HABITAT

Animals are produced by habitat.  I don’t mean that mice are created by dirty old rags in the corner as once was thought, but that rags are such a nice little cuddle-down for mice that they slip in and use it, leaving their mouseberries and nibbling the cloth into bedding.  One way to get rid of mice, is to get rid of their habitat.

Last night at the town council meeting, the mayor’s wife expressed disapproval of her neighbor who feeds “feral” cats, creating a habitat for them.  (Cats, chickens and dust are the markers of degeneration to certain housekeepers.)  But it’s an interesting question to ask what habitat that Valier-dwelling cat-feeder is attracted to and why feeding cats is part of her life.  Is it comforting her somehow?  Is she remembering ranch life?  Does she miss children?  Does she simply enjoy watching them?

At the moment there is an adult cat in my house: Bunny.  She had four kittens, I edited it to two, she figured that out and since the trapdoor to the crawl space was open, moved the other two down between the floor joists where I had no way to get to them.  They emerged only a few days ago: one a little tuxedo-wearing fellow and the other the image of Bunny, gray with gold smudges.  They’re doing pretty well, considering that they were raised in the dark, which means they do a lot of staring.

In the garage is the GrannyMamaCat, a white-based cat with calico patches, thus called “Patches.”  She’s been feral along this street for years and I’ve told the story of her descendants.  Since I also “edit” her kittens, she gives birth in some secret place away from here (five this time) and then was raising them undetected in the rosebush border until a storm drenched and chilled them.  Then she moved them into the garage, which is good because she is so fierce that she keeps all other cats out.

I confess that I feed these two sets of cats, but I actively run others off the premises.  Ancient Caspar, who lives across the street, comes tottering over on hot days to sleep in the “cat jungle.”  That’s real habitat, a tangle of tall growth of honeysuckle, suckers from the dead plum tree, grass, and cottonwood self-planting.  This cottonwood and the poplars want this yard to be a forest.  They attack my house as an intruder.  I had intended to cut the jungle down to the ground this summer.

Two tomcats show up seasonally:  the “bull” tomcat who is stocky, white with black ears and tail, and an all black cat.  Both appear to be owned.  The “dark” calico and her kittens (now half-grown) are not welcome but occupy (off and on) the back workshop/shed.  My goal for this summer was to empty and harden that structure, but my neighbors have occupied so much space that I haven’t felt comfortable even being in the yard.  

I’m conflicted about that workshop because it was trucked down from Swift Dam, the 1965 rebuild.  I also have the watchman’s shack.  They’re not really historic — maybe just nostalgic, possibly only this side of debris.  They were since occupied by a ceramic kiln workshop and a gunsmith workbench.  There are no foundations.  The floors are plywood.  The roofs — minimal from the beginning — leak and some of it has fallen through.  

At one time it was a bat roost, but Squibbie killed them all.  I stash junk there, which is handy but creates excellent cat habitat.  I find evidence of people smoking or huffing — I assume kids.  It would be interesting to see whether I could sell the building either in situ or to be moved.

Neighbors are an important part of habitat.  I am not a good neighbor.  All I do is sit and write all day.  I do NOT chitchat, which is very bad form here.  On the other hand, I don’t keep a barking dog and I haven’t put up a high bad-neighbor fence, which was one of my original neighbor’s fears.  

This post is NOT about how to get rid of feral cats.  It is about how to get rid of the habitat of feral cats, which includes people who like and feed them.  One dynamic is that aging people who can’t afford maintenance will let disintegration create access to shelter, however minimal.  Cats are good burrowers, as good as foxes.  Another is human lonesomeness and powerlessness: one can at least be useful to stray cats.   But people who don’t like cats, esp. in numbers, will easily transfer their resentment to the person who feeds cats — who then feels persecuted, unjustly stigmatized — which gives rise to resentment and even stronger identification with the cats.  

Often the person who objects to cats is the more recent occupant while the (possibly elderly) neighbor has been there a long time, so that the feeling of being invaded collides with the expectations of the newcomer.  A newer dynamic is a young woman with a baby but no husband, who is herself dependent on charity.

It is a recurrent problem that much of the thought about such problems as cats (and a lot of others involving animals) is done by urban apartment dwellers with a minimum of owned and constantly vet-monitored cats.  Some of the philosophers of the feline are so abstract that they are hardly intelligible.  Abused or simply damaged cats and esp. cute kittens saved from fires or crashed cars, are great money-raising issues for the major humane societies.  “Send five dollars or I’ll let this kitten die.”  

