EAST SLOPE: A REFUGE FOR WRITERS

The change in elevation on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains creates an “ecotone,” which is an area that is a transition between one ecology and another. In that case the shift is between the peaks with their subtly tinted parfaited sediments and the flatlands where the the braided path of the Old North Trail passed through the grass, leaving still detectable marks. At the end of the millennia-ago time of the glaciers that came down from the north and also from the mountains, crashing torrents of melt-water carved valleys across the foothills, each with a persisting stream still wandering through its flood plain. These near-canyons provided refuges for people and other animals just as the counterpoint line of igneous peaks running to the east had risen above the ice along the east-west line that became the Canadian border. Plants elsewhere destroyed by ice still grow on the tops of the Sweetgrass Hills.

Among the refugees in the east slope valleys were writers and historians, including the famous colony that included Joseph Kinsey Howard, author of the two landmark books “Montana, High, Wide and Handsome” and “Strange Empire”; the family of Dr. Frederick Schemm, who wrote about a revolutionary treatment he developed for edema; his wife, Mildred Walker, who wrote a series of best-selling novels including the classic “Winter Wheat"; their daughter Ripley Schemm Hugo, a poet married to the poet and professor Richard Hugo; and A.B. Guthrie Jr. famous for writing, among many others, “The Big Sky.” Dan Cushman, author of “The Great North Trail” and the notorious “Stay Away, Joe,” was part of the group.

The older generation is gone but Ripley Schemm is still living today. At least some of the cabins still stand. Dr. Schemm, Cushman, Howard and occasionally Guthrie enjoyed each other in Great Falls homes, but it was up the North Fork that they could really relax or find the solitude to work intensively. This was a WWII-and-after group in the mode of hard-drinking, chain-smoking, Manhattan-published authors with agents and Easterners coming for short restorative stays. They badly needed and greatly cherished their cabins with porches and fireplaces to sit around while talking.

The next generation, now retirement age like myself, grew up in the foothills or on the nearby prairie but found them wanting, blind canyons. Ripley Hugo and James Welch Jr. gravitated to Missoula where the University of Montana offered a different kind of refuge. (James Welch the Senior is buried in the little wild-strawberry knoll that is Dupuyer’s cemetery.) Ivan Doig ended up in Seattle where he writes about Montana. Peter Bowen came and then left again in the metis nomad way.

Less luminary and usually self-published, if that, is a host of historians and storytellers. Percy Bullchild (“When the Sun Goes Down,” published by Harper & Row) lived in Heart Butte. Olga Monkman’s husband was a county commissioner. She never published her many boxes of historical materials but she grew up on a ranch in one of those East Slope valleys. Her nephew was an academic historian on the faculty in Bozeman. Her father, a staunch humanist, was buried by A.B. Guthrie, Sr., acting as a secular pastor. Marion Trexler Brandvold was another girl who grew up on horseback but nearer to Bynum where her son, David Trexler, would become a paleontologist and publish books about climate change. Scotty Zion’s ranch adventures and later ventures into all sorts of enterprises begin to cross over into a new media when he was interviewed on videotape. Historian Nancy Thompson is the present chair of the “Friends of the Old Agency” who collaborated with the Zion brothers to preserve the history of the early “Four Persons Agency,” the second Blackfeet agency. A visit to the location was filmed on videotape with the help of Darrell Kipp, a Blackfeet educator whose refuge was the St. Mary’s valley, another place that sheltered metis since it reaches down from the north. One hardly knows how to classify David Letterman, celebrity host of a television talk show, but surely he takes refuge in this terrain. Clearly the stories once told, then written, are now preserved digitally.

Living on the east slope means that the sun comes up on the flatlands early and descends behind the mountains also early. Writers don’t need daylight so much these days, but there is a psychological rhythm in the light that can be helpful. Now and then I work on a novel called “Both Sides Now” which is placed on the east slope and I find that I make much of the feeling of having one’s back against a protective wall while being able to see a long ways in case of danger approaching. My first experience with the canyon refugia of the east slope was in 1962, horseback hunting with Bob Scriver up Blackleaf Canyon. After a perilous ascent in an overloaded pickup on an icy road, we arrived at first light before color, though anyway everything was white snow and black trees. It was ten below zero. There were so many deer that the season was “double and does,” meaning that each hunter could take two deer of either sex. I tell the story again and again because of its transcendence, all the more penetrating when high on adrenaline.

