LAW IN CHOTEAU COUNTY

Chouteau County Courthouse, built 1885, Fort Benton

As it turns out, the chapter John Sharp, in his book “Whoop Up Country,” calls “Law in Chouteau County” is more relevant to modern times than I expected.  Sharp's idea is that in contrast to the Canadian strategy of governmental persuasion to order, the Montana side was a free-for-all created by individualism, profit, and hatred for federal law.  On the US side some larger-than-life figures went after law-breakers, giving rise to a major literary genre of John Wayne types, but not before exasperated local citizens resorted to vigilantism (lynch mobs).  After all, a lot of them were from the South where black people were lynched, so that seemed right to them.  Horse thieves deserved the rope.  

Sharp says, writing in 1955, that corrupt law enforcement and pre-Revolutionary laws that were rigid and irrelevant created lots of criminal opportunity that I note have continued to the present.  And yet he says that between 1875 and 1881, Fort Benton settled down.  The people there are rather proud of their chaotic past and believe they are in control.  I was once in conversation with one of their local historians (there are many of them) who had just finished an account of what he thought was the last of the brothels.  (It’s typical of old male historians to have a special fondness for frontier female prostitutes but, strangely, so do the business and professional women of Great Falls, who like to dress up as "Miss Kitty.")  I said, “How do you know it was the last?  Maybe you just don’t recognize them now.”  The several women in the room jumped to agree.  Must be a novel in that.

"Soiled Doves" in Butte

In the meantime, let’s look at the big name sheriffs, working for a citizenry that operated on popularity with special consideration for the wealthy.  Henry Plummer was Chouteau’s first sheriff but also the head of a gang of road agents around Sun River until he was hanged by vigilantes in Bannack in 1863.  He was 32.  There are many versions of his life and demise.  The one linked here is not so traditional.  http://www.historynet.com/henry-plummer.htm

John J. Healy (“Johnny”) was Irish, a whiskey trader until the Mounties arrived, and an economic failure in spite of extraordinary energy.  He finally found his feet where politics and law enforcement met.  As Sharp puts it, “Johnny Healy was the law, and the law was what Johnny Healy chose to enforce.”  He particularly enjoyed being out on the trail, tracking the bad guys, and then dealing with them harshly when he caught them.  But in 1879 the horse thieves were doing so well that Johnny couldn’t keep up, so the big freighting companies sent for 25 Pinkerton agents who restored order.  (My mother's maiden name was Pinkerton -- distantly related.)

Sharp claims that Joe Kipp found it safe to carry “sums of money in excess of $100,000 across the plains to Fort Macleod without trouble.”  He doesn’t explain why Kipp would do such a thing, where the money came from, or how it was documented or corraborated since the only practical strategy would have been total secrecy.  Possibly the money was in the form of a check or bond sewn into his underwear, rather than a pack of cash or wagon of gold.

Johnny Healy’s law enforcement career ended when he was assigned the unpopular jobs of tax assessor and collector.  In 1882 he built a new prison which was a building created around a steel cage.  This increased his unpopularity because of the cost.  Small time crime was handled simply by a fine paid to the sheriff.  Even when Bob Scriver became a Justice of the Peace about 1960, he was instructed that this was the protocol and was handed a shoebox of unnumbered citation forms plus a little starter money.  One of the most common practices in the 1880's was just to float nuisance criminals on their way somewhere else.  The Blackfeet Tribal Court has been experimenting with that here recently.

When Sharp looked at the records in Sun River, he found a cruelty against animals complaint dating to 1870 and accusations requiring good behavior bonds as high as $1250 against people using “insulting and abusive language.”  This must be why the Internet is called a “frontier,” though no person on the provider platforms today is required to post a bond -- maybe the companies.  Sharp says the penalties were harsh for those who made “indecent and foul statements” in the presence of women.  These days those statements would probably be about questioning equality.

County sheriffs were not the only source of law and order.  Sharp feels that Deputy United States Marshall Charles D. Hard from 1869 to 1873 can legitimately take credit for much of the cleaning up.  John X Beidler, who liked to call himself merely X. Beidler, got his start with vigilantes, a Dutchman among the Irish.  In Kansas he rode with John Brown, but in Virginia City, Montana, he was a butcher, a cattle drover, and an adventurer in the gold fields, who was finally legitimated by riding shotgun for Wells Fargo.  In the end he died notorious but broke and ill.  Healy, like John Conrad, went to Alaska where the trail grows cold.

Making drunkenness normal.