People in rural environments can only wish they had five dollars for every dead kitten they’ve seen.  After a harsh winter I’ve found a “flat cat” (kitten-sized) — little more than fluff and few bones — in my back shed.  When I pulled all the bedding out of the dog house I put out there to add a little shelter, the husk of a kitten was under it all, hollowed by insects.  Several have been killed by the fenced dogs across the alley — the kittens were trespassing.  Mostly, kittens have an impulse to leave when they approach adulthood, and they do.  The town owl occasionally swipes one.  They say the coyotes that occasionally trot down the night streets will nail cats, but no bears care anything about cats.

Habitat is a complex of society, objects, satellite animals, interstitial insects and rodents, and things like weather or economics.  Habitat is a holon, wheels within wheels that add up to grinding down or lifting up, making space or blocking out.  Unless one considers the whole process, complex as that might be, the individual examples just keep coming back, whether they are unruly kids, old ladies who feed cats, or buildings that are falling down. 

Some of us moved here thinking this was a tolerant, low-cost, semi-rural village where we could live quietly.  In the last decade we’ve been joined by people who want a kind of suburbia without any obligation to serve the town infrastructure of volunteers or to pay for services.  They're often arrogant and demanding in a way that people out West are not. 

Coming next in the campaign is to get rid of abandoned cars, defined as cars that don’t run.  Good luck with that.  It’s sort of the older male version of feeding cats.

SID GUSTAFSON, WRITER

https://scriggler.com/SharePost/Story?cash=3a16552853c5421a7d5a0460d4501c32

Sid Gustafton, who is from the high-achieving family of Rib Gustafson, is known around here as a veterinarian like his father and brother, except that he has a specialty practice in race horses.  He teaches equine behavior, and posts on Twitter.  In addition, he writes both nonfiction and novels, often based on truth, like “Swift Dam,” just published.  The link above is to a website called “Scriggler” where you can read his story called “Smallpox.”  He often expands such stories into whole novels.  Lately he has been recording short stories on Sound Cloud, something I would like to do but never get around to actually doing.  

“Swift Dam” is about the 1964 catastrophic dam collapse on Birch Creek and the lethal consequences, changing lives and the land right up until now.  I was here at the time.

The year 1914 is the year Bob Scriver was born, and those who knew him will realize that he is sort of the inspiration for the character called Stuf.  Sid knew him mostly by stopping as a kid with his father at the Scriver Studio and taxidermy shop in the Sixties.  Raised on the Blackfeet reservation and often spending the summer cowboying with someone like Billy Big Springs Sr., Sid has more ties to the rez land and families than Jimmy Welsh. Jr. did, though no one would dare say so.  Every spring Sid goes up to the grave of James Willard Schultz, which is near the Gustafson ranch on Two Medicine, and does a little maintenance.  Schultz was a white man who married a Native American and longed to be NA.  His versions of their lives were sometimes a bit more dramatic than real, which is not an advantage in this prudish just-the-facts culture.

Sid is more romantic than I am but quite truthful once you allow for that.  “His” bears do things that “my” bears would not.  He’s inclined to mysticism and always searching for true love, but very much anchored in practical how-to.  Bob Scriver would have loved these stories.  It’s good to be near Sid some of the year and via the Internet.

www.sidgustafson.com   More books, photos, ideas.

SNOWPACK AND BEAVERS

Rocky Mountain cirque, cut by a glacier now gone.

This has been an easy open winter — so far — which is what was predicted.  But we watch the mountains nervously to see how white with snow they are.  And we squint at the news when they show us that the glaciers are disappearing.  We already knew that Glacier National Park was not named for its many glaciers, but for the great scoop of geology that was formed by glaciers.  Repeated glaciers, putting down layers carried from wherever they started, inconsiderately putting the rocky sources on top of the fertile soils.

Valier sits alongside -- and because of -- what’s now named “The Pondera Canal Company” which was founded when Swift Dam was built on reservation land owned by Major Steele and his Blackfeet wife, and partly funded with federal money but never legitimated legally.  In 1964 the dam collapsed and killed over thirty people.  I was here then.  Sid Gustafson was a kid or maybe not born yet, but this event was so local and deep that it takes someone from here to get it right and he’s from here. 

Out in April, pre-order now.

