THE IVAN DOIG PAPERS

Ivan Doig at his Puget Sound home

When I first came to Browning, Montana,  I didn’t hear much about “Montana Writers.”  Maybe A.B. Guthrie, Jr. (b. 1901) because of the movies made of his books.  Dorothy Johnson (b. 1905) the same.  A few miscellaneous people wandering around, mostly “poets” who wrote people-pleasing doggerel.  The old-timers sometimes self-published through a “vanity press,” which set the pattern of a peddler with a box of unimportant books under his bed and the general conviction that being published was equivalent to a college degree, a certificate of quality.  Mildred Walker (b, 1905) was writing best-sellers that have held their appeal.

I mostly came to the “Edwardians”, James Willard Schultz (b. 1859), Frank Bird Linderman (1849), George Bird Grinnell (b 1869), Walter McClintock (1870) et al from reading Bob Scriver’s library.  John Ewers (b. 1909), Harold McCracken (b. 1894).  The category of Western Art or Montana Writing, were both as yet uninvented as sales categories, but just about to take hold.  Native American Writing was still a bit of a paradox, since most of it was oral transcription of legends recorded by white people.

By the time I returned in 1982, “Montana Writing” was as hot and revered a category as genuine imitation pearls.  Very appealing but always a little bogus around the edges.  “Montana Margins: A State Anthology” (1946) by Joseph Kinsey Howard (b. 1906) was a little too early to define this group.  Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917) had just exploded still waters with his 1960 essay, ”Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” which set the key Western archetype as two men escaping to the wilderness together.  Fiedler was an East Coast ethnic Leftie with streaks of Red. 

Leslie Fiedler

Now it was the gentleman chroniclers of the West who got out of Dodge.  (Richter (b. 1890), Stegner (b. 1909), and Walter van Tilburg Clark (1909), who was gratefully claimed by Nevada.)  Now Missoula was not just a hotbed of liberalism as the humanities center, but also the experimental edge of what became a time of drugs and iconoclastic politics.  We’re living with the mixed consequences.  A different sort of group developed in Bozeman/Livingston.

So it was with a certain amount of amusement and even cynicism that I reacted when the Valier librarian handed me a postcard announcement about Ivan Doig, “one of Montana’s most cherished writers.”  His papers have gone to MSU, the rival Montana university.  I approve.  I even celebrate.  But it’s all very ironic.  Go to ivandoig.montana.edu for the whole story and DO watch the short video interview to get a sense of the man.  There’s a link on the website, but here’s a straight shot to YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C20ONfvcZCw  

Doig in the 1980's at Annick Smith's ranch

Quite apart from that, I have such a tumble of responses.  Ivan Doig and I were both born in 1939.  We were both in the National Merit Scholar program at NU but we didn’t know each other.  His roommate, the fabulous piano player, Ralph Votapek, dated my roommate, Gwen Cline.  But Ivan and I were never introduced.

At Northwestern, Doig was in journalism and history.  I was in theatre with Alvina Krause, at a time when the School of Speech was quietly a haven for gay male theatre people, like Marshall W. Mason, Laird Williamson, and Tom Foral.   They were among my best friends though I’m not gay.  It was their kindness and intelligence that attracted me, and I was a bit of a disguise for them in a closeted, criminalized time for gays.  As soon as I could, I made a beeline for Montana — not the university towns, but rather Browning, Montana.  Doig was traveling as fast as he could in the opposite direction.  He never returned to live in Valier where he had graduated as class nerd, and has lived ever since near Seattle.  The comparison might be Sherman Alexie.

I spent the Sixties on the Blackfeet Rez with Bob Scriver, a sculptor twice my age.  Bob’s daughter, Margaret, went to Valier HS one grade ahead of Ivan, who said he sort of knew her but she seemed very grownup and not part of his group.  After a retread and an interim as the first lady dogcatcher in Portland, I became a student at the U of Chicago Div School in 1978. There I read the newly published “This House of Sky” right straight through and called him up.  He wasn’t famous yet, so he answered the phone and we visited a while, tears streaming down my face.  That was the end of it.  When I graduated from seminary, I spent three years as a circuit-rider in Montana.  By that time he was long-gone to Seattle, but considered a Montana writer because of his content.
   