In 1990 while teaching at Heart Butte, it became clear to the Montana writing community that A.B. Guthrie, Jr. needed to be honored with a feschtshrift. In fact, he was already too ill to attend when one was organized. I took four of my best writing students to the event at the Choteau High School. All were Blackfeet but nevertheless wary of James Welch who was one of the speakers. They preferred to be hidden. Jimmy himself was warm and generous. I vividly recall Mary Clearman Blew joshing with Ralph Beer over co-opting the work of their students but I’d have to look in my files for the names of the other writers. One wrote a novel about small town basketball that included the immolation of a wooden cigarstore Indian at a mainstreet crossroads. The four students fell madly in love with that storyteller. In fact, since he was teaching high school in Cody, I suggested we do a jobs exchange for a week to satisfy my students’ endless curiosity. It didn’t work out. But I think that’s the same man who taught a writing class at the Bellview School up one of the East Slope valleys one summer. I’m not sure his novel was ever published. So much of the East Slope life is not exactly hidden, but certainly elusive. Sometimes with good reason. It is a place of refuge.

ELK SEASON

It’s cold and overcast today. The summer crops are cut or dug, the winter wheat has mostly sprouted, as it is supposed to. It will die back during winter and then be up early in the spring. Everyone says the signs point to an exceptionally cold and snowy winter, but we’re supposed to get a little more slack in a few days. I’m thinking about putting some straw bales around my foundation. It is hunting season and so far two teenagers have been shot by accident. One out with a group of kids and found dead in a field. The other shot by his sister back at the car at the end of the day -- she was unloading her gun and by accident got him in the face from five feet away.

We know about these hazards in Montana and teach classes that effectively diminish the numbers. Also, on the reservations there are classes to reduce the number of suicides. Classes never totally succeed, but they help. I’m not part of that scene now.

Nor do I go hunting anymore, so I turn to my friend Paul for seasonal stories. The reality of hunting is that a lot of it is just plain hard work.


Paul:

I have another horse tale that ties in with saws. When in college one of my professors heard I had a little packing experience and had a friend up at his cabin near . . . Trego? Anyway the friend had downed a big elk way the heck out there in the mountains, and the prof had a horse, but couldn't get out of his obligations and the horse had no packing experience, nor did he have a pack saddle. The deal was, if we packed it out, I'd not only get paid, but get half the meat! Tell that to a hungry kid who'd been boiling up cheap tongue for lunch meat.

Grabbed a willing friend and we made it up to the cabin the next morning, introduced ourselves to the horse and the hunter, put a western saddle and a bunch of rope and a saw on the horse and headed in. The hunter was careful to mark his way out but had a heck of a time retracing his trail and we had to do a lot of backtracking.

When we got to the elk we had to re-gut it because the inexperienced hunter had done such a poor job. Then I looked for the saw to cut it in half. When I couldn't find it, I remembered an odd sound somewhere in our travels that sounded just like the twang a saw might make hitting the ground, but I chalked up to the sound of a saw brushing up against a tree.

Didn't think we'd ever find it again, so the only thing left was to use the little chainsaw I'd brought along to clear trail. What a MESS! I'm sure I looked like Freddie Kruger by the time I was done.

Went back to the horse to bring him up and he wasn't about to let me get near him, much less follow me into what he must have thought was oblivion. I ended up having to put my jacket over his head to get him close enough to snub up to a tree while we tried to load and truss a half elk to that saddle and the horse.

All the way back down the mountain that elk half would slide to one side or the other or to the belly of that poor horse. The solution to the problem escaped me until we were close to the cabin and I cut a hole in the hide and ribs for the pommel to fit in. The second half was much easier since we knew where it was and how to pack it.