Now owned by the Pondera Canal Company, and Cargill, a worldwide grain business, this irrigation system supports Valier and other villages at the center of a wheel of ranches, strip-farms using high levels of oil-derived chemicals, a huge monoculture.  The federal government is demanding the realignment of water allocation first defined mostly by habit.  Since the Blackfeet are at the headwaters, they have the first legal claim, which they have not used over the years.  Many plans have been laid and even some canals dug, but everything always dwindles off to nothing on that side of Birch Creek, which is the southern boundary.  On the south side, off the rez, ranchers press hard to get as much water as they can.  Water is profit.  If the federal government forces reallocation, some ranches will fail.

We all look to the mountains.  That’s where the water begins.  This east slope country is in the center of two great atmospheric forces, sky forces.  One is the wind that comes from the West, laden with ocean water.  It must pass over several mountain ranges, the last and most serious being the Rockies.  Water is heavy.  The air drops it as rain or snow, until it is light enough to pass.  That's where trees grow tall. 

Chinook arch

We look up at the mountains and see a storm shelf — in winter a snow shelf — of clouds forming a kind of higher, rounder range behind the Rockies.  If there are clouds on the east side, they are pushed back in a great curve of blue called the Chinook Arch.  It means that there is wind up high, pushed by the jet stream from the West, and things will warm up fast.  Go to bed with feet of snow under the window, wake up with water traveling fast over bare ground.  And the Rockies turn dark blue.  The snow pack sinks.  The water master at the Canal Company rethinks how much water he should impound behind Swift Dam or in Lake Francis, a secondary impoundment.

On a little stream that runs through Heart Butte, the beavers in their round house rouse and consider that there is more water running.  They rush to raid the willow brush so as to poke more sticks into their dam.  Not all of them manage to evade the traps set by the local Blackfeet in hopes of making a little money for Easter bonnets for their daughters.  Beavers are too busy to worry about it — they’re not thinkers.  They DO and what they do is impound water.

A beaver lodge

The trouble with global warming is that it throws off timing that has been calibrated by millennia of weeding out whatever doesn’t work.  That goes for water, vegetation, crops, and snowpack.  If the weather is already warm or too warm too early, the snow pack can’t melt slowly over the summer, keeping the trout as chilly as they like to be.  The water is gone by late summer when the cottonwoods need to suck ground water. 

The second wind stream comes down from the Arctic.  It’s not so violent as the 100 mph Chinooks and it is not katabatic because it is not decompressing when descending a mountain -- that's what creates the famous hot katabatic winds.  There are only single volcanic buttes to the north.  So the air comes cold and hard, more of a bulge than a wind, an erratic pattern in arctic air pressure, possibly caused by melting polar cap.  If cold air meets wet west coast air, which it often does over this place, we get snow.  If the arctic air is not so cold, we get rain.  

Even Texas gets the shivers.

Rain washes away snowpack.  Nothing stores the water then — except beavers.  A zillion busy beavers equals one big heavy snow year.  Recently it has been discovered that when smallpox killed so many indigenous people, the North American weather was changed.  The people had set fires, cut wood, even planted crops.  Without them, the vegetation started storing carbon.  The same thing happened in Europe when the Black Plague wiped out the majority of the people.  On the other hand, one vigorous volcano spewing filtering dust and rising to float in the atmosphere was able to make the weather so cold that no crops grew that year and people starved.  It’s not radioactivity that makes the atomic bomb so dangerous, nor even the ghastly immediate effects of the explosion — it’s the ability to throw so much dust into the air.

Kids are like beavers — they are always busy.  If a beaver doesn’t gnaw all the time, its teeth will grow and grow until the beaver can’t eat.  They need to gnaw.  The same with kids.  They need to think all the time and ideas are their willow banks, the raw material for the impoundment of knowledge. 

Tony Hartshorn with kids

This message from Tony Hartshorn arrived via email:  “I’m a soils scientist interesting in applying for federal funding to co-develop (with folks at the Blackfeet Community College) educational materials that might reignite interest in Blackfeet soils, patterned at some level along the lines of Les Carpenter's "Natural history of the Blackfeet Reservation" or the NASA astronomy tutorial "Blackfeet Skies" that Leo Bird helped with.  I've tracked down this 1969 soils map, discovered that some libraries will not share maps of the reservation (or apparently share scans of those maps), and most recently learned that CH2M Hill ran backhoes all over the reservation about 10 years ago to measure soil water-holding capacity (though those results are somehow not public).  This effort loosely aligns with ongoing ideas to lead a "Drought planning workshop" in Browning close to the end of March; that effort is mostly being led by Lea Whitford.  I am eager to figure out a way to harness soil stories for greater student engagement.”