Mary Clearman Blew

Over the years I’d make brief contact, more often with Carol at a reading, but it never went anywhere.  We didn’t correspond.  No one saw me as a writer, just as an appendage to Bob Scriver.  In 1977 Mary Clearman Blew was just beginning to be published and some said she was the only female writer in Montana, though she soon migrated to Idaho.  The same people claimed Jim Welch was the only “Indian” worth reading.   Jim Welch’s father, who was also Jim Welch, was Bob Scriver’s best friend in grade school.  So I knew Jim Welch in a sort of private way.  I’m not welcome in the tight Missoula Circle that “owns” Jim and makes these judgements.  I barely publish and am not their kind of academic.

Writers are defined partly by sales and partly by academic studies.  Lately academics have minds only for Cormac McCarthy, who is close to an opposite of Doig.  As a youngster, Doig absorbed the attitudes of what he called “sharecroppers of the West,” which is to say someone who raises livestock on shares — not that different from the Southern share-cropping experience and as low-pay/low status.  It gave them an abiding yearning for legitimacy, recognition, security.  In his teens he and his family were raising sheep near Heart Butte, and the sociological dynamics did not cause him to romanticize Indians.  He never wrote about them.  

Late in his career he was friends with the Welches, more Lois than Jim, who was not so much an academic as a visionary poet.  Doig was a bit of a snob and sexist (women who wrote surprised him) but Jim was neither.  Both men could be writers because their academic wives paid the bills.  Jim was not much a rez boy — his HS years were in Minneapolis.  His mom’s rez was Fort Belknap.  His sibs were successful urban people, I suppose “assimilated.”

Both Doig and Welch were defined by marketing, locked into stereotypes, just as much as L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott were trapped into writing the same story over and over.  Both of them tried to escape, but the atypical books (for example, Doig's "Prairie Nocturne" or Welch's "Indian Lawyer") wouldn’t sell.  

Doig’s underlying poor health put a lid on him too early.  He was pretty much an author who wouldn’t have pleased Leslie Fiedler by going for the deep mythic dimensions.  But he is deeply satisfying to the ranchers and farmers he wrote about — second generation immigrants with high values on work, respectability, and family.  They all love a good joke, even if it’s on themselves.  Life itself is one of those jokes.  But Doig defined himself a relic, son and grandson of relics.

A couple of days ago a comment showed up on a prairiemary post about  “My Friend Flicka,” by Mary O’Hara.  http://prairiemary.blogspot.com/2011/02/where-did-my-friend-flicka-go.html  (The comment is there.)  “My Friend Flicka” was a book that literally saved O’Hara’s ranch, but not her marriages nor the lives of her children.  Promoted as a kid-book, it’s one of those semi-autobiographical tales that will stay with you the rest of your life, worth rereading now and then.  The comment was from her great-niece, Adele Alsop, who is living in Utah.  The Alsops were a privileged, wealthy, highly educated, well-connected family who were exactly the kind of person an author hopes to be.  

Patricia Nell Warren

Several of that family did write books, something like writing by the descendants of the Conrad Brothers who founded Valier and Conrad, as well as building a mansion in Kalispell.  The sociology of writing in Montana has not been explored.  It drops out many people.  I wonder where Patricia Nell Warren (b. 1936), author of the much beloved “The Fancy Dancer” will leave her papers.  The history of the Grant-Kohrs ranch where she was born is already recorded.  But she’s part of the same cohort (b. 1936) as Doig, Welch, Blew, Warren, and others, including myself (b. 1939).  Maybe this bequest of Doig papers to Montana State University will trigger something.

WRITING A BOOK ABOUT VALIER

I sometimes frankly say that I’m writing a book about Valier, but I think what that conjures up in minds, esp. the ones here, is quite different than the outline I’ve been developing and will continue to research until it amounts to a book.  Many people here think in terms of stings and tattles, because so many pop books are based on sensationalism in order to sell. 

