by Ivan Doig
But enough on that. The Sedgwicks and their namesake hotel provided Gros Ventre its one titanic building and its roving human landmark. The enterprise across the street from the Sedgwick House ministered to the town internally.
The Medicine Lodge saloon gave Gros Ventre its “rough” section of town in the thriftiest manner possible. I would calculate that in Lodge, gravitation amounted to something more like an avalanche. Saturday night, thirsts converged from everywhere in the Two country. Hay hands who had come in for a bath and haircut at Shorty Staub’s but decided instead to wash down the inside of themselves. Shearing crews one time of year, lamb lickers (as guys who worked in lambing sheds were known) another. Any season, a sheepherder in from the mountains or the reservation to inaugurate a two-week spree. Government men from reclamation projects. Likely a few Double W cowpokes. Definitely the customary setters, who had been building up the calluses on their elbows all week just for this. Always a sufficient cast of characters for loud dialogues, occasional shoving matches, and eventual passing-outs. Maybe you couldn’t get away with cigar smoke in the Medicine Lodge, but you could with what counted.
* * *
Turning east past the Sedgwick House and the Medicine Lodge, Mouse and I now were into the Heaneys’ side of town. An early priest had persuaded the Catholic landowner who platted this particular neighborhood to name the streets after the first missions in Montana, which in turn bore the names of saints. This created what the current Gros Ventre postmaster, Chick Jennings, called "the repeater part of town," with mailing addresses such as St. Mary St., St. Peter St., and St. Ignatius St. It was at the end of St. Ignatius St. that the Heaney house stood, a white two-story one with sills of robin’s egg blue. Ed Heaney owned the lumber yard, and so was the one person in town in those Depression years with some access to paint. The robin’s egg blue had been a shipping mistake by the manufacturer; it is a shade pretty delicate to put up against the weather of Montana; and Ed lugged the can home and made the best of it.
The place looked empty as I rode up, which was as I expected. Rather than the creek picnic, the Heaneys always went out to a family shindig at Genevieve’s parents’ farm, quite a ways east of Gros Ventre on the Conrad road. So with Ray out there I wouldn’t link up with him until the rodeo, and I simply slung my warbag inside the Heaneys’ back porch and got on Mouse again, and went picnicking.
* * *
Cars and pickups and trucks were parked so thick that they all but swamped the creekside part of town. It is nice about a horse, that you can park him handily while Henry Ford still would be circling the block and cussing. I chose a stand of high grass between the creek bank and the big cottonwoods just west of the picnic and pastured Mouse on a tie of rope short enough that he couldn’t tangle it around anything and long enough for him to graze a little. Then gave him a
final proud pat, and headed off to enlist with the picnickers.
Some writer or another put down that in the history of Montana, the only definite example of civic uplift was when the Virginia City vigilantes hung the Henry Plummer gang in 1864. I think that over-states, a bit. You can arrive into the most scruffy of Montana towns and delve around a few minutes and in all likelihood find a public park, of some sort. In Gros Ventre’s instance the park was a half circle of maybe an acre, fronting on English Creek just west of Main Street and the highway bridge, one last oasis before the road arrowed north into the plains and benchlands. In recent years WPA crews had made it a lot more of a park than it had been, clearing out the willows which were taking over the creek bank and then laying in some riprap to keep the spring runoff out. And someone during that WPA work came up with an idea I’ve not seen before or since. There near the creek where a big crippled cottonwood leaned—a windstorm had ripped off its main branches—a crew sawed the tree off low to the ground, leaving a broad stump about two feet high, then atop the stump was built a speaker’s pulpit, a slatted round affair somewhat on the order of a ship’s crow’s nest. The one and only time I saw Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who some people thought might become president if Roosevelt ever stopped being, we were let out of school to hear him give a speech from this speaking stump.
From where I had left Mouse I emerged into the creekside corner of the park where the stump pulpit stood, and I stopped beside it to have a look around.