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.  Tony said there were 150 attendees at the meeting !!  He’s on the faculty at Montana State University in Bozeman if you want to find him.

BEGINNING A TIME-LINE FOR VALIER, MONTANA

Time has moved on.

I think I will begin this project, which will take a long time, by going forward in plain sight as I have done with the Blackfeet materials.  As an ordering mechanism, I’ll include as many links as I come across.  Some materials will make people uncomfortable.  Others are simply explanatory or interesting, with a few surprises.  If there is misinterpretation I take responsibility and will make corrections as far as possible.

Reroofing the old Belgian church

“Williams” is a community that existed only as an enclave for the Belgian immigrants when they first arrived and now marks the location of their Belgian language church, just below "Belgian Hill" where an array of antennas and relays are lined up.  The history of Belgium comes into the story in several ways.  It is a plural composite nation unified by language, which made a Belgian language Catholic church very important.  But as the children grew up speaking English (or American, actually) the need for the church and the community lessened to the point of making Williams a ghost town.  But the popularity of genealogical research has brought memories of Williams to the surface.  And the graveyard is still a home ground.

Interior

The other more “colorful” nearby temporary community was Robaire on Birch Creek.  It was created when the supervision of the Blackfeet Reservation was allotted to the Methodist denomination as a corrective against corruption.   The Jesuits had been active for a long time and claimed most loyalties. The new Methodist agent, connected to the anti-Papist sentiments that clung until JFK was elected president, banned the Catholics.  Methodists are “dry” -- forbidding alcohol -- so that was also a new policy.  Robaire was the response of the ousted, just across Birch Creek from the rez jurisdiction, near the present route of Highway 89.  They say the bar was next to the new little Catholic chapel.  Anyway, Birch Creek claimed the remnants of Robaire in the 1964 flood.

Gene Curry

The flood also overwhelmed Swift Dam, killing dozens of Blackfeet when a wall of water swept down Birch Creek.  The Carey Act came back into the news recently when the Curry family sued over the proper entitlement to irrigation water.  The government’s role in creating and defending land and water entitlement-based sources of wealth is now a lively source of income for lawyers.  Again the stream itself plays its part: diminished snow pack (whatever the cause) means less water for the new negotiations over water rights.  This time the Blackfeet are active negotiators.

VALIER TIME LINE (Just beginning to develop)

1910 is the end of the Edwardian Era --King Edward VII (Queen Victoria’s son and heir) died that year.  (So did William James, and Florence Nightingale.)  Some people say that the 19th century didn’t end until the beginning of WWI.  Science and inventions were just becoming “industrial.”  Empires were weakening.  Natural resources were in major demand.  The end of the War Between the States had major consequences across America.

Charles Conrad's home in Kalispell

1886  W.G. Conrad and bro Charles of Kalispell took up eleven sections of land but didn’t develop them until 1889 when they left Fort Benton.  Their cowboy employees were guided to “homestead” and then sell their “proved up” land to the Conrads.  

Major Steele, then the Indian agent and married to a Blackfeet woman, sold their ranch to the Conrads.  It was a narrow place, the natural locus of Swift Dam.

1894  The Carey Irrigation Land Act, was a way to acquire land by irrigating.  Others did this as well.  The following is reblogged from an Idaho history blog called “Revue Guru” that traces out a situation that was repeated in Montana.  Link to the blog is at the end of the quoted post below.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 18, 2015

Desert Land (Carey) Act Signed to Encourage Irrigation in the West

On August 18, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed the Desert Land Act of 1894, better known as the Carey Act. Sponsored by Wyoming Senator Joseph M. Carey, the Act was meant to improve the success rate for the settlement of the public lands. The law specifically addressed the millions upon millions of acres in the western states that required irrigation for productive farming – the so-called “arid lands.”

Individuals and irrigation cooperatives had already exploited most of the land that could be watered with smaller systems of canals and impoundments. Many larger projects funded by farmer cooperatives or hopeful investment firms had failed, and discouraged further risk-taking on that scale.

The Act authorized the Federal Land Office to transfer up to a million acres of arid public lands to individual states that established approved reclamation programs. States would cover expenses by charging fees and selling the land at nominal prices, with the real incentive being the expected increase in tax revenue.