My plan and goal is to trace out the relationship between the land and the people over millennia from the glaciation intervals over thousands of years and the eruption of the Rockies.  Then after that last withdrawal appear the rain shadow that created grasslands and Chinook winds and the formation of the Old North Trail.   I will NOT be discussing dinosaurs!  Just their bones and the last of the mega-mammals and the people who preyed on them.

Next chapter is the bison-hunters and the beginning of white contact.

Rockies and wheat = irrigation

The real meat of the book will be the effect of industrialization, the beginning of the Anthropocene.  Dams, railroads, sea shipping, the formation of nations, the addressing of population explosions through raising grain to prevent famine, the impact of world wars, the infiltration of the land with manmade molecules (pesticides, herbicides, meds), alfalfa, species extinction, coal mines, oil wells, wind turbines, boom towns, and so on.  Getting order and continuity out of this will take research and time.  I don't know how many chapters that will require.

Valier cherishes its "Belgian" roots, but Belgium is a composite country divided by language and history.  This calls for more research -- WHICH part of Belgium did Valier come from and what impact did the bloody European Thirty Years War have on the people.

The last chapter will be an attempt to project what a sustainable future might be.  What comes AFTER reservations?  What would governance in general look like -- would it go to ecosystems instead of today’s states and counties?  What would the landscape look like?  Should we restore the original animals?

I will NOT be looking for a publisher.  Today’s publisher-based book producing system is a phenomenon of profiteering.  There are consortiums and organizations but even they by now have developed elites that control the others or have let the mass stifle the inspired individual.  Books in libraries are controlled by practical demands and increasingly becoming access points through computers rather than storing information in books.  This is not meant to be criticism.

The bottom line is change and how to survive in the midst of tumultuous new forces.  Part of that is being able to predict at least a few years ahead.  The great institutional stabilizers of schools (including universities), churches, economic systems, and transportation/communication/energy regulation are already rocking and shattering.  We in this small town are already seeing the imbalances from in-coming people who imagine the town other than it is, maybe hoping for a return to an earlier century, or possibly nefarious wayfarers not responsive to local standards.  Health and welfare issues are no longer supported by extended families.

Valier is particularly interesting because some of these newcomers, including the very early written-down historical population, arrived as a group.  An entire Belgian village was imported to tend the new irrigation-based grain growing made possible by the building of Swift Dam.  This is the real spine of the story I’m after, the industrial web of canals/fields/grain elevators/railroads/ocean-going ships/international politics and today’s international ag corporations that control whole countries.

Hutterites

In addition, Hutterites arrived as groups related to a network across countries and time, trying to preserve a different culture supported by religion.  Compare to the Blackfeet, forced to coalesce into a captive nation, but now demanding sovereignty and participation.  They present themselves as issues of culture, even religion, which gives them some protection, but -- in fact -- they are economic phenomena.

Economics is always ecological, meaning many small forces of survival that amount to general prosperity in the luckiest of times.  Human life is short.  The Anthropocene is only a little more than a century old and already we approach the tipping point of climate change, more extreme, warmer, moving insect vectors and vegetal patterns that carry coded diseases already epidemic.  The right to carry guns will do nothing to defend against malaria.

Militarized police

But guns and near-military force and surveillance may become part of the social dynamics as things become more unstable.  I hope to be gone by then, but some predict big trouble will start within five years and others laughingly point out that we’ve got plenty of instability right now, with the US Congress teetering at the edge of chaos after years of gridlock.  

But I don’t think of equality as a good thing.  Too often it is an assumption of uniformity and that every person should have the same sort of desires and sources when it is plain that successful ecologies are those based on interacting variety.  Even the most extreme outliers, surviving on crime or oppression, suffering from stigma, can have their use in terms of the whole.  They may be explorers, they may be secretly providing something the culture denies, they may be necessary counter-actions in the face of crushing forces from inside or outside.  They might be artists.