When we got back and hung the meat, all we could do was drool until we cut what was left of the mangled back straps out and headed back to town for a real feast. Came back on the weekend and cut the whole thing up and split it up. Ate good for a long time and the prof even loaned us freezer space for the winter.


How long have folks been bugling elk? Never been much of an elk hunter but I did take a brief interest in bugling. I must have bought mine at the pawn/gun shop next to the tavern because I took it into the tavern to try and figure out. It had two pieces, the "flapper" that you were supposed to put in the roof of your mouth and the bugling tube. The flapper gagged me for some reason, so it took a few beers to relax my gag reflexes enough to give it a proper try. My first attempt must have been pretty good, because within minutes the place cleared out. Just for a few minutes though, because everyone went out to their trucks to get their own bugles and we had an impromptu bugling jam session.

Bugling was hot in those days, which is why I was thinking it was a relatively new tool. I'd be out cruising timber and hear "elk" bugling all around me. Which of course was probably the real motivator for my purchase. I like messing with folks!

Nope, never did find that handsaw, even though we looked for it on subsequent trips. I knew right where it fell off, too, because it was in one of the few rocky areas. It's probably still lying there or part of someone else's "what the heck is this doing here" collection.

The bugling craze has died down pretty much here. I think the F&G changed the season to a later opening specifically to get away from rutting season, because bull elk are plumb stupid then and too easy to bring in. Now you can only effectively bugle during archery season.

Yeah, I never did much like my in-the-mouth bugle, but damn, it sounded like the real thing. I could probably pull off a feeble attempt with a piece of grass and some inventive grunting, but the bugle did all that for you and was much more believable. Those inserts were the worst though. There were several tones as I recall and you could buy different colored inserts. I think I was always afraid of sucking the dang thing down my lungs.

My gramps used to make me willow whistles too. I've tried a time or two, but they never work. I have better luck with Elderberry stems, hollow, kinda like Cow Parsnip, but less poisonous and won't make your lips fall off.

Thanks, Paul!

MONTANA GOTHIC by Dirck Van Sickle

This book review is going to start in a strange place: a basement bedroom in a house in Higgins Avenue in Missoula, Montana. There’s a lot of mystique about Missoula, even within Montana where it’s seen as sort of the Paris of the range. Intellectual, you know. Over on the east side of the Rockies, we find intellectuals a little -- um -- depressed. Where I am, I can see A.B. Guthrie’s beloved Ear Mountain. I love “The Big Sky,” both the book and the real thing. The sky on the Missoula side is quite a lot like that in Portland where I grew up. In fact, I’ve known people in Portland who would dash over to Missoula on a three day weekend, thinking they were visiting Montana. But they’re just going from the gray Willamette Valley to the gray Flathead Valley. Everywhere they go, there they are.

Once I was asked to stoodge for a little documentary film about A.B. Guthrie, Jr. They wanted certain questions answered, so my job was to sit off-camera and ask their questions. We got to having a pretty good time and pretty soon Guthrie was telling me how Leslie Fiedler ran Walter van Tilburg Clark out of Missoula. (There was no shoot-out. Walter just saw that it was time to get out of Dodge.) At that point Guthrie’s wife told him to put on his hat because they were leaving. She thought literary gossip was bad taste. Fiedler, though he lived in Missoula for twenty years, never quit mocking Montana for its own good. That house on Higgins was Fiedler’s house and Dirck Van Sickle lived in the basement bedroom for a while. (1960-61) Fiedler sold the house to the Missoula Unitarian congregation which is still there. 1982-85 when I was the circuit-riding Montana minister, I slept in that bedroom. Very strange vibes. Possibly a curse. But I had come to east side Montana in 1962 and though I felt it, I was protected, possibly by the spirit of Jim Welch, half-Blackfeet and a poet maudit himself, but an east sloper.

This book review is about “Montana Gothic” by Dirk Van Sickle -- not gossip -- and here’s how it all ties together. The first point to grasp is that literary fashions change and college towns are swept by them more than other towns. Walter Von Tilburg Clark is one of the truly major figures in Old Western lit and one of my favorites. He’s not thought of as a Montana writer so much, maybe because his magnum opus was about Salt Lake City, “The City of the Trembling Leaves,” where he, like Wallace Stegner, got a taste of civilized life while coming of age.