“Norming” is a concept about how people accept the philosophical error of “from IS to OUGHT,” that is, acceptance of the status quo as the only possible reality.   Even today we have a lot of norms that need to be changed, for instance, the idea that it's normal and inevitable to kill prostitutes, especially if they are Indians.   Moving that blindness over to new insight about what can and should be done is a frontier enterprise removing society from embattled violence that justifies just about anything.  It's not easy and it's always a job that is incomplete.  Normal strategy is (1) a matter of protesting that disorder is bad for business and (2)  churches try to expose and protest what has been taken for granted.  These strategies can be heard in contemporary political debates, but the norm is still where it has been for decades.  Some wonder whether the media reinforce low expectations.

At one point Johnny Healy’s effort at "forced conformity" was something he considered a harmless joke:  He was holding Bad Bull, a Canadian Blood Blackfoot, as an accused horse thief.  Before releasing him, Healy close-clipped the man’s long hair, and then everyone mocked the new skinhead, laughing in the same way as people laugh today at tricking Islam people into eating forbidden food.  Breaking other people’s taboos is SO much fun.  Until it becomes a time bomb of hatred.  Many people are now trying to re-norm such bullying, fighting the idea that there is only one true way, the way in the limited minds of people imposing violations and stigmas.

Buffalo Soldiers, Fort Keogh

Re-normed by the Civil War

The US Military was also present in these years, though much drained by the Civil War and accommodating hardened and sometimes below-standard men.  They introduced little bubbles of civilization in much the same way as is illustrated in the current BBC/PBS series called  “Indian Summers,” about the time in India when new politics of revolution turned norms on their heads, empowering East Indians in a way unthinkable at the time.  The American cavalry did run little fort schools, drafting officers and whatever other men had some knowledge.  They even put on plays.  They were pretty dubious spellers, but there were newspapers, and literary societies (book club anyone?).  The ladies were thrilled when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police rode down to confer with American officers.  

THE EVOLUTION OF BRAINS

This is continuing comment on “The 10,000 Year Explosion”.

Cochran and Harpening did a brave, dangerous thing.  It had two steps.  The first one was to point out that mutation and evolution, which go hand in hand, are a changing code flow that make bodies change, including the brain.  That is, people today think in a different way that they did only centuries ago or in different environments because their brains have evolved but the same cells evolve differently when challenged by different tasks.  We think about this when we say that kids’ attention spans are shorter but more of them have an ability to see patterns quickly -- both of which we attribute to the impact of the internet.  

We do not think of “thinking” as anything concrete, but as a kind of vapor that hangs in a thought bubble over our heads.  But “thinking” is X and O, electrochemical charges, molecules and blood flows -- very real.  Its codes and functions change.  They say there are over 200 different KINDS of neurons, each specializing in some certain information.

With that insight in place (one hopes) the second step was to study a specific population, assert that it has demonstrably evolved differently than the surrounding population because of stigma and oppression or restrictions, and then describe specifically what became different and why.  They chose  Ashkenazi Jews to study.  Probably they could not have done that in an Ivy League university, but they were working in Utah.  This meant NOT studying Mormons who practice polygamy.  Maybe they haven’t evolved.   Or maybe they HAVE. (Jokes.)

Most Americans are not aware of the subdivisions of the Jewish population over the millennia or what has happened to them.  The subdivision called Ashkenazi (meaning German) Jews were practicing Judaism and identifying with it in Germany, but barred from the main culture and, anyway, compelled by their beliefs to marry within their faith community.  The result was that by 1800 they were small group who specialized in finances because Christians are supposed to avoid usury (that’s the theory, anyway).  

Such work does not make the world love Jews running banks, but it DOES make those peoples' IQ’s go up, because success is predicated on handling complex transactions and lots of math and theory.  A magazine length version of this reasoning is in the Journal of Biosocial Science 38, no.5 (2005): 659-693.  The article by the same two men is called “Natural History of Ashkenazie Intelligence.”  

I recommend this whole book, esp. for Valier since it talks a lot about how brains developed to handle agriculture, particularly crops but also pastoral herding, much helped by a mutation that allowed milk and other dairy products as a source of food.  It knocked out the enzyme that made people lactose intolerant.  Good nutrition means good functioning, no matter the creature.  Belgians carried lactose tolerance and other traits good for agriculture to the early immigrants to Valier.

The dark side of the Ashkenazi evolution, which through bottlenecks caused the survival of “smart” people, was that the same mutations (there were several) that made them smarter also carried along -- if there were not quite the right changes in the right amounts -- deadly diseases.  Mostly the mutations had to do with the dendrites of brain cells proliferating (involving fats).  These changes were detectable by 1800.  Below normal dendrite numbers meant below normal intelligence.  The right number within a narrow spectrum meant high intelligence as expressed in IQ.  (I have a lot of quarrels with IQ.)  Too many dendrites meant disease and early death.  They do not have children.

