"THE RED AND THE WHITE: A FAMILY'S SAGA OF THE AMERICAN WEST" by Andrew Graybill

The Clarke family, beginning with Malcolm Clarke (1817-1869) attending West Point by pulling strings only to be thrown back out, and ending equally ambiguously with Joyce Clark Turvey (1928-2013) who was an adopted child, is a genealogical trail that leads through complex territory composed of “memes,” the term for culturally transmitted behaviors and beliefs.  From the early marriages “in the fashion of the country,” which is to say partnerships formed (as they often are today) without benefit of any institutional certification, either religious or governmental, to more recent events that living people don't want known, the task of a historian is not easy.

Andrew R. Graybill, the author of “The Red and the White: A Family’s Saga of the American West” is an academic historian and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where he has returned to his Texas roots after his education at prestigious Yale and Princeton and some years at the University of Nebraska, which has been one of the major publishers of Western history.  His book is diplomatic and documented whenever possible, but this is a paper history based on paper records.  He is wary of personal testimony and with good reason.  The “memes” in question are sometimes racist, vengeful, full of emotion and family defensiveness.  Yet they need to be examined, but patiently against a background thrown into chaos by the War Between the States, which is what Graybill provides.

Only a few days ago I was contacted by a woman trying to understand her grandmother, who loved the St. Mary’s valley on the Blackfeet reservation and returned there every summer even in old age, and yet when asked about possible “Indian blood” froze into denial.  The quite “New Age” granddaughter found this incomprehensible.  She told me she had read “every book” about the Blackfeet, but she had not.  What she had read was the conventional, constantly quoted, taught-at-universities books which had not captured reality beyond anthropology and a few facts.  They are circular, like bios of celebrities that repeat old lies because they are colorful.

“The Red and the White” had to be written by an outsider because people saturated with the memes of massacre, blame, trauma, and family loyalty would have been blind even in the face of careful library research.  They would have been forced to take sides and use incendiary adjectives.  Instead, this account is a useful road map of the interlaced trails of economics, temperament, and alliances.  Even just the bibliography alone is worth the price of the book.

I don’t much follow the more traditional histories of this area, mostly white-written and with a big romantic thumb on the scales, meant to defend the reputations of white men, or at least those in power.  (Exceptions might be “Ghost Hunting in Montana” by Barnaby Conrad III -- which does for the Conrads what Graybill does for the Clarkes -- and the quiet work of Jack Holterman, never valued properly, possibly because he was gay.) Mrs. Grundy, the prissy censor, has suppressed the wives of Malcolm Clarke all except Coth-co-co-na, and the Blackfeet themselves have not wanted to see her as a broken victim of her husband’s death, which she was.   I never understood the status of Bill and Nora Spanish until I saw in this book that the first wife of Horace was Margaret Spanish (First Kill). Horace, Malcolm’s son by Coth-co-co-na, was a lifelong tribal politics player -- see Paul Rosier’s primary research in “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation”.  

This is a simplified version, for which you should be grateful.

Two of the most mysterious and yet omnipresent characters among the recent traditional Blackfeet were “Chief Bull” in Heart Butte and “Kyi-yo” (Bobcat) in Starr School, bilingual brokers in the political struggles.  It turns out they are descended from one of Malcolm Clarke’s earlier wives, “Good Singing” (Akseniski) who was a daughter of Isidoro Sandoval, major frontier figure.  She and Malcolm Clarke had four surviving children, Isidoro the 2nd (b.1856/57) being the first son and the ancestor of both “Chief Bull” and “Kyi-yo.”  There is no room here to explore this, but it’s clear that the Clarke family, like Thomas Jefferson, had a shadow set of siblings.  The drive to power, pride verging on arrogance, a strain of creativity and verbal skill, and tumbling economic fortunes mark all of these generational lines.