Acceptable state programs would be able to certify acreage as meeting the requirements of the Act, inspect and approve irrigation projects executed by private investment firms, and oversee the ultimate transfer of properly-irrigated 160-acre plots to individual settlers.

Development companies proposed, designed, and built suitable irrigation projects. They profited by selling water to the settlers, at rates determined in negotiations with the state reclamation office. The development company did not “own” the land itself – technically. However, these firms could place liens on the land and the associated water rights to protect their capital investments … so the effect was basically the same.

Settlers usually paid a flat entry fee ($1 in Idaho) and an almost trivial cost per acre. Owners had to then dig a feeder ditch to connect with the nearest main canal. Once water became available, they followed a schedule for bringing a set minimum of their holdings into cultivation. In three years, if they met all criteria – including construction of a “habitable dwelling” on the property – they received title to the land.

Of course, developers seldom waited out the years it might take before cumulative water sales covered their large initial investments. Once settlers held much of the land, an operating canal company or joint water district bought the system and the collective water rights from the developer. 

Milner Dam, 1905.  One of the first Carey Act projects in Idaho.

The Idaho legislature quickly established the position of State Engineer and tried to assemble the administrative infrastructure to support Carey Act projects. A few years passed before the state refined the process, but then interest picked up substantially. Thus, in the first ten years after passage of the Act, Idaho developers started just 10 or 11 projects. Then, in 1905-1907, they added 14 new ones.

The emergence of so many new projects led Congress to add another million acres to Idaho’s allotment in May 1908. Two days after that authorization, they added yet another millions acres, while also increasing Wyoming’s allotment by a million.

With that much land available, development exploded: In 1908 through 1910, developers initiated forty new Carey Act project in Idaho. No other state approaches Idaho in the exploitation of the Carey Act and later related legislation. By one reckoning, 60% of all U.S. acreage irrigated by Carey Act projects is in Idaho.

                                                                                                                                      

References: [French], [Hawley]

“Canals & Irrigation,” Digital Atlas of Idaho, Idaho State University.

The Cary Act in Idaho, Idaho State Historical Society (2004).

“Carey Act of of August 18, 1894 (28 Stat. 422),” Code of Federal Regulations, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. (2012).

Posted by Revue Guru    https://www.blogger.com/profile/10925903211294652386

190?  M.S. Darling, engineer, constructed a ditch system of 50 miles that diverted both Birch and Dupuyer Creeks. Conrad brothers also organized the Pondera Canal Company 

1907  2 feet of snow with crust that would support a horse.  When broken through, this crust became a knife that cut their legs.  This probably prompted the end of cattle ranching on open range.  Even cutting hay had not prevented major losses.

1908  Cargill bought the land, livestock and water rights of Conrads.  Carey Land Act Irrigation project.  They laid out plans for town of 3,000 next to Lake Francis.

1909  Substantial 3 story stone and brick hotel built

1909  Harry P. Harrington’s jewelry store opened.

1909   Dr. G.D. Powell came as the second doc and stayed until his death in Nov.1943.  No resident doc after that.

1910-11 First water system

1912   First electricity -- a steam generator plant.

           Montana power replaced them.

1912   Dr. G.F. Tidyman was the third doctor and retired in the late twenties.

From  http://boards.ancestry.com/thread.aspx?mv=flat&m=179&p=localities.northam.usa.states.montana.counties.pondera

2-6-1913  Monsignor Victor Day, a native Belgian priest, brought over 80 in 13 families from Belgium and Holland.  Left Antwerp on the S.S. Vanderland.

Later in 1913 Goemare Christiaens, with the help of Father Day, went back to Belgium and brought a second group including Pharila Sabbe whom he married and Peter Habets family, Pharila’s birth family.

Goemare Christiaens says,  “I took part in this colony and have now returned to Belgium with the aim of getting more settlers together, in order to enlarge the existing colony. This colony went to Montana under the guidance of Monsignor Victor de Brabandere of Desselghem, now living in Helena, capitol of Montana. The colony consists of the following families: 

The three families Christiaens originated in Waereghem 

The family Jules Sabbe from Waereghem

The family Henri Deketele from Nazareth

The family Cyrille Ghekiere from Beveren (Leie)

The family P. Leclerq , Bachte (0. Vl.)

The family H. Vandoorne, from Denterghem

The family C. Vandebulcke-Nollet from Noordschote

The family Th. Beelaert from Meulebeke

Emile Verstraete from Meulebeke

Cyrille Decramer from Langemarck

Maurice Tack from Caeneghem

Ch. Vanderjeught from Dendemonde (O.Vl.)