Dirck Van Sickle was a student of Fiedler’s. The year after he left, 1961-62, was my first year of teaching in Browning. I’m guessing a little now, though Patia Stephens recently interviewed Van Sickle in New York and will know for sure, both Fiedler and Van Sickle were Easterners who confronted Montana head on. Provocateurs. That was just their modus operandi. Opposition to conformity. Social criticism. Poets maudit.

“Montana Gothic” is a series of short stories linked by characters and stretching over many years. The first is about a med student with a broken heart who bought -- sight unseen -- an undertaking business and discovered all kinds of surprises. But he coped until he fell in love and his sweetheart . . . well, this is a horror story so I won’t give it away.

The book begins: “For most of the long winter the universal mud was frozen like rippled rock, but now, in the middle of this chinook, the graining gumbo lay over the land like the primal muck, almost trapping the horse’s hoof at every step. If you’re a newcomer, the suck of the hoof pulling free of the thick ooze can turn your stomach; best to concentrate on the saddle creaking or the horse snorting -- but don’t look at the sky: winter sky in northeastern Montana is just another kind of mud; thinner and grayer, but so deep that if you ever fell into it, you’d never get out.” Take THAT, Bud Guthrie!

The stories really amount to the same thing as James Willard Schultz and Charles Marion Russell asking, “Why Gone Those Times?” Unless you’re a believer, the elusive mythic West falls apart in your hands because it is a construct. What’s left is horror. Suffering, death. Ugliness. You can tell Van Sickle is writing from the west side: there’s no wind. Missoula in its valley is vulnerable to temperature inversions that seal in the woodsmoke and the latrine-stink of the paper mill.

There are four sections to this book, beginning with the pre-med student; then a range double-tale about two mismatched men wintering in a line shack with a few cattle; then a three-part melodramatic Jim-Harrison-style attack on the grand generational tale of success (lots of THEM in Montana) with bits of Jane Eyre thrown in; and last a homily of doomed anachronism pushed to ridiculousness. All of them are outsider stories: this is a novelist maudit who will never find a home in Montana, never be invited to the celebrations. NOT commodified.

One of the compensations for living in a mythic place, if you can accept the givens, is participation, feeling chosen and proud. People will say, “Oh, I live in God’s country.” For this author, God is a vengeful woman, a Death who meets one at every turn. I read it long ago and recognized the bloody truth of it, not quite in the way expressed in the action tropes of Westerns nor in the way the old cowboy puts it, for he feels he has married Death. “It’s like I was tryin’ to tell ya last night, she ain’t just dead spiritless land, no sir, she’s something ta take her life and share it with ya, like a wife mebbe. An mebbe better, too. ‘Cause a woman can die . . . but the land, she can’t die. . . ya don’t have to think about it. Ye just come to know it.” That’s the old man’s philosophy and of course he dies. Consummated.

The young man says, “. . . to think of Montana in these terms was not just pathetic fallacy but a dangerous, possibly fatal anthropomorphism, like imagining a rattlesnake could return love. The land has no persona, the land is nothing more than a floor beneath the weather. . . the sandstone rimrock and buttes are numbed, calloused, and worn as the nipples of an old-time Miles City whore, and as incapable of feeling. The forests are as badly beaten every winter as the kids of an alcoholic Indian, and, as inevitably as the Indian’s shanty discovered on a rancher’s land, they burn down every summer.” He’s not on the east slope. No grass.

But there’s an eagle: the second chapter is a Jacob-and-the-Angel struggle with an eagle, part-real, part-obsessional. The Winged One wins. “He’d always sought for the savior to be a woman, the feminine apotheosis whose face he never saw, the haunting succubus -- but it was to be the eagle all the time; it could only be Grandfather . . .the blank authority of his power. Grandfather would end Deke’s life and take it with him, and this was, in the needle-sharp clarity of his final deluson, the end of questing, the terminal answer to his question.” This book is dedicated to Van Sickle’s mother. “Mother” is also the name of the horse of the anachronistic cowboy at the end.