Ivan Doig

One of the strong forces in Valier is the constant demand for uniformity, “respectability,” even as admiration is awarded to ostentatious wealth.  Another troublesome tendency is to do what every other town does rather than seeking out the uniqueness of this set of circumstances. I talk about high school rules and one-celled cultures, that don’t want to hear about anything except their own way of doing things.  Maybe these demands for what seems like safety are best addressed in fiction.  But the novels of Ivan Doig, which DO address some of these things, is resented in Valier even though it’s about them.

Our awareness is now forced way out to the near unimaginability of the sedimentary shell of space debris around the planet, molecular saturation of the world’s seas with plastic particles, growing piles of nuclear waste, and the culture of sensational mass communication replacing what was once fitted to an extended family, a local institution, and an embracing ecology.  Some of us will find niches for survival or be able to adapt, many will not survive, and a few may be the beginning of a new species.  I often say that we can’t even find the factors that would allow sorting, and that’s a good thing because we would try to skew it to suit our prejudices, our OWN elements for survival.

Anyway, there is no way to stop the present coming out of the past and zooming on into the future, sort of whacking us in passing as a side effect.  How do we withstand that?  With beauty and pleasure!  Participation, appreciation.  It’s the old Zen story of the monk falling over a cliff and on the way down plucking a raspberry growing in a niche so he knows one last sweet taste.  Much better than balking until one can't hold on any longer.

So much to find out!  So much to do!  Such stories to tell!  Do you  know about Robaire, the town too wicked to survive in spite of the priests living there?  Do you know about the Original Kipp who may have been even more powerful than the Conrad brothers?  Do you know about the decade during which Valier was technically not a town because someone didn’t turn in a document on time?  Do you know why our houses constantly writhe in and out of their original rectangles?  I'll tell you that one.

It's because of the volcanoes in the Cascades.  Sensational after all.   

BEAUTIFUL DOWNTOWN VALIER

Highway 44 thru town.

The reason I like reading about brain function and its evolution is that it’s so explanatory.  One thing it explains is that the brain sets up categories and interpretations of the forces it encounters and then refuses to give them up, even when facing facts.

Grain bins in town.

So people insist that Valier is a pretty little town in spite of the fact that some blocks consist of nothing but big metal grain bins, there is a feed lot next to the town limits (very well maintained, I must say), gray chemical fallow fields come right up to the town edge, and the worst “weed” in the mown yards is Roundup Ready alfalfa which comes back as soon as you cut it.  The older folks insist that other weeds be sprayed with Roundup and will not believe it is carcinogenic. (The same as they will not believe that a high sugar/flour diet will trigger diabetes.)  But then one of the complaints at the town council meeting was that the edge of someone's yard had been sprayed against their wishes, rendering it a brown dead strip.  As the complainant said, growing grass is a better deterrent to weeds than Roundup.  What no one said was that you can’t grow grass without water and our water is currently so expensive that only the prosperous can afford green lawns.

Chemical fallow, poisoned land.  The road is the town edge.

Logic has nothing to do with it.  Much of the agitation is driven by the high school fear that the other towns will look down on us, that they’re doing better and that somehow we aren’t trying.  Some of it is people blaming the town for their own aging and for the velocity of time-related change.  Our citizens don’t believe in global warming but if they did, they would be convinced it was the fault of the town council.  When you read what the VADC writes, they sound like advertising copy for a new dress shop.  “Unique, pretty.”  Many women here are in the habit of driving their husbands to try harder without much experience of the real world.

A big part of the problem is “outsiders”.  I’ve been here sixteen years and have spent half a century in the area, but I’m an outsider and will be until the day I die.  They say the only way to become an insider is to raise kids here all the way through to high school graduation, esp. if their year has good athletic teams.  Outsiders speak in terms of safety, raising kids, and Mayberry USA, which was about the past even in 1960 when it started being on television.  Most of our residents weren’t born yet in 1960.

Valier could be a “pretty town” if you only look at the parts where the more prosperous and employed people live.  Its streets are often empty most of the day.   It’s not as industrial as Shelby or Cut Bank where the tracks and transmission lines go off over the prairie in all directions and the smell of sour gas lingers.  Browning is considered ramshackle no matter how much one points out sculptures, shops and -- of course -- the hospital, museum, casino and rodeo grounds. But Valier will never be as historic as Fort Benton, never have as many interesting little shops as Choteau, and can never be a resort town like East or West Glacier, St. Marys or Babb.  No matter the fishing and boating, Lake Francis is always an irrigation impoundment -- not an alpine lake.