Yet Graybill emphasizes, partly I’m sure because of Joyce Turvey’s concerns, that Helen and John, respectively Horace Clarke’s sister and son, were quiet, respectable, achieving people.  If it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, no history would ever be written.  But no history could capture John Clarke’s complete disregard for social considerations and his single-minded pursuit of his artistic vision, which was sometimes celebrated and other times brushed aside.  This book does not address his many lifelong friendships with other artists in the area, including Bob Scriver.  They’ve been photoshopped out, which might be a good thing, because it leaves room for another book, probably not written by a formal historian.  Joyce Turvey’s daughters emphasized that she was adopted, NOT Indian, very much Californian which is where they grew up.  Joyce had a career as a makeup company executive and that’s what they value.  No Indians were present at Joyce’s funeral.  Her gallery did not represent Indian artists.

Graybill is not an expert on the contentious field of contemporary Western art or even the checkered practices of the Montana Historical Society nor is he particularly informed about the memes of the Blackfeet.  One of them, the practice of a powerful man making a daughter into a specially cherished child (minipoka), often recurs in this narrative.  The violent names of some of the women were a compliment to their father’s exploits.  But these considerations were not vital to the forming of this narrative, which is exceptionally pleasant to read, clear and graceful in its phrasing.

Malcolm Clarke

The crucial issue is not just the struggle of individuals to matter in the world, but the painful and sometimes deadly dynamics of two juggernaut cultures producing humans born into turbulence.  Described as “races,” they were often more similar than different -- warriors and wives on both sides, hard-pressed to find safe and peaceful places, believing that violence was the only way, often deeply damaged when alcohol became an alternative.  Sorting this all out is tough when Malcolm’s birth year (1817), isn’t quite two centuries ago yet.  I’m waiting for the Uphams, Kipps, Tatseys, and Weatherwaxes to get their books into print.  Woody Kipp is the only one so far.  Jimmy Welch’s father was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, but Jimmy Welch, Jr. was not, except for summer visits.  His family line doesn’t go back far in Browning -- in fact, the father, who was mostly Cherokee on his father’s side, was Bob Scriver’s playmate.  (Both born in 1914 in Browning.)  The grandfather was from the Carolinas.

Emotions still swirl on the rez, still affect who goes to college and how they are received when they come back, what possible ways there are to survive after returning.  The roots of being Blackfeet are on this high east slope of the Rockies and their survival as a cultural people depends upon keeping the relationship to the land alive -- NOT blood quantum or descent.  

It’s self-serving for me to say so, but many white people have felt the mystical magnetism of this land and have quietly visited whenever they could.  Walter McClintock, for instance.  Me, for instance.  A small array of scholars, more and more include the Blackfeet themselves, the Cree and other strands mixed into them, and the assimilated outliers like Tom Dawson, who married Malcolm’s daughter, and whose family descendant was the “registrar” for the Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls.  Where’s THAT book?  

I hungered and thirsted for “The Red and the White” because there were so many questions.  But it’s like studying the cosmos:  the more questions are answered, the more the answers raise even more crucial questions.  I think this will not be the last post about this book, either by me or by others -- particularly the descendants, even the ones in California.

BARNABY CONRAD JR.

Barnaby Conrad Jr. has just died at the age of ninety.  He lived in the Santa Barbara area of California and few here in Montana know his story as they ought to, though he never lived here.

After the Civil War Charles and William Conrad were Big Men, so big that they had to split up the territory, first between the US and Canada along the Whoop-Up Trail, and later on either side of the Rocky Mountains so that William founded Conrad, my county seat, and ran the Seven Block Ranch from roughly where I live in Valier, developed the irrigation system that now supports wheat, and sold the whole outfit to Cargill for a nice profit.  Charles took the west side and founded Kalispell.   Both “married” Indians, some more formally than others, and had mixed blood children.  To read their stories is to read the history of Montana, but the plot is only passing through from French Huguenots (a subcategory of Calvinism persecuted by Catholics), to the US War of Independence, the Civil War, the early industrial development of the high prairie, then diplomacy and bull-fighting in Spain, and finally the post-WWII literary and arts flowering of San Francisco.  Of course there was a saloon:  “El Matador,” founded by Barnaby Conrad Jr. to invest the money made from his book by the same name.  Trying to make that much money from a book nowadays is sort of like undertaking open range ranching of sheep and herefords in the 1800’s. Barely possible with a lot of luck.

