"LIFE ON THE TRAIL", a chapter in "WHOOP-UP COUNTRY"

Living in the North American “flyover country” as it is patronizing called by the bi-coastals who think there is nothing on the prairies, is an exercise in ambiguity.  Neither here-nor-there, it has been seen that way since the first Easterners arrived on the steamboats and it persists today.  It was said, in the joking style that helped people tolerate both the limits and the tragedies of the settling by a people not suited or accustomed, that the water in the Missouri was too thick to drink and too thin to walk on.  One of the clergy, an eloquent sort of person who was in one of the circuit-riding occupations along with drummers, theatrical performers and gamblers, advised that a person arriving from more civilized climes, would be well-advised to have a good set of teeth, not for biting but for straining out foreign objects.

I have especially tender feelings for the chapter of “Whoop-Up Country” called “Life on the Trail”, since for three years I lived in a F-150 Ford cargo van and circulated among four congregations: Great Falls, Missoula, Bozeman, and Helena.   Circuit-riding.  It was a classic thing to do though the leaders in Boston never understood why I would want to.  For them all spaces “between” were empty.

Bull Train

Four-horse coaches, 18-mule teams (as opposed to 18-wheel modern trucks) and bull trains capable of moving enormous loads very slowly, were reinforced by railroads.  Not the trans-continental federally-subsidized railroads, but short stretches between thicker populations or valuable commodities, like the spur line that serves the grain elevator in Valier.  (Currently, these short stretches are being torn up as not commercially viable.  The movement that has accompanied this is the creation of fashionable long walking parks, trails of a sort.)  Since clergy and missionaries circulated among towns, they spent a lot of time on railroads eating cinders and withstanding the grinding of steel on steel and the banshee wails of the warning steam whistle.  One could not be confident of access to meals so the journal-keeping religious people noted that they carried “dates” in their “wallets.”  (This practice served nomad bedouin rather well.  I always carried breakfast bars in my circulating parsonage.)

Concord Coach

The Concord coach was considered a major advance, since the passengers were jostled around without being directly exposed to the weather until they had to get out to walk uphill or even push.  They were treacherous, tippy vehicles that required special skills, experience and reckless attitudes to get the mail through -- maybe not on time.  Coaches were identified with particular drivers, who sat up high in the dust or snow -- whatever.  In winter they really needed the buffalo hide coats and Scotch caps.  In summer it was Stetson, bandanna and vest that counted.  

Their tongues were their whips.  This is also a persisting skill.  When I was an animal control officer, early on when I was the only woman, a stock truck full of horses went over the bank between the Portland Airport and the Columbia River.  In the pre-dawn dark it was a horrible scene of massacre with the horses trapped inside because the truck fell on the door.  The Really Big Wrecker arrived and the driver set to work attaching chains and so on.  He spewed a steady stream of mule-skinner oaths until he realized I was female.  Then he was rendered mute, but that meant he couldn’t work, so I tactfully left to get coffee.  Whisky and coffee are necessities on any trail, in any trial.

A Democrat 

The “Whoop-Up Trail” was international since it was between Fort Benton, Montana, and Fort Macleod, Alberta.  Some of the the travelers were English adventurers, like two young men who assumed the whole world was like the one they knew at home.  They left in a “Democrat.”  They let their horses escape in the night, but after they had been advised to picket them, nearly strangled the pair by tethering them close enough together to entangle the ropes.  They couldn’t start a fire because they didn’t know about kindling.  They were forced to admit that an Oxford education had limited relevance.  But other sophisticated travelers felt that the trail-life folks were surprisingly sophisticated about politics and so on.  They were Civil War survivors who had been displaced from small town life and did not care to go back.

Same place from the Alberta Side

That's Chief Mountain.

On the Canadian side, newcomers were advised that British standards of behavior were necessary.  However, the first version of Fort Macleod was a “house built on sand.”  Not only that, it was on the river floodplain and regularly flooded.  After ten years of this it was moved to safer ground.  Macleod House, run by Harry “Kamoose” Taylor (1824 - 1901), was a prominent feature, much like the Kipp boarding house in Blackfoot (the town) on the Blackfeet reservation.  Various “house rules” supposedly posted by “Kamoose” included things like removing spurs and spiked boots when going to bed, sleeping double if the management said so, and forbidding assaults on the cook.   More clever, and evoking English tavern signs, there was posted out front a large silhouette of the back of a man’s head with the words:  “No Jawbone.”  It meant no credit, just cash. 

