Yesterday I drove to Cut Bank to use the laundromat. The second person to show up to wash recognized me but I didn't recognize her at first. She was Brenda Bird, who was Brenda Flamand in the early '70's when she was in my high school English class. When she married Dale Bird from the "Flats", she was entering a family of world class rodeo champions, bull-riders and later stock suppliers ("Bird's Bulls"). They traveled the continent in both Canada and the US. She is a dynamic woman who recently retired from teaching, a little early.
Somehow she knew about the death of Ramona Wellman and I hadn't, though Ramona and her daughter moved mobile homes onto the other side of my block in Valier decades ago. Debbie was also my student in Browning as were some of her sibs. The history goes back a long way, with many stories.
After WWII a certain kind of guy came to the rez seeking his fortune. Wellman, Polk, Davis, two kinds of Johnson, and more. These were tall, handsome, get'er done guys in the mold of John Wayne, and they were looking for strong tribal women who had land allotments. Their ranches formed the backbone of the river communities and their wives, who often worked in town to keep the operating money coming in, forming the working core of Browning. The children of these unions went to college, did well, and stayed on the rez where their fathers became patriarchs until they aged out. They preceded today's ethic of indigenous preference. In those days white men ran the town and the BIA.
But there have always been families, sometimes Cree or Métis, who were solid, stable, hard-working people with good jobs, the honorable core of what "Indians" are really like. Like Flammond and Bird. When Bob Scriver divorced me, I spent the first winter on our little Two Med ranch and in Spring -- going back to teaching but still broke -- I looked around for someplace cheap to rent. I made a deal with Wellman's to rent the big yellow two-story house in East Glacier where Ramona grew up, then a Wippert. The deal was that I would spend $75 a month on materials and put in as much labor as I could manage.
The house had fallen on hard times and stood derelict for years. I scrubbed and scraped and hammered and papered. It was great therapy. Sometimes Bob came up and took me to dinner. Ramona had been his student in the glory days when he taught band. That big yellow house is derelict again today, but someone ought to do another restoration. It's solid.
When I was on the Two Med ranch, the road along the river was still gravel and left 89 by Wellman's. When the Big Flood came in '65, they were in the old schoolhouse which is right by the water, and a man came to warn Ramona with her many kids. I don't know where her husband was. The water was rising very quickly and the little kids were helpless. Ramona took one in each hand and the man grabbed others. One of the children Ramona was towing through neck-deep fast water slid out of her grip but the man caught the child. They made it up to the raised highway without losing anyone. She didn't like to talk about it.
Another Ramona story was about the time a criminal had finished his jail term and was roving through the country, taking what he could. When he showed up at Wellman's, Ramona had been warned by the radio. She ran a shotgun out the window and sent him on his way. One didn't argue with her. I'm sorry she's gone, but she won't be forgotten.
Going back to Brenda Bird, she and I caught up on the fates of those young people in her class. 1972 was the year of the winter that snowed as hard as recent winters, dropping house-tall drifts. The Warbonnet had just opened. The teachers who lived in East Glacier were trapped at the school, eventually, sleeping on the floors of our classrooms when a motel became too expensive. The days went on and on until the railroad sent out a huge track-clearing rotary plow. Snowmobiles had just been invented and a few intrepid souls rode them up to East Glacier where wives were taking care of kids and pets. The ranchers were desperately feeding their cattle, but they took a big hit.
In the laundromat what hit Brenda hardest was the teacher who had affected her most, Bill Haw. Coming from Detroit right after the race riots, he was hired to be the high school counselor and brought Third Force Psychology with him. Previously he'd been a photographer and a rodeo competitor. Kay was his wife, and Wendy was his daughter, a friend of Brenda's. Brenda sometimes stayed with the family in East Glacier. She didn't know that Wendy had died of breast cancer as a young adult.
Bill Haw was one of those charismatic men who could do the impossible, which included running the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop out of an old commodities warehouse. He could also be impossible, and his marriage broke up when he fell in love with Lynn, a beautiful primary grade teacher. Her husband had been rustling cattle now and then, so it was easy to get rid of him by simply turning him in.
Bill and Lynn bought a pet shop in Kalispell which did very well. Once, after some break-ins, an alarm was installed that called the owner at home if it heard anyone moving around in the store. At dawn one morning the phone rang and it was the burglar alarm. Half-awake, Bill was slow to realize he was having a conversation with a parrot that had triggered the call. There were two more daughters and then the energy and stability ran out. The brilliance and originality that had been controlled by meds were no longer effective. His last few years were in a nursing home.
This part of the story hadn't been known by Brenda and it struck her hard. But this is what it is to live on a rez where things can go from sublime to terrifying so suddenly that what happened might not be sorted out for years. All those fine ranchers and their stalwart wives are about gone now and the double-heritage kids are retiring. Browning is no longer a white business and government town on the terms of the State of Montana, but a "population center" run by the tribe and the BIA, which was ordered decades ago to eliminate itself. (Ha, ha.) I'm pleased that I can still be recognized and pleased that Brenda is still pretty and so competent. We persist.