This was Ivan Doig's teacher's house, Currently for sale.

In the fifteen years (plus) that I’ve been here this time, maybe half the businesses have closed, but the real change has been in the morale of the town.  It has turned cross and intolerant.  Consider that Valier is the access town for Heart Butte and could double its customer base if it would kick the racism always simmering.   There are 698 people living there.  The estimated median household income in 2013 was $28,259, which is roughly twice mine.  The median resident age is 24.7 (one-third mine) while the Montana median age is 39.6 years.  Do people say life begins at forty nowadays?

One of the complaints has been the volatility of student numbers, but that doesn’t account for the fact that rez kids have the choice of Valier, Heart Butte or Browning and often move back and forth according to the gossip opinion of which is more effective, more fun, or more likely to have winning teams.  When kids realize how much power they have through simple attendance, they use it.

Heart Butte

It’s a strange thing to think that Swift Dam, the source of water for the Pondera Canal Company is on the rez above Heart Butte (which meant HB was devastated in 1964 when the dam broke) but the 1910 boom caused by building it was in Valier, just OFF the rez.  Of course, that’s where the irrigation water went, too.

But let’s leave all this for now and think about how Valier might reshape itself for preservation in the future.  I’m not talking about the kind of Sim City  ("simulated") little “improvements” always suggested after busy note takers come around to claim they represent everyone when they don’t even represent the double-dozen people who show up as Seniors for lunch in the town hall or who appreciate Meals on Wheels.

It’s obvious that racism just has to go, though it’s a national problem, like the constant polarizing that can turn into riots between blue and red interests or black and white populations.  We’re small enough to go against the tide.  If we were more activist on the state level we might even be able to head off the forces always trying to force us to do our shopping in Great Falls.  I’m talking about the distributors who refuse to deliver bread and fresh vegetables, who make rules supposed to be about health but really about monopolies (no home-based bakeries) and tending to close down small town grocery stores.

It’s beyond me why missionaries from Georgia are necessary to keep kids busy in summer and teach them their own heritage.  The same in Browning, though it’s more obvious there that the missionaries are enjoying a subsidized adventure in an exotic place.

This is the grizz family just captured on Lake Francis and moved.

Too much underground stuff goes on.  I did not know until I tapped into gossip that there has been a problem with teens swiping coolers from the campground in hopes they hold beer.  I made a swing past the campground last night and saw that it was empty.  Maybe it was just the capture of grizzlies at the edge of the lake.  I did not know that one reason for the bright campground lights is that there are night fishermen who are NOT grizzlies and the diligent use of the cleaning station is to keep fish guts from becoming bear beacons.

Already this town has a number of excellent craftsmen.  The library is booming.  Valier is part of the mystique of “This House of Sky” and Ivan Doig’s nationally beloved books about this area.  It is so strange and self-defeating to say the resentful things that one can overhear people express:  “Doig never did anything for us.”  “Libraries aren’t meant for kids.”  What is going on in their heads that they need these defenses?

If you ask, what you get is a long list of complaints.  If you interrupt the list, they will immediately go back to the beginning as though it were written down or recorded -- often repeating word-for-word.  They cannot take in new information or consider alternatives.  This is a brain adaptation to homestead life where there was no alternative to breaking ground and harvesting -- grueling, painful work that might not end in profit, driven by sheer determination and focus.  The only path to success was repetition, unvarying.

Library art project done by kids.

But in today’s world, the way to succeed is variable, inventiveness, asking the big deep questions.  How can we become stable without becoming paralyzed?  I think it is by trusting each other enough to tell the truth and work together.

WAYS TO WRITE ABOUT PALOOKAVILLE

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.

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.

THE SOURCE AND SUSTENANCE OF VALIER

In this country the economic base is capitalism.  Land IS capital.  The value of ag land depends on crops and crops depend upon water.  The right to the use of water is also an asset that can be recorded and manipulated in the form of bookkeeping and a system of law.