Rene Vandepopuliere from Moen

Remi Nollet from Noordechote 

The families Habets, Jochems, Houbens, Raemaeker, originating in Holland.

1913  https://diosav.org/sites/all/files/archives/A%2007-24-14%20CROSS%2007.pdf

Newspaper article.

QUOTE:"When Sister M. Lillian Quadrella, RSM, donated a small book that originated in the Catholic Diocese of Helena, Montana to the Archives of the Diocese of Savannah, there was – as often happens – some mystery connected with it. Dubbed “First Communion Catechism”, the book was adapted for the Helena Diocese by Victor Day, modestly identified as “A Priest of the Diocese of Helena”. Written for the benefit of Sisters who’d teach from it, the book complied with a paper pre- sented at the 8th Annual Institute of the Catholic Educational Association in 1913. Comprised of 35 questions and answers culled from the Baltimore Catechism, the book bore the imprimatur of Bishop John Patrick Carroll and a 1917 copyright. "

Monsignor Victor Day in action

A TOWN MEETING IN DEADWOOD -- er, VALIER.

The mini-Bakken boom around here has changed the dynamics of Valier, adding itinerant oilfield labor to the demographics.  Once Swift Dam and the canal construction that is the heart of the town's economy had been completed in 1910, the previous boom dynamic of male gypsy labor moved on to other territory.  Cut Bank became the saloon town and petit professionals like school teachers did their relaxing in more upscale emporiums in Valier, places more like restaurants.  Froggies, which had been closed down, reopened as a pizza parlor with beer.  Since then, it has become more of a dive, though the parking lot fistfights have been kept to a minimum.

In fact, Froggies, its growing clientele, and the general weakness of the town council as they struggle with the fraying of infrastructure built a century ago and a constant stream of imposed requirements from the state, has meant that the malcontents and the mutineers have solidified into a kind of alternative political hub, though they have no background or information that is current.  Froggies is their headquarters.

This came to a head last night in a council meeting during which the Froggies crowd expressed huge outrage at the lack of respect for their fireworks event on the Fourth.  On the one hand the owner actually wept over the grievous insult of a town council member, gentle and quiet Dave Widhalm, coming into the bar and asking whether they had remembered to get insurance for the fireworks in a year so dry that in many places fireworks were flatly forbidden.  The indignation focused on Dave asking these questions in front of his clientele.  Also, this man felt that the posting of the Valier regulations for fireworks was an assault on his dignity.  He had a handful of notes detailing these failures of respect.  After a half-hour of being harangued, Dave humbly apologized.  I didn’t see why, though it was a generous thing to do.

In addition, the Froggie owner spoke out about the constant fury from people who want to do things that are blocked by city rules.  This news must be conveyed by city employees who are personally blamed.  

Then there was a diatribe over the failure to properly respect and support the older man who has volunteered to run the campground, so full on the Fourth this year that four spaces were double-camped.  He and his friends prepared the camp before the fireworks and then cleaned up afterwards -- all for no pay.  Among the other indignities, he has to go around to the camps to collect the fees because the town has not provided registration boxes the way the national parks do it.  

Valier fish cleaning station

One wonders at the enormous popularity of the campground this year.  This is the first year there has been a full-time resident camp tender.   One of the more peculiar complaints about the campground was that the very bright lights by the fish-cleaning station and the wash house should be turned off at night.  They were installed to deter persistent vandalism.

The campground (and the lake) is owned by the Pondera Canal Company and the head of THEIR board gave permission for the fireworks.  Again, rather strangely, no one seems to have consulted the fire department, though it’s only volunteer.  The Pondera Canal Company is a sort of “third government” of the town, but very quiet in most circumstances.  It is the whole reason for the town’s economic existence -- NOT tourists, nor fishing nor even ranches.  Froggie claims that the fireworks display was not advertising for his bar but rather a benefit event for the library (the most vibrant and irreproachable institution in town) and the VADC which springs into being whenever the ladies of the town want to undertake some improvements of a cosmetic nature. 

In fact, two ladies were there to propose more grant applications to improve the looks of the town, because surely money would follow if only the weeds were gone.  Of course, they propose to write the grants, as they have done before.  (The town can barely get the old ones paid off since they are usually partial funding.)  Many of the complaints by the Froggie crowd are demands for repairs to streets and so on that simply can’t be afforded without going into even more serious town debt which must be repaid by property taxes.  Maybe a third of the town is “owned” by Pondera County (the county -- not the Canal Company) because of unpaid taxes.  The county does not pay itself taxes.