I see his problem. His eagle was a bald eagle, the awkward symbol of the nation, which feeds on fish (west side spawners coming in the from the coast) and carrion. On the east side we have golden eagles. (In actual fact Bob and I did raise one and held her in our arms.) They eat meat. It’s their tail-feathers that are in Blackfeet war bonnets. Such a small difference, but a crucial one.

RISKY OLD MEN

I once said the name “Peter Beard” in the presence of Peter Matthiessen and saw that it had roughly the same effect on the latter as being plugged into a wall socket. “What?” he demanded. “What about him?” I love both Peters, though I’ve only met Peter M. and own all his books but have never owned any of Peter B’s photo books. Just now I googled Peter Beard and discovered that he is the great-grandson of James Jerome Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railroad which opened the northern prairie to homesteading and provoked the creation of Glacier National Park, which means that he relates to the past of this part of the world in much the same way as Barnaby Conrad III. But Peter Beard himself has become greatly identified with the Kenya of Isak Dinesen. They were only alive at the same time for a brief period, but their spirit was similar. He met her the same year I came to Browning, Montana.

I have always said that this part of Montana was my Africa. Peter B. is a year older than me and very, very rich to say nothing of being very very well connected. He takes fabulous photos with magnificent cameras and then besmirches and adorns the enlarged photos with bloody handprints, tiny India ink drawings, glued on bugs and leaves, anything. He’s a little like Robert Kennedy (who was a friend) crossed with (if you must know) Tim Barrus. And not terribly unlike his Yale compatriot, Peter Matthiessen, except that everyone loves Peter M. and some people think Peter Beard is, well, too much the free spirit. He probably has as much of what he calls “jewelry” in his hips as Tim Barrus does, but because an elephant trampled him, an event that was filmed, right out to the moment he actually died as he was wheeled into the Nairobi hospital. They did revive him and he’s still out there having art shows and getting into trouble, which is like Tim Barrus.

Beard’s specialty is photos of supermodels, meaning very skinny and young women with long necks, like gracile gerenuks, who are willing to take all their clothes off and stand against a background of the least modern African people Beard can find. Splashed with paint, encouraged into extreme poses, adorned with extravagant objects, they are quite stunning. Beard says they are NOT fashion photos and one has to agree. Who would show up at a cocktail party looking like that? The Africans are terrific -- work-worn, humorous, always up for anything. The most famous photo of Beard is the one he took of himself half-inserted into a dead croc. It had only been dead a short time and some of its reflexes remained, so he ended up with painful tooth marks. I’ll bet his toenails got bleached as well. I just rented “Peter Beard Scrapbooks: Africa and Beyond” from Netflix.

I love these kinds of wild and original guys. Yesterday one of our local examples (a good reason for loving Montana), Rib Gustafson, took me to lunch at the Panther Cafe. 84, Rib and his beautiful artistic wife have raised five kids, four of them men, two of those veterinarians like their dad, in addition to a famous singer (Wiley) and a math teacher. They all write, especially Sid. The daughter is a lawyer who has just finished a book on maritime law.

Rib met Bob Scriver for the first time in what must have been the late Fifties after a rousing bar fight that caused him to be jugged until he sobered up. Bob was the City Magistrate who tried Rib's case, but I didn’t ask what the sentence was. The other story Rib told happened in the Nineties. Bob had a pet badger, which can be thought of as either a weasel on steroids or a mini-grizzly. The badger had caught one of its formidable claws under a piece of heavy machinery in the shop and was so frantic that Bob couldn’t get near it to help. So at midnight, happily asleep, Rib’s phone rings and Bob wants help -- NOW. It’s an eighty mile drive, but Rib gets up and heads to Browning where he rendered the badger comatose with a shot. Even the two men working together had to remove the wedged claw to get the animal loose. Rib said when he left Bob was holding “Badgie” on his lap, soothing his beloved pet.