“Kamoose” means “wife-stealer” according to Sharp and others, but I’ve had no occasion to learn the word, so I’m not sure he’s right.  The story is that he fell in love with a tribal woman, offered to buy her, was refused, and simply ran off with her.  More certainly, “Kamouse” had been clergy but turned to whiskey trading, rather like the contemporary Montana priest, John Bauer, who owned “Miss Kitty’s” X-rated book store named for his cat.  It’s more a coffee shop now, but still offers the same kind of books.  John is gone so it is owned by his female former manager and quite accepted by the town.  People find their comforts where they can and only the foolish turn them away.

Fort Macleod

This is also the time period when Jerry Potts earned his reputation as a guide for travel and John Healy was feuding with anyone who differed with him or interfered with his shipping.  But the legends had not grown yet and visitors from more civilized places were unimpressed.  One Brit said Fort Macleod was “a wide, muddy lane, with a row of dirty, half-finished, wooden shanties flanking each side.”  This sort of scene is archetypal now, immortalized in a thousand movies.  

An ecologist told a story about a newcomer to the West who was enchanted by the purple mist of blooming spotted knapweed, a notoriously invasive weed that even goats think twice before eating.  The ecologist’s comment was that the first sight of a place will forever afterward be the marker for “normal” and seem like the way it “ought” to be.  The West has always and will always have a steady stream of newcomers who divide their opinions between their homelands and this broad landscape that seems more eternal than it is.  The result is often stupid and transient construction, or a sudden impulse to build without thinking about maintenance or adapting to the future.  There’s no choice but to live in the “now,” but to deny the past and ignore the future is to build a ghost town.

Mounties with Empire standards

At least in “flyover country” we’re not likely to drown when the oceans rise, but what are we going to do with all the displaced coastal citizens on the road?  That’s also a rising tide.  My laundromat locks its customer bathroom to keep out “road people” who wash their children and hair in the small sink.  But maybe “Kamoose” would build a proper wash house along the highway to accommodate all the people living in their cars on the trail.  It would be a comfort.

THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST MONTANA MINISTRY OF 1982-85

Meadville Lombard Theological School

When I was approaching graduation -- or at least departure -- from Meadville/Lombard Theological School in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, I had very little idea of what sort of church to look for.  All I knew was that I was desperate to get back to the West, preferably to Montana.  

My “home” minister in Portland, Oregon, Alan Deale had said to me two things that suddenly struck me hard.  One was that for ministers Unitarian Universalism is an urban religion because it needs population density to accumulate the critical mass necessary to support a building and a professional minister.  The other was that through the rest of my life as a minister, I would not be associating with other ministers but rather with the members of my congregation, with a little peripheral relationship to other non-UU church ministers.  I was about fed up with Chicago and I had learned to speak a language that lay people could not or did not want to hear.

Alan Deale and Mary Scriver

What he did not tell me, or I just didn’t hear, was that as much as I admired him and Peter Raible, the Seattle minister, I did not understand that their dedication was to the institution rather than to the ideal.  Also, the UU denomination has very much a “learned” ministry at that time bumping against a spiritual surge from the Sixties and Seventies.  It is open to the culture in which it exists and vulnerable to all the same dilemmas: race, sex, war, and money.  The “association” (rather than denomination) is an often uncomfortable assortment of various free-will congregations of different sizes, styles, expectations, and budgets.  Like all institutions, the association was relentless in its emphasis on membership and endowments because those were the indices of survival.  If they went too low, the “denomination” would gutter out.

Two “old hands,” even more experienced than Deale and Raible -- or maybe I should say masters of a different body of understanding -- loved the prairie as much as I did and set out to find a way to get me there.  One was Emil Gudmundson, an Icelandic Canadian, and the other was Russ Lockwood, a man of the American Mid- and SouthWest.  Both were ministerial “district execs” meaning that they oversaw regional events and connections.  Both were committed to growth in terms of small congregations.  

The Universalist denomination had been smaller, more rural, more Christian, than the academically anchored Unitarians.  When the 1961 merger between the Unitarians and Universalists happened, the more conservative and cautious Universalists managed to shelter some of their assets in secret paper instruments.  Russ Lockwood knew about this and saw me as a chance to use it.  Both men set about persuading the Montana fellowships, as ornery and independent as any, that having a minister was essential to their well-being and would magically cause growth.  A little conference was arranged in Great Falls where I was introduced like a prospective bride.