Now I’m quoting myself about the third Conrad brother, John.  (Use the search strip on the right edge of this blog to find earlier posts.) 

Rewind to 1880. Now we turn to John Conrad. His cattle were in the Hurlbut-Conrad Cattle Company, based in the notorious Johnson County, Wyoming.  [See “Heaven’s Gate”, the movie filmed in Glacier Park though the history was in Wyoming.  Some of the film was shot in the Charles Conrad mansion.) It’s unclear whether John was part of the cattle mogul vigilante groups, but certainly his cowboys were also gunslingers. By 1891 he had sold out his cows.

He met Mabel Barnaby during the 1884 Democratic National Convention. She was nineteen, accompanying her father, who was a Rhode Island merchant and politician. John was 29, identified by the newspapers as a “Western millionaire.” In 1887 he installed his new wife in a log cabin home in Billings and opened a fancy store. He also established an attachment to Samuel Hauser (banking, railroad, mining, and cattle) who was one of the Big Four. the others were Charles Broadwater (railroads and a fabulous health spa in Helena), Marcus Daly and William A. Clark (both copper kings). John’s goal was becoming governor. He bought a house at 702 Madison Avenue in Helena.

In the spring of 1891, Mabel’s mother was poisoned to death in Denver. John went berzerk in pursuit of the poisoner, who might have been a doctor who had ingratiated himself with the woman. The doctor had a mentally unstable wife and eventually collected $25,000 from her will, but the doctor poisoned himself before he could be convicted of murder. Under the pressure of all this the John Conrad marriage came totally unglued -- the master and mistress accusing each other of repeated adultery and the household so disorderly that at one point there was an in-house riot featuring the coachman wielding a stick and the Chinese cook swinging a frying pan. John was the loser.

The divorce was complete in 1895 and Mabel took her children (Florence, Maud and the first Barnaby) back to civilization in Europe. Since she had her own fortune, it was not difficult to marry an American named George Choate Kendall and move into a chateau in France.

______________

Barnaby Conrad, Jr. (Mabel’s grandson) is the one who just died at the age of ninety.  He has a website of his own:  http://www.barnabyconradauthor.com   Basically, he lived the life that every small town boy in Montana longs to have -- including a career as an amateur bullfighter, ended by a near-fatal goring.  

His children fanned out across the humanities: painting, writing, publishing and editing, traveling and exploring.  But in Montana we don’t recognize such elite society: we cling to Charlie Russell, celebrating the man we think he was over and over and over, even as we un-fund humanities in the public schools.  The history of Conrad and Valier are mute on the subject of their founding families.  And the biography of Barnaby Conrad Jr. does not mention Montana.

I would not know about all this except for the courageous and engaging writing of Barnaby Conrad the Third, born in 1952 and author of “Ghost Hunting in Montana,” a key book about this major family of Montana history.  Conrad III was born in San Francisco in 1952.  His mother was architect Dale (Cowgill) Crichton. After graduating Yale with a BA in Fine Arts in 1975, Conrad worked as a journalist and magazine editor. Much of his work was for art magazines: he was one of the founding editors of Art World in the 1970s, and a senior editor of Horizon from 1979 to 1980.  In 1982, Conrad moved to Paris and became an adventure travel writer.  Conrad III married art gallery owner Martha Sutherland on May 24, 2003.  

His father, Barnaby Conrad Jr. was married twice, first in 1949 to Gale Cowgill. That marriage ended in divorce, and in 1963 he married Mary Slater, who survives him.

He is also survived by two sons, Barnaby Conrad III of Acconac, Va., and Winston Conrad of Kanuela, Hawaii; two daughters, Kendall Conrad of Montecito (Santa Barbara County) and Cayaetana Conrad of Carpinteria; and eight grandchildren.  The two daughters are artists who each have websites.

www.kendallconraddesign.com/ and www.taniconrad.com/

This intercontinental family has enormous vitality, boldness, and intelligence -- all supported by connections and money.  This third branch who descended from the younger son did a little better than the older sibs, probably because of their mothers.  Morality didn’t come into it much, though things have calmed down quite a bit in the last hundred years.  Not many of us have coachmen or Chinese cooks -- much less in-house riots.  But I suspect most of us don’t have as much fun, either, or the reckless and exhilarating exploration of new horizons.  