A true Two country Fourth of July. The trees were snowing. Fat old cottonwoods stood all along the arc between the park and the neighborhood, while younger trees were spotted here and there across the rest of the expanse, as if they had been sent out to be shadebearers. The day was providing just enough breeze into the tree-tops to rattle them a little and make them shed their cotton wisps out through the air like slow snow.
Through the cottonfall the spike of tower atop the Sedgwick House stuck up above one cottonwood at the far side of the park. As if that tree had on a party hat.
As for people, the park this day was a bunch of islands of them. I literally mean islands. The summer thus far had stayed cool enough that even a just warm day like this one was putting people into the shade of the cottonwoods, each gathering of family and friends on their specific piece of dappled shade like those cartoons of castaways on a desert isle with a single palm tree.
I had to traipse around somewhat, helloing people and being helloed, before I spotted my mother and my father, sharing shade and a spread blanket with Pete and Marie Reese and Toussaint Rennie near the back of the park.
Among the greetings, my father’s predominated: "Thank goodness you’re here. Pete’s been looking for somebody to challenge to an ice-cream-making contest." So before I even got sat down I was off on that tangent. "Come on, Jick," Pete said as he reached for their ice-cream freezer and I picked up ours, "anybody who cranks gets a double dish."
We took our freezers over near the coffee and lemonade table where everybody else’s was. This year, I should explain, was the turn of English Creek and Noon Creek to provide the picnic with ice cream and beverage. Bill Reinking, who despite being a newspaperman had some fairly practical ideas, was the one to suggest the system; that instead of everybody and his brother showing up at the Fourth armed with ice creamers and coffeepots and jugs of lemonade, each part of the community take a turn in providing for all. Now one year the families west of Main Street in Gros Ventre did the ice cream, coffee and ade, the next year the families east of Main Street, the one after that those of us from English Creek and Noon Creek, and then after us what was called "the rest of Creation," the farm families from east and south and north of town and anybody else who didn’t fit some other category.
So for the next while Pete and I took turns with the other ice-cream manufacturers, cranking and cranking. Lots of elbow grease, and jokes about where all that fancy wrist work had been learned. Marie shortly came over on coffee duty—she was going to do the making, my mother would serve after everybody’d eaten—and brought along a message from my father and Toussaint: "They say, a little faster if you can stand it." Pete doffed his Stetson to them in mock gratitude. The holiday definitely was tuning up. And even yet I can think of no better way to begin a Fourth of July than there among virtually all of our English Creek neighbors. Not Walter Kyle, up on the mountain with his sheep; and not the Hebners, who never showed themselves at these creek picnics ; and not the Withrows, who must have been delayed some way. But everybody else. The South Fork folks other than the Withrows: Fritz and Greta Hahn, Ed and Alice Van Bebber. Then the population of the main creek, those who merely migrated downstream here to the park, so to speak. Preston and Peg Rozier. Charlie and Dora Finletter. Ken and Janet Busby, and Bob and Arleta Busby; I had half wondered whether Stanley Meixell might show up with the Busbys, and was relieved that he hadn’t. Don and Charity Frew. The Hills arrived last, while I was still inventorying the crowd; J. L. leaning shakily on his wife Nan. “Set her down, J.L.," somebody called, referring to the ice creamer the Hills had brought with them, "we’ll do the twirling." "I get to shivering much more than this,
" J.L. responded, "and I can just hold the goddamn thing in my hands and make ice cream." In truth, J.L.’s tremble was constant and almost ague-like by now. It is terrible to see, an ailment fastened onto a person and riding him day and night. I hope not to end up that way, life over and done with before existence is.
But that was not the thought for this day. If a sense of life, of the blood racing beneath your skin, is not with you at a Fourth of July creek picnic, then it is never going to be.
* * *
When Pete and I finished ice-cream duty and returned to the blanket, my father had Toussaint on the topic of what the Fourth of July was like when Gros Ventre and he were young.
"Phony Nose Gorman," Toussaint was telling. "Is he one you remember ?"
My father shook his head: "Before my time." Much of Toussaint’s lore was before anyone’s time.