Munroe Husbands

Montana had six lay-led “fellowships,” which were a 1948 invention for places that did not have populations that would support a minister, a step up from the Church of the Larger Fellowship, a mail-order congregation, and also a necessity at  a time when there was a shortage of ministers. Munroe Husbands was a circuit-riding minister except that he didn’t set up loops.  Rather he played “Johnny Applechurch” all across the nation.  Of the hundreds of groups he started by providing a public lecture, some advice, and a box of materials, about half failed after a few years. 

Whitefish (Glacier) said they were not interested.  Neither was Billings.  Helena was, but despite having an actual church at the turn of the 19^th century, they were having trouble sticking together as a fellowship.  The two university towns, Bozeman and Missoula, thought it was a matter of conscience to do this extension effort but feared being drained of resources to serve the small weak groups.  Great Falls was the town I knew the best and they were the ones who knew of Bob Scriver, the charismatic sculptor to whom I’d been married in the Sixties.  Two Montana towns, Red Lodge and Butte, had once had churches that collapsed in the Depression and never recovered because their economic base was mining.

Grand Street Theatre, built as Helena Unitarian Church.

The four fellowships who agreed to the idea -- Bozeman, Missoula, Great Falls and Helena -- each pledged, but the bulk of the money came from the Universalist cache in the Midwest.  I might have been technically an employee of the UUA, though I was ordained by the Helena fellowship on the stage of the Grand Street Theatre that had once been the Unitarian Church.  When that congregation collapsed, the building was given to the City of Helena, leased for $1 a year, with the provision that it would always be used for civic improvement.  It’s first use was as the library.  When the new Lewis and Clark library was built, the building was nearly bought by a restaurant chain, but Don Marble, an alert and progressive lawyer with UU leanings, blocked the transaction.  It became the Grand Street Theatre and I was ordained on the set of “Death of a Salesman.”  

Russ Lockwood, Alan Deale, Mary Scriver, Marvin Shaw

In the days of the original church, the ministers had done a bit of mission work, always traveling by trains that criss-crossed the state, mostly to serve the mining industry.  My plan was to keep a pied a terre in Helena but to live in a van, more basic than an RV.  My salary was $12,000 and my expense money was $12,000 ANNUALLY.  No insurance, no retirement, no bennies.  The first vehicle was a pickup with a camper but no brakes.  The second was a Ford F150 cargo van that had been used for mining investigations so that the motor, which had run machinery, was much older than the rest of the vehicle.  It was subsidized by a member of the Helena congregation.  Antennas for radio transmissions had been removed from the side, leaving holes.  When the wind was just right, they played a pleasing chord.  Otherwise, I cobbled up a plywood box across the rear for a bed and a plywood box along one side for a desk.  I had a series of rough baskets for hymnals and other books, and one bag for clothes.

At Meadville I rarely saw Russ, who traveled the SW, but Emil came through now and then and since we had things to talk about that were not of interest to the usual Curtis Room lounge crowd, and since I was living in the big old Fleck House, which had no living room and where my upstairs bedroom would be suspect, we sat halfway up the stairs of Fleck House for long talks about which town might grow and how to make it happen.  I always wanted it to be Great Falls, closer to “home,” but Emil pitched for Billings.  We couldn’t quite figure out how to manage to get Lethbridge into the mix, though it was only a short distance into Canada, well within Blackfeet Country.  Either Russ or Emil told me a wonderful story of flying in a small airplane over the prairie along the border.  Each of us thought, “If only I were a pilot!”

We talked a lot about logistics, but very little about what the content ought to be.  As it turned out, some people thought it was a church for divorced people and free sex (that Aquarian influence) and others felt it should be purely scientific.  All agreed -- without admitting it -- that they thought a church should be a source of high status.  They were a little disappointed that I wasn't jazzier, more of a prize winner.

My contract was for three years.  If the fellowships could pay for the program to continue, there was no reason to stop as there was for Interim Ministers, who in those days were forbidden to stay more than one year.  By 1985 it was a moot point since I was exhausted.  At age 46 I went to Kirkland, WA, as an interim.  Older women had become the “adjunct faculty” of the UUMA, taking the small, short, underpaid jobs and moving often.  But what a glorious three years it was!

(I recommend an on-line story from the UU World.  http://www.uuworld.org/2002/06/feature3.html)