Valier grain elevator

This is a collapsing town.  The grain elevator is old-fashioned and there is talk of abandoning it, esp. since the railroad spur may be closed down.  One grocery store is left and a proposition to sell it to someone younger has broken down.  The cafe has been sold to people who don’t have the vision of the previous owners.  The engine rebuilder of great talent is seriously ill.  The bank provides less and less service.  The owner of the Medicine River Trading Post is too ill to open.  One large and prosperous family, reaching critical mass, has bought the only service station (the other one closed) and the motel.  The car dealer is gone.  The other major business in town, a construction company, has an adjunct office in Kalispell and the company wives would rather live over there where there are many amenities.

Valier is less than a hundred miles from the Canadian border, next to the Blackfeet reservation, and on dealing terms with a half-dozen Hutterite colonies.  Our population is divvied up into compartments.  The whole situation is ideal for people who like to evade the law without attracting attention.

Lethbridge, pop 83,000, was originally Fort Whoop-Up, based on the whiskey trade (the Whoop-Up trail went past here), and after that a coal mining town.  It has always been a sin city with a veneer of upper class culture: universities, art galleries, and so on.  It is 131 miles from Valier.   Apart from the many 18-wheel haulers,  traffic up I-15 is fast, sporty cars with Canadian plates.  Great Falls’ population is not quite 60,000 with the same bourgeois cultural features (museums, universities, orchestra) but also Malmstrom Air Force Base.  It is 86 miles away.

Lethbridge, Alberta

When the cultured ladies who want to propose grant applications think about small towns, they do not think of the larger context or the opportunities for evading the law.  They do not think about the world wheat economy or the international corporations who own it.  They do not dream that a new water agreement with the Blackfeet tribe might very well cause ranches to fail, if the lack of snow pack in winter doesn’t end irrigation first.  They haven’t penciled on the back of napkin how many major construction projects on the northern prairie remain on the federal agenda, which have been what sustained the company.  Nor are they aware of how federal funds are steadily dwindling.

Their thinking is all on nice domestic terms, which is how they don’t notice the drug scene.  They drive up government costs simply by bustling around imposing surveys on people who never fill them out.  It’s not a glass wall that seals them off from the handsome, wolfish, money-making men or makes them the tools of the steak-eating, red-faced, heart-attack bait who hold office and run businesses.  It is a mirror.  But this has always been America’s problem.

I think that I will honor my grandmother, a staunch Women's Christian Temperance Union member in her prairie homestead years, by putting a referendum on the ballot this fall to make Valier a "dry" town.  Let the soreheads drink in Cut Bank.

LIQUID ASSETS ON THE REZ

Harry Barnes

Harry Barnes, the Blackfeet Tribal Business Chairman, is a good storyteller.  In his January 28 message to the People he tells two pretty good ones.  The first one jokes that there must be some pretty good sales genes in the Blackfeet, since it seems that over the years just about every leader has sold the tribal water rights -- at least according to the rumors.  In truth selling water is a long and complex process and is only final when everyone in the tribe has made an individual vote.  Not yet.  Not yet.

But as with many sales, timing is important.  Sell too soon and profit is not maximized.  Sell too late and they’ll just take it.  Read your history.  BIA bats last.

His other tale was even funnier.  He claims to have had a brainstorm after seeing the calendars featuring hunky guys with their shirts off -- a calendar featuring the tribal council.  (I assume female members will be strategically holding great big bouquets of flowers.)  He even claims he had 100,000 calendars printed up but has only sold one -- to himself.  His wife made him hang it in the barn.  Maybe the cows refuse to look at it.

Joe McKay’s message is not funny at all, except in the sense of “funny business”.  This is where his law school education pays off, but the reader almost needs a degree of his own in order to read this complexity.  There are two categories of complex matters, overlapping:  one is the paperwork that corporations have long learned how to write so as to embroider loopholes and obscure facts, reducing contracts to little more than empty paper bags -- and you know who is intended to end up holding it.  Nothing inside but a bill, a few beans, and a lot of debris on the landscape.

What oil producers want is complex time-staged percentages of profit shares depending on the yield of the well.  This comes down to sleight-of-hand so that profits simply disappear into bookkeeping.  In the meantime, the value of oil and gas are sinking rapidly.  The day of high profit from oil may be gone, while the value of water goes up daily.