Schools now are focused on “containment and conformity”, which it is assumed will guarantee prosperity -- even as today’s Yale graduates wander the land looking for jobs.  We so underestimate youngsters.  When the oldest Conrad brothers joined their father in the Civil War, William was thirteen and Charles was eleven.  John arrived here in his teens. Their plantation was destroyed and their slaves dispersed, so they just walked West.  Nowadays, they might walk their fingers across keyboards.  Or maybe not.  Maybe organic farming.  We mostly recognize achievement in retrospect.  Few in the midst of the struggle have the perspective to understand what it means.

If you’re interested in this philosophical angle about the arts, you might watch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iG9CE55wbtY#!  This is Sir Ken Robinson on the same theme.  www.sirkenrobinson.com/  Think he’s ever heard of Charlie Russell?  To be fair, he’s probably never heard of the Conrad Brothers, either.  But I’ll bet he’s heard of Barnaby Conrad, Jr.  

Thanks to Dave Lull, here is a link to another fascinating bit of Barnaby Conrad lore.
www://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/03/04/barnaby-conrad-author-matador-bon-vivant-and-thorn-in-hemingways-side/

"COUSIN CLARE" by Anita Leslie

If you’re a Downton Abbey fan, you’re going to love this story.  It begins with Winston Churchill and my version ends on the Blackfeet Reservation.  Clementine Churchill, Winston’s wife, was one of the Jerome sisters who were so American that they had Native American -- or as they put it, “Red Indian” -- blood in them.   The grand-daughter of another of the Jerome sisters was Clare Sheridan, whose natural energy was freed and driven by the early death of a beloved husband, an officer in WWI, and developed by a lifetime of devotion to art and writing.  Her niece, Anita Leslie (1914-1984), wrote a book about her:  “Cousin Clare, The Tempestuous Career of Clare Sheridan,” which was recently sent to me by Joyce Thomas, whose aunt was a close friend of Anita Leslie.  Joyce’s aunt was Norma Smith, who grew up on a homestead near Great Falls, graduated from the University of Great Falls, and became an early Blackfeet reservation teacher in the Two Medicine area.  Among other things she taught the locals how to go on picnics, driving a team and wagon to some picturesque spot.  They must have thought it a curious practice, but anything involving food was welcome.  Later she trained to be an occupational therapist and in late life was an artist.  At her death in 2011, she was 98 and living in Green Valley, CA.

In the early days of Glacier National Park many Europeans and Brits saw its potential as the “American Switzerland,” luring a steady trickle of visitors with fancy titles.  One attraction was Winold Reiss’ school of art on the east shore of St. Mary.  He and his brother came from Manhattan for the summers.  In 1937 one of the residents in the school was Clare.  If you have visited the “Big Hotel” in East Glacier and walked past the tall carved Indian figure, you have seen the work of Winold’s brother and undoubtedly the inspiration for Clare’s work in her late years: wood carvings hewn from single logs.  Her iconography was religious, Catholic.  Her life was anything but.  She had done busts of the Russian monsters Lenin and Trotsky, which did her no political good but became the foundation of a journalism career.  A bust of Charlie Chaplin touched off wild rumors. She portrayed both Gandhi and Churchill, who were enemies but both certainly friends of hers.  “Winston” had to save her more than once, but he could not save her son who died of appendicitis leading to peritonitis.  This was the motive for coming to Montana to grieve.

Clare wrote:  “How strange that through losing one child [a very young one] I discovered myself as a modeller, through losing another I found myself a carver.  It seemed to me I hadn’t been a sculptor until now, for modelling is not sculpting.  To tackle wood is a great sensation.  Wood lives, comes to life under one’s hand, one wrestles with it, humours it, coaxes it, argues with it.  The grain gives fight.”  