Valier was created by the forebears of the Pondera County Canal and Reservoir Company and is sustained by the PCCRC -- not tourism, camping, pretty yards, or dust-free streets.  Not even lack of chickens.  Nor does history as the open-range ranch originally claimed by the Conrad Brothers have much to do with today’s prospects, though it’s the most romantic story -- save for the little-known history of those dynamic teenaged brothers during the War Between the States.  (See April 28, 2005 on this blog.) 

Ivan Doig's novel about the boom of building Swift Dam.

Natural resources create settlement and value in several ways:  first the actual value of the resource (in this case water);  second, the value of the created structures and the value of the labor necessary to extract the resource and manage it to delivery (which creates a boom); third, the value of the services -- materials, machines -- necessary; and finally the value of goods needed to create and sustain households.  Valier was created in two ways: the boom accompanying the construction of the dams, reservoirs, and canals; and -- what continues today -- the long commerce resulting from homesteading that used the water.  The water is used three ways: for crops, for livestock, and for human habitations.  Small town businesses are derived from these primary values.  This also applies to developing wind and oil.

I went down to the Canal Company to look at maps.  The big main one of “everything” is under glass on the wall.  It reveals the following:

1.  The New Miami Hutterite Colony, which can be seen at night across Lake Frances, if you know which lights to look for, is NOT a shareholder, though it’s the nearest to the lake.  Their main operation is swine.  Their sewage lagoon once broke, flowing into Lake Frances.  (Many jokes.)  Birch Creek Colony and Kingsbury Colony have historical relationships to PCCRC, partly because the colonies bought ranches with pre-existing water rights. Midway Colony, and Pondera Colony are also in the county.

Swift Dam and reservoir

2.  There are three dams:  Swift Dam which is the historical key to the irrigation system, and the two dams at the opposite ends of Lake Frances, one of them by the Lighthouse Restaurant.  Swift was originally earthen but after the flood destroyed it, the dam was rebuilt as concrete.   Leading out of Swift Dam are two major branches, one that goes out northeast along the Two Medicine River and one that goes out southeast much farther south, towards Conrad.  This latter is “Canal B” which is in litigation, challenged by the Curry ranch.

Birch Creek Headworks

3.  Surprisingly, to the east and south of Valier there are few “shareholders,” meaning irrigators.  One big cluster of irrigators is along Birch Creek north of Valier and out towards Cut Bank.  The other big cluster surrounds Conrad.  It might be that higher ground prevents water from flowing that way, or it might be that the land was not part of the Conrad holdings which were the origin of the Pondera Canal Company.  It may be that most of the unirrigated land went into CRP and so remains unirrigated.

4.  The irrigation systems vary a lot once they leave the main canals, mostly responding to the shape and size of the owned plot.  Long skinny plots can’t use pivot sprinklers.  Some are better suited to flood irrigation.  Others use some other kind of system, like a web of ditches.  This makes an interesting map of interlocking squares and circles (pivot sprinklers).  To the east the map extends past I-15 to the next section road.

This bear was headed for the Lighthouse restaurant.

5.  There are 7 “ditch riders” who are responsible for monitoring and maintaining their "reaches".  Originally they rode on horseback, but now go out in pickups and ATV’s.  It probably won’t be long until they are at least partly replaced by drones overflying the ditches, but there will always be times when a person is the only option.  As a joke, a wandering grizzly cub is listed as a ditch rider!  His photo is there with those of the humans.

http://ponderacanalcompany.com/about-pccrc/maps-and-photos/

There are at least four major issues facing this company and therefore impacting Valier: 

I.  The Blackfeet Compact

In Montana water claims are based on the headwaters and earliest use.  The Blackfeet Reservation is the location of Swift Dam which impounds the main irrigation water for the company.  The tribe has not in the past asserted their right to the water, but now they do.  They have the money for irrigation and the intent to develop as would not have been historically possible.  This will seriously diminish the water available for the Company.   Rep. Rob Cook and Sen. Llew Jones secured 14 million dollars in funding through the Montana legislature to help mitigate impacts of the Blackfeet Compact on PCCRC.   Current tribal conflict and the split tribal council means that this compact may be endangered.  PCCRC's Board and their representatives will be closely watching and working with the delegation as the Compact is introduced and moves through Congress.  So will the Blackfeet.