It’s not that I love these extravagant guys because I want a romantic relationship with them. Been there, done that. My thing is that I wish I could live the risky life as they do. I wish I were them. But women in bar fights end up dead and I’m not willing to go that far. The next best thing is to sit across a table or in front of a fireplace and hear all about it. Not that I haven’t managed to do a few far-out things, but it doesn’t matter how liberated a woman is, she still can’t live quite so “large.” Of course, men die along the way, too. Now and then.

Rib has the great advantage of being in a position to do a great deal of good for people and they reward him by watching out for him. In his several books Rib tells about some of his strategies. For instance, once he was called by a threadbare rancher with a cow teetering on the edge of oblivion, a man too proud to go into debt. So Rib proposed that the rancher make him the half-owner of the cow as payment. That way there was a chance the cow would be saved and the rancher would have half a cow -- without treatment he would have nothing. When word got around, Rib accumulated quite a little herd of half-cows.

Society theoretically likes the dependable wage-earner who protects his children and comforts his wife and we do, we do. But we also love the guy who gets out there and tastes everything the world has to offer, risks big-time pain but also big-time gain, and then can tell us all about it. I’m going to watch this movie from Netflix about Peter Beard about five more times before I send it back. Then I’ll try to buy the disc. In the meantime, I’ll watch for Rib or any of his sons, or any of a dozen other resourceful reprobates around here. And, of course, I can email Barrus any time and I do, I do.

FORT BENTON & VALIER

Hope Good, publisher of “Treasure State Lifestyles Montana,” has been commissioning short historical and local essays from me. She has generously agreed to let me reprint those pieces on this blog. Look for the courtesy magazines in waiting rooms and at various advertisers around the area. What you’ll find here are just the stories that I have supplied.


I.

The first story is about the Belgian community that has been a big part of Valier. Bob Scriver’s daughter, Margaret Skogan, finished high school in Valier and married a DeSmet, part of that Belgian community.

Valier sprang up where it is through a confluence of forces. One of the most deliberate was the importation of a Belgian village to what is still called “Belgian Hill.” Eight percent of the Valier population still self-identifies as Belgian and they include some of the most diligent and prosperous families. At first there was a little village called “Williams,” which has since withered and dispersed, leaving the Belgian church, Sacred Heart Mission, and its graveyard under the shelter of the ridge, now easily recognized because of the line of receivers and transponders on top.

Victor Day, Vicar General of the Diocese of Helena, was a native of Belgium so he welcomed the idea hatched in the interest of bringing farmers to the newly irrigated land and helping them escape the ravages of WWI. Father Shevlin, the local pastor, and Emile Monroe, an early guide, met the families and sheltered them in an eight room house “owned by Bishop Carroll” and previously the ranchhouse of the Conrad Circle Cattle Company. A part of that company was the Block Hanging Seven, the ranch where Lake Francis and the other components of the Pondera Canal Company were developed.

The devout farmers were meant to be stable and productive, not prone to the disorder of the oil town to the north, Cut Bank. White people were needed to settle because Swift Dam and the dependent irrigation grid were partly on the reservation and Birch Creek had only recently become the southern boundary of the reservation. The Conrad brothers didn’t bother with permissions and documents, and tried to get the boundary moved even farther north because of the good land between Birch and Badger Creeks, already under irrigation though not very effectively. They knew that occupation by law-abiding whites would help their goals.

The Catholic Church Extension Society helped to build the little church which endured from 1914 to 1963, helping the transplants keep alive their identity as it had been in Belgium. As they learned to speak English and the little town of Williams disintegrated, these people attached to Valier, helping to shape its identity. Principally, European farmers were accustomed to living in a village and traveling out to the fields daily while American assumptions about homesteads meant actually occupying the farmed land, a lonesome practice for farm wives. Valier is often best understood in the European pattern, as a hub with spokes.

In the Sacred Heart Mission days there were twenty-two weddings, twenty babies baptized, and twenty-eight funeral masses. For a while the old European festivals persisted. The church still stands and the graveyard is maintained. A side road from highway 44 provides access. Don’t be surprised if someone nearby meets you there. It is still cherished.


II.