"Tim Gorman," Toussaint elaborated, "Cox and Floweree’s foreman awhile. Down on Sun River. Froze his nose in that ’86 winter. Some doctor at Fort Shaw fixed him up. Grafted skin on. I saw him after, the surgery was good. But Phony Nose Gorman he was called. He was the one the flagpole broke with. There across from the Medicine Lodge, where that garage is now. He was climbing it to put Deaf Smith Mitchell’s hat on top. On a bet. Those times, they bet on the sun coming up."
Toussaint Rennie this day looked maybe sixty-five years old, yet had to be at least a dozen beyond that. He was one of those chuckling men you meet rarely, able to stave off time by perpetually staying in such high humor that the years didn’t want to interrupt him. From that little current of laugh always purling in him Toussaint’s face had crinkled everywhere it could. Tan and wrinkled deep, that face, like a gigantic walnut. The rest of Toussaint was the general build of a potbelly stove. Girth and age and all, he still was riding the ditches of the Blackfeet Reservation’s Two Medicine irrigation project, his short-handled shovel sticking out of a rifle scabbard as his horse plodded the canal banks. Allotting a foot-and-a-half head of water to each farm ditch; plugging gopher holes or muskrat tunnels in the canal bank with gunny sacks of dirt; keeping culverts from clogging; in a land of scarce water a ditch rider’s job was vital above most others, and Toussaint apparently was going to hold his until death made it drop from his hand.
In about the way that shovel was carried in that scabbard, the his story of the Two country rested there in Toussaint’s memory, handy to employ. And sharpened by steady use. It never was clear to me how Toussaint, isolated way to hell and gone—he bached out there a few miles west of where the highway crossed the Two Medicine River, about fifteen miles from Browning and a good thirty from Gros Ventre—could know news from anywhere in the Two country as fast as it happened. Whatever the network was (my father called it moccasin telegraph) Toussaint was its most durable conductor. He came to the Two in the time of the buffalo, a boy eight or so years old when his family roved in from somewhere in the Dakotas. The Rennies were part French; my father thought they might have started off as Reynauds. But mostly tribal haze. Of their Indian background Toussaint himself was only ever definite in declaring himself not a Blackfeet, which had to do with the point that the Two Medicine woman he married, Mary Rides Proud, was one. The usual assumption was that the Rennie lineage was Métis, for other Métis families had ended up in this general region of Montana after the Riel rebellion in Canada was put down in 1885. But count back across the decades and you found that Toussaint already had grown to manhood here in the Two country by the time the Canadians were hanging Louis Riel and scattering his followers. Toussaint himself was worse than no help on this matter of origin, for all he would say was to claim pedigree from the Lewis and Clark expedition: “I come down from William Clark himself. My grandfather had red hair."
Thinking back on it now, I suspect the murk of Toussaint’s lineage was carefully maintained. For the one thing unmistakable about the Rennie family line was its knack for ending up on the side of the winners in any given contest of the Montana frontier. "The prairie was so black with buffalo it looked burnt. I was with the Assiniboines, we came down on the buffalo from the Sweetgrass Hills," one Toussaint tale would relate, and the next, "The trader Joe Kipp hired me to take cattle he was selling to the Army at Fort Benton. He knew I kept Indians from stealing them." Able to straddle that way, Toussaint had a view into almost anything that happened in the early Two country. He was with the bull teams that brought the building materials for the original Blackfeet Reservation agency north of Choteau, before there was a Choteau or a Gros Ventre. "Ben Short was the wagon boss. He was a good cusser." After the winter of ’86, Toussaint freighted cowhides off the prairie by the thousands. "That was what was left in this country by spring. More cowhides than cows." He saw young Lieutenant John J. Pershing and his Negro soldiers ride through Gros Ventre in 1896, herding a few hundred woebegone Crees north to push them back over the line into Canada. "Each creek those soldiers crossed, English Creek and Birch Creek and Badger Creek and all of them, some more Crees leaked away into the brush." He saw the canals come to the prairie, the eighty-thousand-acre irrigation project that built Valier from scratch in 1909 and drew in trainloads of homesteaders. "Pretty quick they wondered about this country. Dust blew through Valier there, plates were turned facedown on the table until you turned them up to eat off of. One tree, the town had. Mrs. Guardipee watered it from her wash tubs."