I’d bet money that she knew John Clarke, the Blackfeet wood carver.   Probably also Bob Scriver, Charlie Beil and Adrian Voisin, other sculptors in the area at the time.  But it was another Blackfeet whom she added to her life of intimacies with men:  Levi Burd, descendant of Jemmy Jock Burd, who a century earlier had lived a life not unlike her own, moving among nations and making narrow escapes.  [I never found a documented account of Levi’s descent.  I’m going by the name.]  In fact, Burd -- described in Paul C. Rosier’s “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954” as “the patrician half-blood who profited handsomely from Blackfeet oil leases throughout the 1940’s,” was deeply involved in state and reservation politics.  He was quite a bit older than Clare, married, had held offices from judge to tribal chair, and knew the world well.  Just Clare’s type!  She wrote a book about that summer:  “Redskin Interlude,” which I found on the used book dealer websites and will review when it comes from England.  (Estimated to arrive before December 13.)  I suspect that a magpie’s eye view of the relationship would be about lively conversation rather than physical intimacy.  In any case Anita Leslie knew all about it and named her own son “Tarka Dick” possibly after Winold Reiss’ son Tjark and certainly after Clare’s lost son, Richard.  Tactfully, she claimed Tarka merely meant “otter” and the boy was like an otter.

Clare Sheridan was one of those women liberated by the social shifts that war imposes, partly by killing a generation of the best men and partly by pressing women into new roles.  Anita Leslie drove an ambulance for France in WWII.  “Once you’ve seen Paree . . .”  But, rather oddly, this wandering woman’s greatest affection was for the Sahara desert and she loved nothing better than to consort with Bedouin chiefs.  The only truly brutish top leader Clare confronted in the course of her career was Mussolini.

The sense of entitlement these women felt, alongside an acute awareness of being “other” and therefore outside the rules, gave them common cause with Communists, Indians, rebels, and other oppressed and suffering peoples.  But also they felt themselves equal to the biggest names and risked going into dicey situations all the time, partly because of having friends and relatives (Winston) who could and would save them.  Their currency is not money -- they spend it as fast as they get it -- but skill and reputation, the same as it was for Jemmy Jock Burd among the fur traders or the early Kipps and Browns or the other middle-class mixed-bloods of the Blackfeet.

Montana life is not so different.  We are confronting another oil boom, wondering whether this time it will take out the diminishing reservation pure water supply that comes from shrinking glaciers.  Levi Burd wanted to cut off enrollment at the half-blood point, but now some are arguing for a  quarter-quantum cut off.  This time around, the Blackfeet politicians are sometimes women and they are keenly aware that reservations can help to swing national elections, as just happened.  The books that trace the genealogies and forces have only just begun to follow the trail cut by Paul C. Rosier (no relation to the DesRosier family, I think.)

On top of everything else, Clare Sheridan was beautiful.  The last words of the book about her describe the simple funeral in the presence of a sad but serene madonna she had carved as a memorial to her son.  It stood in the fourteenth-century church of Brede village where she had often lived.  Anita Leslie tells us:  “I began to grasp a reality which the passionate exuberant Clare had always sought to express -- beauty outlasts pain -- beauty does not age.”   Surely an artist’s sentiment.  There are other realities.  Beauty was not Clare Sheridan’s only value.  Or maybe there are many kinds of beauty.

BARRUS & SCRIVER

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU8tnkiL9KU

This vid is only one of many on YouTube that refer to the “poete maudite” as a category. They range from the classic French decadents to Jim Morrison. I’m working at making a case for a certain kind of Native American writing, for instance, Jim Welch’s two early novels (“Winter in the Blood” and “The Death of Jim Loney”), as belonging to this category, now thrown to the side. I’m going to claim that, partly because of that despairing darkness, rez Indians form a doorway between Barrus and Scriver. How do I dare do that? Especially since Barrus got into such trouble for pulling what he knew about the rez into his own story? Now I pull Barrus into my story? (We’re both white.)

This is a “conceit.” www.thefreedictionary.com/conceit

1. A favorable and especially unduly high opinion of one's own abilities or worth.

2. An ingenious or witty turn of phrase or thought.

3. a. A fanciful poetic image, especially an elaborate or exaggerated comparison.
3. b. A poem or passage consisting of such an image.

4. a. The result of intellectual activity; a thought or an opinion.
4. b. A fanciful thought or idea.