Each issue of “Lifestyles” concentrates on a different community. This story harks back to the dedication of the Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea monument in Fort Benton.


The fate of the nation was determined when President Thomas Jefferson, a framer of the Declaration of Independence, bought the Louisiana Purchase which was defined by the drainage of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. He sent Lewis and Clark to discover how far that drainage reached, using the waterway for the great highway it still is.

The northern limit of continuously navigable water was Fort Benton, naturally the town to want to do something big for the 200th birthday of the nation on the 4th of July, 1976. That’s “big” as in “really big statue” of Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea and the baby Pomp. And there it still is along the levee. On the Fourth the town held a major parade that included the sculptor, Bob Scriver, riding his beloved horse, Gunsmoke, as well as all sorts of characters from mountain men (Corky Evans) to a ten-foot-tall stilt-walking Uncle Sam. (Didn’t get his name.) There weren’t seventy-six trombones, but there were a LOT of fine marching bands and a kilt-wearing pipe band from Alberta as well as floats.

The statue itself was “veiled” with a huge tarp and “unveiled” by Scriver. At the time Montana wasn’t so used to giant statues and the foundry head from New York City, Bob Spring, attended the dedication, beaming at his work.

Since then Fort Benton has repeated its role as the mother of Great Falls. Paris Gibson, a rancher from Minneapolis who had moved to Fort Benton, traveled to the Great Falls and realized with that power source there ought to be a city. Great Falls people at the dedication of the big Lewis and Clark statue were inspired to commission their own version which now stands under a giant flag.

Since those days Fort Benton has reclaimed much human history from Indian encampments to the mysterious death of the first governor, from the wrecks and conflagrations of the steam paddle-wheelers to the faithfulness of a sheep herder’s dog. The original fort is rebuilt. Yet the town remains a modest ag center, showing you don’t need to live in New York City to be sophisticated. In fact, as soon as Europeans realized they could step off a sea-going ship and onto the deck of a steamship, royalty and fine artists eagerly traveled in what amounted to a floating hotel. Prince Maximilian, Audubon, and others were anxious to see the far West.

When Lewis and a sub-group of the expedition had been to the northernmost reaches of the Marias River and realized that the drainage ended at the 49th parallel rather than the fiftieth as hoped, they met a party of young Blackfeet horse herders and killed two of them in a skirmish over guns. Within decades Culbertson and his beautfiul and resourceful Blackfeet wife, Natawista, were holding court on a steamboat that brought in supplies to the Blackfeet and new settlers, then removed thousands of beaver plews on the way back to St. Louis to spend the winter. Wood hawks made their living all along the river by cutting and piling cords of fuel for those paddle-wheelers. Until the railroads were built, this was the only practical means of moving raw baled buffalo hides to the cities of the east where they became conveyor belts for the new factories.

When Lewis and Clark, reunited and homebound, got to the shores of Fort Benton, they could not have guessed they would be immortalized in bronze. What they did understand was that they were only weeks from a celebratory dinner party in Saint Louis, complete with oysters and champagne. In 1976 we settled for a smashing parade!

REAL PEOPLE IN REAL PLACES

For two days in a row I’ve traveled to adjacent communities, on Monday up to Browning for the dedication of the new high school and then on Tuesday to Conrad to do some interviewing for free lance articles in “Treasure State Lifestyles” which does Regional Community Coverage for north central Montana. Online at www.treasurestatelifestyles.com. This is a monthly giveaway publication you might find in waiting rooms or those little wire stands in the foyers of grocery stories. Though it’s not so upscale as something like Big Sky Journal, in it’s own way it’s more “Montana,” because it is by and for locals. Big Sky Journal is on the newsstands in big cities and is meant to support high end tourists. It comes from sophisticated high-density college towns.

One interview I did from home via telephone: that was the Gustafson family whose patriarch is Rib Gustafson, a big rumbustious veterinarian married to an artist wife in the best Western pattern. When I was asked to interview “a Gustafson in a law office” I assumed it was Rib’s only daughter, who is a lawyer, but as it turned out the woman in question was Susan Gustafson who grew up in Poplar and married an unrelated Gustafson.