Since the many other populations of practitioners of Judaism -- those not Ashkenazi who are from other world populations -- have gathered in Israel, and since Europe and North America had mostly stopped resenting Jews so much after the Holocaust (until now), intermarriage has lessened this curse/blessing.  WWII didn’t just murder many Jews, but also drove many of the smartest and most accomplished people into enclaves like Manhattan, where they were impressively high achievers.  But there are still people who when they have hardships will look for someone to blame -- they still focus on Jews and immigrants.  I have no answers for that.

I have a special interest in two populations: Blackfeet and the Smash Street Boys.  Both have been confined and stigmatized, the originally hunter/gatherer Blackfeet tribe for about as long as Jews have been changing in the US.  The traits that were encouraged until after the horse arrived have not been helpful today, but the transition to the new world is happening, with the help of Metis and tribes who were traders, like the Mandan genome that helped the original Joe Kipp make deals and build forts.  

Joe Kipp

The Smash Street Boys time span is way too short for actual DNA mutations that are consistent, though they are under enormous molecular pressure both from the HIV in their cells and the violent meds in their blood streams.  Nevertheless, one can speculate, particularly in terms of the epigenome, which is a sort of molecular annotation of the four gene elements.  But their sources are multiple and each boy is too unique for anyone to suspect a bad seed gene.  There is no such thing anyway, since no gene can be expressed without an environment.  The universal environment for the boys is unstable and punishing families.  Poverty, bad mental health, lack of nutrition and shelter -- the “bad seed” is really a toxic seed bed or as one playwright has it "A Chalk Garden".

What’s intriguing is that both Blackfeet and SSB are natural artists and, as well, take to the cyberworld like ducks discovering ponds.  Nor are they afraid to stick their heads down into the muck.  They know muck.  They do not sit paralyzed in front of a keyboard but at once begin to explore.  If their internal heads were watched via fMRI, the paisley patterns of the connectome and its underlying blood flow would be urgent and various.  Of course, head phones would be necessary to fortify the brain waves with a beat.

I don’t think IQ tests can pick up such things.  IQ tests only identify those who do well on IQ tests, which correlates pretty well with good grades in schools.  We are now calling into question the efficacy of stair-stepped schools, the constant sorting according to previous assumptions and expectations.  This system, which worked pretty well a century ago, might be creating the wrong kind of people. Or at least brain mutations perpetuated by the wrong kind of environment.

Darrell Kipp, founder and director of the Piegan Institute and

Cuts Wood Immersion Blackfeet School.

A QUIET DEAL IN ROBARE

It happened sometime between 1884 and 1897.  This little story is about “Major George I. Steell” (b. 1837, d. 1916), Hiram Upham, Joe Kipp, a man named Barron, and Robare, the town “too wicked to persist.” It is entwined with the beginnings of the irrigation system that feeds from Birch Creek on the reservation out across Pondera County.

Robare was a little settlement just south of Birch Creek as it emerges from the Birch Creek Flats.  You can see a sign pointing to its original location just west of Highway 89 as you approach the Birch Creek bridge from the south, but the last remnants of it were washed away by the ’64 flood.  Formed by the reservation boundary that was Birch Creek and the policies of Methodist Indian Agents who wanted neither liquor nor Catholic missions on the reservation, it therefore featured both church and tavern, side by side, each with its own kind of spirits. 

"Major George I. Steell"

Steele had actually been the Indian agent, twice but briefly both times, declaring he would clean out this nest of thieves.  He was a strong Republican and in those days, as now, tried to present themselves as virtuous.  Yet he knew Robare well enough to make deals in the bar, “Deadwood” style.  He owed his status to T.C. Power and George Bird Grinnell who drew on Back East liberal intellectuals with political connections but little real knowledge of Indians.  Grinnell was not above either whitewash or blackening as suited what he thought were the right goals.

Steell’s English mother and Scots father immigrated to Quebec where Steell was born and raised.  Looking for his life, he went from New York to Boston, to St. Louis, and up the Missouri to Fort Benton in 1857.  For seven years he worked for the American Fur Company in Helena.  Then for Matthew Carroll in Fort Benton, where he and Carroll were what Jack Holterman, historian, calls “merchant princes.”  That is, they were linked to C.A. Broadwater and T.C. Power who dominated both wagon trains and politics.  He was one of the first commissioners of Choteau County.  In 1869 he went back to Ticonderoga, NY, and married Eva Treadway, a sign that he was secure enough to want to start a family, but within months of reaching Montana, she died.

Steele (who evidently had no military status or service) went to Salt Lake City for a few years, then returned to ranch in 1875 on the Sun River and the Missouri.  In May of 1877 he married Annie Dias, a Blackfeet.  (Other places her name is given as Last Calf.)  This is probably how he acquired a ranch in the foothills above what became Swift Dam.  That year he served in the territorial legislature and also in 1879.  In 1884 he participated in the constitutional convention and in 1890 he was appointed agent of the Blackfeet.  By then his ranch had moved downstream along Birch Creek to near Dupuyer. 