5. a. A fancy article; a knickknack.
5. b. An extravagant, fanciful, and elaborate construction or structure.


Tim Barrus is a poete maudit Americaine. His aesthetic is the Doors: edges, riots, and beach decadence alternating with luxury hotels. He is a cultural dissonant, using outrage and transgression to criticize in ways that demand attention He endures constant torture from shattering bones. Some people are not displeased by that.

Mary Scriver is an impressioniste du prairie. She doesn’t care about conventional people or national boundaries, but relates to the land, living humbly and thinking grandiosely. It suits her (me) to be friends with Tim, to match his stories with my own tales. I like analysis and theory, connections not seen before. I despise sentimentality.


www.britannica.com/EBchecked/.../poete-maudit

poète maudit,  (French: “accursed poet”), in literary criticism, the poet as an outcast of modern society, despised by its rulers who fear his penetrating insights into their spiritual emptiness. The phrase was first applied by Paul Verlaine in Les Poètes maudits (1884), a collection of critical and biographical studies that focused on the tragedy of the lives of the then little-known Symbolist poets Tristan Corbière, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud. Verlaine may have taken les poètes maudits from Baudelaire’s “Bénédiction".

There is no pre-existing category of “impressioniste du prairie.” I’m making it up right now. But I am not like the French Impressionists who are so floral and pretty. This is a place of dung, dust and grass, the chiaroscuro of frozen winter darkness and then unbearably hot summer dazzle laced with ultraviolet that will mutate DNA as though it were radioactivity.

Where is the point of intersection between the urban counter-sophisticate Barrus and this stubborn tubby old female village philosopher? I had a student in Heart Butte who looked so much like Jim Morrison that people did double takes. He’d lived with a relative in Denver and gotten into the rock ‘n roll life enough to have handcuff scars on his wrists. I admit that Jim Welch was never Jim Morrison. But I will assert that Welch was (at least in part) a poete maudit Amerindien, captured by the Missoula crowd of white bourgeois academics.

In his earliest books, Welch writes of horror, fantasy, and guilt with as much energy as Edgar Allan Poe. From one angle he is Montana Gothic, a tiny genre also from Missoula. (Peter Koch, who was at the foundation of Montana Gothic before his career with his fine letter press in Berkeley) suggests “Montana Maudit.”) By Welch’s latest books (after Richard Hugo had gone; Hugo being also interpretable as a poete maudit but, as Koch might agree, actually more “Seattle gris,” my phrase.) Welch was captured by the consumerist Native American romance, the Rousseauian nobleman with white bourgeois ethics. (Annick Smith’s sons are filming “Winter in the Blood.” I am waiting to see what two white boys will made of Jim’s dark and frozen early rez books. Russian genes should help.)

I found Peter Koch when I began to trace back to find the origins of “Montana Gothic,” once a poetry triquarterly in Missoula as well as the little paperback of the same name that I’ve packed around for years. The following url will take you to a discussion of the letters of Peter’s great-grandfather, also Peter Koch, who came up the Mississippi and then the Missouri to Fort Benton where he confronted along the bank a row of stakes topped with grinning rotted Indian heads, guarded by the massive, red-bearded Liver-Eatin’ Johnson wearing only a red flannel undershirt too short to cover his genitals. Koch was a highly educated (meaning tough-minded) man who took loss after loss until finally he was established in Bozeman, Montana, among the cowhands, a founder of Montana State University and owner of one of the finest book collections in the nation.
http://www.peterkochprinters.com/peter-koch-in-montana-home-ground-radio.mp3

When Barrus and I began to correspond via email, we were mostly matching stories about boys destroyed. His had AIDS and were stalked by pimps and drug traffickers. Mine were Blackfeet trying to survive alcohol and violence. We matched each other, dark story by dark story, and at first that was the idea of the shared book we call “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs.” Also, I had the notion that I could back down the smartass overeducated bi-coastals who were always on Barrus’ case. (Maybe Koch among them.) But then other ideas became bigger. I still have an enormous amount of reading about the poetes maudites to do -- and the films. (I just began watching Pasolini.) Oh, the films! What exactly is the relationship between Gothic and maudit?