The other special knowledge is about the practice of drilling for oil, including the controversial fracking, which shatters deep rock, injects it with a great deal of contaminated water, and spills out the excess onto the land.  A minimum of 600,000 water is needed.  480,000 gallons stays in the ground -- possibly in the well aquifers for drinking water -- and 120,000 just goes out on the dirt.  It cannot be made safe for people, animals or even plants (saline) so the idea is to put it in lagoons to evaporate into powder as our native alkali does.  Things move around: the wind, seepage, and now we hear more and more evidence about earthquakes triggered by fracking.  Maybe you’re old enough to remember what improvements to the snowshed along the railroad did to the ranch well just over the hill.

Andrew Nikiforuk

It looks like the sweet spot created by fracking is turning sour.  This is a quote from an article by Andrew Nikiforuk, a writer in Alberta:  “Hydraulic fracturing, a technology used to crack open difficult oil and gas formations, appears to have set off a swarm of earthquakes near Fox Creek, Alberta, including a record-breaking tremor with a felt magnitude of 4.4 last week.  That would likely make it the largest felt earthquake ever caused by fracking, a development that experts swore couldn't happen a few years ago.”   Below is a link the article in case you want to read more.  The geology of Alberta is similar to that in northern Montana.  In fact, “Fox Creek” is probably at the northern limit of the old Blackfeet range.

http://thetyee.ca/News/2015/01/29/Alberta-Fracking-Earthquake/?utm_source=editor-tweet&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=290115

On the first August night I stepped off the Great Northern and was driven down to Browning by Jimmy Fisher, engineer for School District #9, the first thing he did in my teeny apartment was to run a bathtub of water while he carried in my trunk and whisky boxes of books.  This was because a new waterline to Browning had just been installed and it had a tendency to airlock, because instead of running in an engineer-measured slant from up by Parsons, the crew found it easier to just dig the ditch for the pipe five feet deep, uphill and down dale.  We’ve come a long way since then.  

Browning, MT

We’ve come somewhat farther than the Army officer who picked out the location of Browning, styling Government Square after a cavalry parade ground.  He was impressed by the beautiful flowers blooming everywhere the first time he visited.  (Must’ve been June.)  Ironically, the town is on a swale which is currently drained through a web of underground pipes.  When they are overwhelmed or blocked, basements and even streets fill up with water.  Yet, ironically, there is less potable water in the Willow Creek drainage than almost any other stream drainage on the rez.

In the Sixties, a time when most people were afraid to even mention the Baker Massacre 1869 (not everyone calls it that), or the Starvation Winter 1883, or the Dawes Act 1887, the national political scene was finally demanding to bring truth to light.  It was a Centennial year for very bad things almost every year, with the 1964 flood as a real-time centerpiece.  Now we’ve passed even the fifty year anniversary of that Flood.  In 1864 Montana became a territory.  In 1889 it became a state.  The first governor fell overboard from a ship in Fort Benton and disappeared.  Things have been a little rocky ever since.

Talbot Jennings, screenwriter

In the Territorial Centennial year 1964 there was supposed to be a pageant in Depot Coulee, written by Talbot and Betsy Jennings, East Glacier screenwriters with Hollywood credits.  There was supposed to be a dance in costume on the parking lot at Teeples, which was then the only Teeples (It's a chain now.) and a major advance from the smaller version a few blocks away.  All that was cancelled.  North American Indian Days was almost cancelled, but it was decided that coming together was the way to heal.

1885, the year of the formal establishment of the reservation, was also the year the Winters law setting Indian water rights took effect.  There was no Centennial celebration in 1985 and consciousness about the existence of the law was nil.  It was vague, saying that Blackfeet were entitled to all the water they needed to maintain their lives.  Of course, no one thought that meant more than watering horses and trapping beaver.  The 19^th century assumption was that Indians were defined by their culture but that cultures did not evolve.  They thought being born Indian meant being born craving buffalo meat.  They had no mental picture of wheeled irrigation machinery watering acres of alfalfa.

Major Steele, Indian Agent

At least not until the Conrad brothers, working through Major Steele and everyone’s favorite Napi-figure, Joe Kipp, figured out how to build Swift Dam on Major Steele’s wife’s allotment.  Then it was just a matter of collaborating with the Catholic church to bring in a village of Belgian farmers en masse.  History is not all massacres, at least not the bloody kind.  Some revolutions are quiet.