things became violent.
Nevertheless, Carma never left. When Carl was sober, he was hard-working, intelligent, and willing. By mid-life he managed to get the booze under control. The government was offering a program to people who were willing to build themselves a house. If the people would do the labor, the feds would pay for materials and teaching. Carl and Carma entered this program and successfully completed their house.
The paint provided was in pastel colors so people called the development the “Easter Egg” houses. Carl had helped us cut willow switches by the creek and keep them planted in mud until they began to grow, which didn’t take long. You could see his house from the road up to East Glacier and easily pick it out, the only pink house with trees.
At one point in the feverish constant decades of politics over artifacts and entitlements, some renegades let it be known that they intended to ride behind Bob in the annual Indian Days parade, rope him off his horse, and drag him down the street in front of everyone. He was old by then and the act would kill him. He had ALWAYS ridden in that parade and had no intention of stopping, so Carl rode alongside him, an informal bodyguard, big, aggressive when that was needed, and very protective of Bob, whom he saw as a kind of father or at least uncle. Nothing happened.
Later in life, Carl ran a relief house for street people. The cigarette smoke in those days made a thick haze and a big coffee pot was always steaming in the corner. At some point Bob had used his band teacher practices by printing up Certificates of Competence and Achievement, and Carl had framed his to hang over his desk. By that time he had become an artist himself and made molds, but never cast bronze. Sometimes I ran into him at an event like the Russell Art Auction in Great Falls, and we’d gossip a bit.
But the best creation of Carl and Carma was their son David Cree Medicine who was the best foreman Bob ever had and the principal person looking out for him at the end of his life, along with Boyd and Corky Evans, who provided the major pleasure of riding across his Flatiron ranch.
David’s temperament was steady and alert. The bronzes cast by the team were much better than what was by then possible with bronze-casting “kits” for backyard projects. By that time the Andersons had sold their lot and house to Bob to make room for a foundry addition. When Bob died, his widow gave the Anderson house to David and as far as I know he still lives there. By now the toddler clinging to his dad’s long leg is a middle-aged man with adult children of his own. But there is no more “atelier” or foundry.
Sullivan Hameline was another “unsteady” employee. Overweight and jolly, he was under-motivated but would sit happily skinning the cartilage out of the ears of ungulates so a plastic replacement could be sewn in. He used an entire box of bandaids every and sharpened his knives so much it was no wonder they cut him.
If we went downtown for something, Sullivan propped himself on the bottom half of the Dutch door between the working shop and the front entrance lobby and greeted the tourists. He ran the cash register and dutifully did the little record-keeping of who came in and whether they paid to go into the museum. On a day when we made more than $100 we all squashed into the pickup and went to Angie’s bakery for maple long johns.
One winter Sullivan, who lived in a small cabin in Moccasin Flats and heated with a wood stove, didn't intervene in time to keep their toddler from falling against that red hot wood stove. The child died of the burns and we attended the funeral. Bob may have slipped him extra money. He was Cree, as we called Metis, and didn't qualify for Blackfeet housing projects.
On an ordinary day in summer when things were slow and the shop work was closed down, if there was only one person acting as receptionist and they needed lunch, it was customary to run across the street to the diner at the end of a the motel that Mel Overdahl had built. He leased the café to Finette and her friend Mary Peterson.
One summer they offered sourdough pancakes with chokecherry syrup, which they thought would last weeks, but sold out in two days. Sometimes we were the only customers during the slow afternoon hours but we did our best to help clean up the supply of such locally iconic food.
In those days the show called “Laugh-In” was highly popular on TV which we were just beginning to get in Browning. A running gag was tricking someone into saying, “Sock it to me”, which meant a bucket of water was thrown in their face. Bob always used a few Blackfeet words so when we came in one afternoon he exclaimed, “Siksikimi!” which means coffee.
Mary Peterson answered, “You heard the man! Sock it to him!” No one threw coffee in his face but we all had a good laugh. Since the women were mostly Metis, they really hadn’t known the Blackfeet word but Bob had held up a coffee mug in his version of sign language.
When time went on, the lots were eventually sold to a 9-ll and Bob moved the long string of motel rooms out to the Flatiron ranch where he used them for storage for the giant plaster molds of the full-mounted animals for the museum. When his estate was settled, I doubt that anyone understood the value of those molds. They were simply dumped. Then it was discovered that their insulation was asbestos, so they were useless without renovation. The Flatiron Ranch is now used as a study center for ecology in an arrangement made by Eloise Cobell between the tribe and Nature Conservancy.
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