If the story of the high prairie is about how sophistication meets raw frontier, then there might be another story something like the raw frontier of war smashing into the sophistication of post-WWII Europe, creating a broken beauty full of hidden horror that continues to play out in terrorism and genocide. Always everywhere there is a constant effort on the part of those who came out more or less on top (here on the prairie and there in Paris) to hide their origins and deny the forces that still pull them into the same patterns in spite of all the efforts of the deconstructionists.

The common theory is that Unitarians (to some degree I remain one) have no theory of Evil. But Presbyterians (which I was raised) certainly do, plus an iron commandment to do good works. As always, the marginal barely survive, but in the process we form knots of new culture, new ideas, resistance to the same old terror. It’s worth doing.

TO BE CONTINUED

DON MARBLE (1938-2010)

Church congregations always have a kind of penumbra of not-members, people who are in sympathy but don’t attend except possibly for special events. They’re like cousins who were raised elsewhere, the same but different. Sometimes those people are in a position to do the group a Great Good, but not all of them take advantage. Don Marble did.

The First Unitarian Church of Helena, Montana, was built at the beginning of the twentieth century (1901) when the city was one of the most progressive and wealthy communities in the West, full of men whose fortunes were founded on copper and gold. Since they were largely educated bankers and engineers from the Boston area, they were likely to be Unitarian. Anxious to prove they were respectable church-goers, they built a solid stone church. At the time the church needed finishing, pledges lagged. So the minister offered moral support to the moguls being put on trial for some of their practices by showing up in court to sit beside them. They had their checkbooks with them. A unique feature of this church is a Tiffany window that is a memorial NOT to that minister, but to his much beloved wife, who was the founder of Helena’s first kindergartens and the hostess of an ecumenical leaders’ group -- priest, rabbi, pastors, no imam that I know of. (Eventually the Catholic church bought the synagogue, which is right behind the cathedral.)

In the Thirties the congregation dwindled and failed. The last remnant leased the building for a purely symbolic amount to the City of Helena in perpetuity with the proviso that it always be used for some valid and cultural civic purpose. It was converted to a library after its raked seating floor was leveled and the stage covered. In the urban renewal days decades later, the library was able to expand to a state of the art building on Last Chance Gulch which was converted to a mall. The destruction and rebuilding of Helena was now supervised by a group not in the least Unitarian. They did not read the contract concerning the old library and were inclined to sell it to a company looking for a classy building for a restaurant suitable for a capital city where it was necessary to wine and dine politicians.

Don Marble is the man who saved the First Unitarian Church from being converted to an eatery by pressing the enforcement of the lease. He was not living in Helena and he was not a Unitarian. Rather he was a Methodist pillar of the community of Chester, up on the “highline” where politicians dread to go, a model town full of cultural enlightenment. If I had to name an honest lawyer in Montana, I could have named Marble until he closed his office.

Now the stone building has become the Grand Street Theatre with the raked seats restored and the stage intact, a worthy part of the vigorous amateur theatre scene in Montana and a proud consequence of Unitarian foresight, buttressed by a Methodist with a sense of what is right and graceful.

When I was ordained in 1983, we asked to borrow the church back. The set onstage was “Death of a Saleman,” and the proscenium had no curtain, so I was given my vows in front of an old-fashioned kitchen and two unmade beds. I was proud. The attendees brought pillar candles for footlights and banners for the walls. No need for a cross. The bigshot ministers who came to do the ordination/installation wore their robes, red for Harvard, blue for Princeton, and standard black. It was world-making. We borrowed the theatre a few times more, but then the theatre’s board became nervous that we might try to claim the church back. They needn’t have worried. We couldn’t, we wouldn’t, and if we had tried it, I think Don Marble might have intervened to protect them.

As I’ve moved around the state over the last half-century, I’d run into Don Marble at cultural events in unexpected places, and sometimes embarrassed myself by not recognizing him. He wasn’t particularly tall or fat or bald or otherwise remarkable. But he was incredibly intelligent and just, which are internal qualities. He made a huge difference in the quality of Montana life.