And the Two Medicine canal he himself had patrolled for almost a quarter century, the ditch rider job he held and held in spite of being not a Blackfeet: "It stops them being jealous of each other. With me in the job, none of them is." The first blats of sheep into this part of Montana were heard by Toussaint. "I think, 1879. People called Lyons, down on the Teton. Other sheepmen came fast. Charlie Scoffin, Charlie McDonald, Oliver Goldsmith Cooper." The First survey crews he watched make their sightings. "1902, men with telescopes and Jacob’s staffs."
—"The first Fourth of July you ever saw here," my father was prompting. "When was that, do you think?"
Toussaint could date it without thinking. "Custer’s year. "76. We heard just before the Fourth. All dead at the Little Bighorn. Everybody. Gros Ventre was just only a hotel and saloon then. Men took turns, coming out of the saloon to stand sentry. To look north." Here Toussaint leaned toward Pete’s wife Marie and said in mock reproach: “For Blackfeet."
All of us echoed his chuckle. The tease to Marie was a standard one from Toussaint. Married to Pete, she of course was my aunt, and if I’d had a thousand aunts instead of just her she still would have been my favorite. More to the point here, though, Marie was Toussaint’s granddaughter, and the only soul anywhere in that family who could get along with him. Most of Toussaint’s sons wouldn’t even speak to him, his daughters had all married out of his orbit as rapidly as they could, and down through the decades any number of his Rides Proud in-laws had threatened to shoot him. (Toussaint claimed he had a foolproof antidote to such threats: "I tell them bullets can fly more than one direction.") I myself remember that the last few years of her life, Toussaint and his wife Mary didn’t even live under the same roof; whenever my father and I stopped by their place, Toussaint was to be found in residence in the bunkhouse. Thus all the evidence said that if you were a remove or two from him Toussaint could be a prince of the earth toward you, but anybody sharing the same blood with him he begrudged. Except Marie. Marie was thin and not particularly dark—her father was Irish, an office man at the agency in Browning—and only her black hair, which she wore shoulder-long, brought out the Blackfeet ancestry and whatever farther east Indian heredity it was that Toussaint transmitted. So her resemblance to Toussaint really was only a similar music in her voice, and the same running chuckle at the back of her throat when she was pleased. Yet be around the two of them together for only a minute and you knew without mistake that here were not merely natural allies but blood kin. There just was something unmistakably alike in how each of them regarded life. As if they had seen it all before and shared the amusement that things were no better this ti
me around.
But Toussaint’s story of the first Fourth wasn’t quite done. "I took a turn at sentry. I was in there drinking with them. In the saloon. Already an old man, me. Fifteen."
"Ancient as Jick," Marie murmured with a smile in my direction. If she but knew. Maybe my toot with Stanley that night in the cabin didn’t break any saloon records, but it was spree enough for a starter.
"Jick has a few months to go yet," my mother corrected Marie’s observation.
"I’m getting there as fast as I can," I defended, drawing a laugh from our assemblage.
* * *
As you can see, an all but perfect Fourth of July picnic so far. I say all but, because the year before, Alec had been with us instead of off sparking Leona. The only awareness of him this year was the way people took some care not to mention him to my parents.
* * *
My mother turned to Marie and asked: “Do you suppose these scenery inspectors have earned any food?"
"We’ll take pity on them," Marie agreed, and the picnic provisions began to emerge from the pair of grub boxes.
The blanket became like a raftload of food, except that such a cargo of eating likely would have sunk any raft.
There were the chickens my mother spent part of the morning frying. Delectable young spring friers with drumsticks about the thickness of your thumb. This very morning, too, Toussaint had caught a batch of trout in the Two Medicine and now here they beckoned, fried up by Marie. Blue enamel broilers of fish and fowl, side by side. The gateposts of heaven.