The other interview was Mary Pouray, daughter of Dorothy Floerchinger, whom I knew as a local historian whose scrapbooks now occupy 34 feet of shelves at the University of Montana library. Mary's address was “Big Sky Villa.” In the phone book the address of the “Villa” was 701 Minnesota (the streets are named for the states) but I paid no attention to the north/south indications and ended up at a supported living “tower” on the wrong end of town. The ladies there set me straight.

I discovered that Big Sky Villa is a complex, the converted housing the Air Force “sold” to the town for $1 when they pulled out of their cold war activities in the area. Norby Hall at one edge of this compound, much upgraded, serves as a community meeting hall for many conferences and town halls and a theatre for the Pondera Players. Since I hadn’t gotten a house number, I stopped at a nearby complex that serves children who need special services. I had no idea that such an institution existed anywhere this side of Great Falls. The place was humming with preparations for the school year but cheerfully stopped to help.

I was directed to “the house with the goose wearing crocheted clothes” and, sure enough, there it was. But Mary Pourray, daughter of a major progressive force in North Central Montana, was not a frivolous woman. Nor did her house look like an Air Force barracks. Her elegant little duplex was furnished with beautiful objects from a trip to France to find her husband’s French roots: dolls, demitasse cups and a big P stamp for branding sheep with paint.

At the law office I butted in on a spirited conversation about Wall Drug Store, that phenomenon of advertising! It is indeed a drug store, but made famous by billboards far and wide, and furnishing in large part souvenirs saying “Wall Drug Store,” like the fellow who was famous for being famous.

What I’m thinking about today as I write up these articles is that I was interviewed about as much as I did interviewing, even in Browning. I don’t normally mix with people, partly because writing so much means that one is turned in on oneself without filtering, so in spite of writing about myself it is always from MY point of view! Kind of a bubble. When these people began to ask questions, I suddenly began to see me from THEIR point of view, a person who is quite different. I worried them. I was too frank.

We had a lot of overlap. I started out to be someone like Mary Pourray, teaching kids English in the small town public schools, or indeed like her mother, Dorothy, who taught here in Valier. Or I thought in the very beginning that I would be like Susan Gustafson, a mainstay of the local amateur theatre company, acting and directing fine productions of classics. But I ended up being pulled off course by Bob Scriver, whom they all knew superficially because of stopping into the Museum. Mary remembered meeting me when I was skinny and had red hair. Fred DesRosier in Browning remembered both Bob and I all through the decades (His ancestors got to Browning half a dozen years before the first Scriver came, about the same time Charlie Russell showed up.) Fred is one of the few locals I’ve met who has read “Bronze Inside and Out,” already knowing everything. (He said I did a good job, which pleased me very much.)

Mary asked me about family and whether they were nearby. Susan and I talked more about things like the wonderful “thrust” stage in Choteau and whether the school people really understood what they had. Fred DesRosier and I talked about new books about the Blackfeet. He’s quite deaf now and gets frustrated, but reading works. Among them they had an excellent understanding of the political forces of this east slope way of life, the tussles between right wing libertarians who want untrammeled free enterprise and left wing do-gooders who want no child to go hungry, both on and off the rez. To them those forces are concrete and name-by-name. They don’t think in abstracts so much as I do and aren’t inclined to borrow trouble from issues that are alive in faraway places. And yet there is a strong arts-conscious community, quite skilled. They aren’t exactly what you might call “cutting-edge,” mostly because they are getting older. The You-Tube generation doesn’t want to stage Oklahoma.

Except, remarkably, in the last ten years in Browning, staging big-time musicals has been exactly what the high school has wanted to do. The Conrad people do not go up to be in the audience. The excuse is distance, but I think the real reason is that they feel alien there. They have no awareness of how alien I feel in Conrad! Sometimes I even feel a little out-of-it in Browning. I don’t participate in Valier either. In my virtual reality I live in the English BBC world and the Paris Cinematheque world. It’s actually quite comfortable that way, unless I go trekking around. Then suddenly I seem like a tubby old woman with white hair who is somehow deprived. It’s disconcerting.