The controversies of Steele’s time included the usual mingled assets and corruption by suppliers, the Great Northern Railroad’s constant “taking” of timber, hay, and right-of-way, the scandalous Willow Creek School, rumors of mineral riches in the mountains, and alcohol.  But these headaches, which became literal, he treated with morphine to the point where the agency doctor said he was incoherent most of the time and he would only talk to the Indians through a little peekhole he cut in his door.

His friend J. W. Schultz also had back pains which he eased with “grass” as well as morphine.  Schultz said that once the two of them played Ouija with prospector Dutch Louie Meyer and made the Ouija board tell Meyer where there was gold in the mountains.  There was, but not much.  In this way they discovered how good the gold strike was without investing money or effort.  A more exciting story by Schultz is that Steell, called “Puhpoom” or Thunder because of his temper, had a powerful black stallion that was stolen.  Schultz cleverly and heroically stole it back.

Steell, like Grinnell, felt that the tribe should sell “the east half of the Rockies” to the government.  Hill proposed moving the tribe to Dakota.  The east slope and the rez were both in the crosshairs of Republicans v. Democrats; fur and whiskey trading vs. livestock and grain ag; respectability vs. opportunism -- all pushed hard by the industrial revolution with its drive for cross-continental railroads and hunger for copper.

In 1897 Steell's agent career ended, after an interlude during which a harsh reforming Army captain tried to stamp out Blackfeet culture.  All through this time Steell was friends with Joe Kipp (who was always everywhere) and the two of them took a delegation of “chiefs” to Washington, D.C.  Then the collaborators -- with two other prominent citizens, Barron (possibly an ancestor of a Valier sheriff) and Hiram Upham (patriarch of a talented family) --were in the habit of gathering in a Robare bar to speculate and do a little trading, though Steell had a reputation as a despiser of alcohol, of which he had little need since he was a drug user.  In the bar the movers and shakers dabbled in water rights, that other dangerous liquid.

Joe Kipp sold some land and his water rights to Anna M. Steell, George’s wife.  She operated her place, which included the Carroll homestead, until 1905 when she sold it to the Conrad Irrigation Company, a predecessor of the PCCRC.  Interviewed old-timers said Anna irrigated it for timothy hay.  A photo of her ditch taken in 1919 shows Swift Dam with the ditch intake for Anna’s place.  It appears that she and George ran separate cattle herds on the rez, but that Anna’s cows were herded by Indian Agency employees.  Grazing vs. plowing was another dynamic but both needed irrigation.

In the time period around WWI -- 1909 to 1925 -- settlers and immigrants were coming and going.  Some seriously underestimated their ability to take root and thrive.  The CIC went broke, and so did its successors.  The irrigation works fell into disrepair until the next surge of settlement after WWII.  Edgar J. Steell, George’s son, testified that the original Steell ranch was “up at the mountains” and then moved 15 miles downstream from Swift Dam in 1898.  The ditch took water to Sheep Creek, then from that stream to Dupuyer Creek, and then to the Conrad holdings.  Thus PRCCR claims those water rights.

A law called “The Statute of Frauds” allows for a settler on public lands to sell land and water rights to someone who immediately moves there and uses them, making the deal orally without written record -- just a handshake.  But the squatter needs to have made improvements like fences and buildings.  Kipp, Barron and Upham were not improvers of land.  But they did “take out” (dig) a ditch in 1884 to irrigate on Birch Creek Flats, perhaps thinking of reselling the water.  In the 1892 survey, the surveyor Paul Bickel called it “the Kipp and Upham Ditch” and reported gardens and crops growing there.  Anna M. Steell and Raphael Moran acquired the water rights in a written document, properly recorded and dated in 1897.  A neighbor and relative to Steell by marriage, Charles P. Thomas, testified that the ditch was taken out in 1873 and used for irrigation every summer afterwards, but then it fell into disuse until Lewis Carroll’s father redeveloped the area in the 1940’s.

R. to L.:  Heart Butte, Feather Woman Mountain, Major Steell's Backbone Mountain.  Truly.

The mix of opinion, bar deals, written registration, use and development, unreliable witnesses, Indian rights and female ownership reveals the unstable legality of the headwaters of Birch Creek.  It’s tempting to bring another Lewis Carroll’s book, “Alice in Wonderland,” into this story.  But I keep thinking of the modern parallels, with Cut Bank dives taking the place of Robare saloons.

(Sources for this post include the Michael F. Foley Indian Claims Commission Docket Number 279-D and a far rosier account at  http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/h/a/l/Douglas-G-Hall-1/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-1506.html)