The Blackfeet attitude is affected by the 1964 breach of Swift Dam.   The original dam at this location was constructed around 1910, with a height of 157 feet.  There was little or no legal process.  The Conrads were not in the habit of asking permission.  This structure gave way on June 10, 1964, after heavy rains caused flooding on Birch Creek. The dam collapsed and sent a 30-foot wall of water down the creek bed. The nearby dam at Lower Two Medicine Lake also failed, and at least 28 people were killed.  I have never heard of lawsuits or insurance claims in spite of these deaths and the immense loss of property.  At the time of the flood (I was here) there were rumors about failure to maintain properly.  Lately there has been interest by student film makers about the tragedy, but not the technicalities.  Fiction writers like Sid Gustafson also address this event.  

The current concrete-arch structure was completed in 1967, with a height of 205 feet, and a length at its crest of 573 feet. The reservoir is also contained by a secondary earthen dike with a height of 53 feet and a length of 457 feet, also completed in 1967. The dams and reservoir are owned and operated by the local Pondera Canal and Reservoir Company.  You can monitor the operational dials and switches on their website.

Swift Reservoir has a maximum storage capacity of 34,000 acre-feet and normal storage of 30,000 acre-feet.  Recreation is restricted to hiking in the area, with a parking area that requires Blackfeet Nation permission.  One would also need a tribal fishing permit.

Gene Curry

II.  Curry legal challenge

http://ponderacanalcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/legal.pdf

This is a combination of challenges that go back to the original allotment, follows through various transactions, and is affected by historical use.  Curry owns land west of Valier in an area known as the Birch Creek Flats. Curry acquired the land beginning in 1988 when he purchased property referred to at the hearing as the Keil property. The Keil property is locally known as the Carroll property as well. In 1989 and 1990, Curry purchased adjacent land known locally as the Ryan property or Crawford property.

In short the Curry “ranch” -- which includes a feedlot at the edge of Valier and the Valier gas station/liquor store/C-store -- is claiming that they are being shorted on water to which they are entitled.  The case is in “water court” and is decided by a “water master.”  This case is an interesting illustration of how the “capital” of land ownership can be leveraged by pushing for a larger share of water and by investing in local business.  Cheryl Curry attends many town council meetings.

III.  Global weather change

The ultimate source of the real value of the Pondera Canal Company is the snowpack on the east side of the Rocky Mountains.  Every year there is less of it.  This is partly because of changing patterns in the high airstreams and partly because warmer weather means more water falls as rain and runs off instead of storing as snowpack.  A few years ago people here flatly denied there was any such thing.  Now they just get quiet.  As much outspoken emotion is expressed about these issues, there is even more contained by denial, unseen but powerful.

IV.  Frakking

If priming or waste water were to contaminate the aquifer from which Valier draws its well water, it would be a disaster.  But if the wastewater were to somehow enter the canal system, it could be a crop killer, possibly making the land unusable.  That’s a stretch, but stranger things have happened.

Emotional factors from history enter into these geological factors.  Plans were repeatedly made and funded for irrigation on the reservation but never came to fruition though canals were dug by Blackfeet, often by hand with a wife working alongside her husband, and sometimes compelled by an agent who would not issue food commodities unless the people worked.  (See the Foley Report.)  This is part of the successful lawsuit against the US for negligent and predatory management of the assets of the Blackfeet people.  Part of the reason for the tribe's poverty is failure to develop their land with effective irrigation.

As it turns out, there is another fascinating but overlooked story about the origins of PCCRC irrigation rights which I’ll address in another post.  It’s about an Indian agent who went native, the ever-resourceful Joe Kipp, and Robare, the wicked little town destroyed by the ’64 flood.  No Conrads were present.  Valier did not yet exist.