From the Great Falls Tribune:

CHESTER -- Donald Marble, 72, of Chester, a former attorney and Liberty County commissioner who was active in numerous community and environmental organizations died of pancreatic cancer August 22 in Tucson, Arizona. The memorial service was held at the Chester United Methodist Church.

Donald Raymond Marble was born April 10, 1938, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the son of Jack and Mona Marble of Kalamazoo. He graduated from Richland (Michigan) High School in 1956, and received a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1963 from the University of Michigan.

During his unviersity years, Don was a summer employee of the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho and Montana, primarily working as a smokejumper. After college he was employed as an engineer for NASA in Mountain View, CA, and worked on landing gear for the moon mission.

Seeking a simpler, rural lifestyle, Don moved to Montana where he attended law school at the University of Montana School of Law, graduating in 1967. While in Missoula, Don met Harriet Pirkle, whom he married in June, 1965. Don’s legal career began in Havre, MT, with the Legal Services program, through which he provided legal aid to people iin Liberty, Blaine and Hill counties, including the Rocky Boy’s and Fort Belknap reservations. In 1970 Don joined the law first of Paul Bunn in Chester, MT. He practiced law in Chester until 2002, when he closed his private practice after being elected to the Liberty County Commission, on which he served for six years.

Community involvement was important to Don, and he served the state and his profession through a variety of board positions, including the Montana Committee for the Humanities, the Montana Commission on Practices and the Montana Board of Environmental Review. He was a longtime member of the Montana Wilderness Association for which he served a term as vice president. He also was actively engaged in environmental groups, including the Sweetgrass Hills Protective Association, Montana Environmental Information, Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, the Montana Audubon, and Friends of the Missouri Breaks Monument.

THE FOLLOWING SECTION WAS INCLUDED IN THE GLACIER REPORTER BUT NOT THE GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE:

Don used his legal expertise to assist in the many contexts in which he served. In their remembrances of Don, the Montana Environmental Information Center said: "Among the many important victories, Don represented the grassroots citizen groups Red Thunder and Island Mountain Protectors on Montana's Fort Belknap Reservation in their attempts to prevent the wholesale destruction of the Little Rocky Mountains by open-pit cyanide heap-leach gold mining. It was Don's legal work that resulted in the U.S. Department of the Interior's decision to halt the expansion of the Zortman and Landusky mines, a major factor in Pegasus Gold's bankruptcy and ultimate demise."

Don was instrumental in the building of both Prairie Homes and the Sweetgrass Lodge in Chester. He served several terms on the board of Liberty Arts Council. He helped bring public television to Liberty County. During the past few years, Don enjoyed doing the research and development necessary to bring wind power to the hi-line. Don represented the County Commission on the Liberty County Hospital Board, and he chaired the Liberty County Mental Health Board. For many years, he helped to lead the Adult Great Books Discussion Groups as a part of the community's adult education program. He was active in the Chester United Methodist Church and served faithfully as mission chair. He led the church's efforts to support El Pouvenir and traveled under this group's auspices to Nicaragua to help build sanitary facilities in remote areas there.

Don enjoyed being outdoors. His favorite pastimes included gardening, hiking, river floating, camping, cross-country skiing and the development and maintenance of a bluebird trail. Don was an avid reader. He could usually be found with reading material at hand, whether it was a newspaper, a favorite book -- ranging from spy and mystery novels to books about archeology or western/Native American history -- or one of the many magazines he loved. He also enjoyed writing poetry. Don loved quality literature and music. He and Harriet enjoyed their regular trips to Great Falls to hear performances by the Great Falls Symphony.

Don is survived by his wife Harriet; sons Justin (Vanessa) of Gaithersburg, Md., and Jay (Myrla) of Tucson, AZ; granddaughters Ivana and Alejandra’ brothers Charles of Munisine, MI; and Phillip of Galesburg, MI; and sister Judy George of Sturgis, MI. His parents preceded him in death.

Contributions are directed to Friends of the Missouri River Foundation, 224 W. Main St. Suite 202, Lewistown, MT 59457; or Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, PO Box 181, East Glacier. MT 59434.