Road Trip Yellowstone

by Dina Mishev

  Local celebrities such as Colonel Buffalo Bill Cody, Frederic Remington, William Jennings Bryan, Calamity Jane, and later Ernest Hemingway frequented the hotel. On September 18, 1897, the Sundance Kid robbed Carbon County Bank, which was housed inside the Pollard Hotel. Local lawman John Dunn placed the Sundance Kid under arrest, not once but twice. The second time was after he escaped from the jail in Deadwood, South Dakota.

  Mr. Pollard remained in Red Lodge until his death in 1942. His widow ran the hotel for several years, before selling it to Lottie Salk. Over the years, it carried several names: the Chief, the Hotel Tyler, and the Cielo Grande.

  In 1991, Hotel Company of Red Lodge bought the hotel and began the Pollard’s restoration in accordance with National Park Service guidelines. Efforts paid off when on June 15, 1994, the Pollard Hotel re-opened with a new elevator, an elegant dining room, a unique history room, and large suites that have indoor balconies and oversized jetted tubs. A stained glass window on the east side of the building brings in the morning light. Round stained glass accent windows face out from guest suites into the gallery area. 2 North Broadway, www.thepollard.com. 406-446-0001 or 1-800-POLLARD

  LOCAL LOWDOWN GARY FERGUSON, Author

  Gary Ferguson has written twenty-three books on science and nature, including the award-winning Hawks Rest: A Season in the Heart of Yellowstone for which he lived for a summer in one of the most remote spots in the Lower 48 states. Other books include Decade of the Wolf (co-written with Douglas Smith), Shouting at the Sky: Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild, and Through the Woods: A Journey Through America’s Forests. Ferguson’s most recent book is Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the American West. In January 2017, Ferguson said, “I’m ruminating about my next big project. It will certainly be resting in ecology and the wisdom of science and the wisdom of cultures across thousands of years. They’re not as far apart as we sometimes think.”

  A native of South Bend, Indiana, Ferguson came to Red Lodge, Montana, in 1987 with his wife Jane, who was an environmental educator. “Between her job and me being a nature writer, the idea of moving to the largest intact ecosystem in the temperate world was appealing,” Gary says. When Gary and Jane arrived in Red Lodge to check it out, “it was a love affair at first sight. The ecosystem was every bit as magnificent as we imagined. And the people of Red Lodge are interesting and intriguing and supportive of who we are,” Gary says. In 2005, when Jane died canoeing in northern Ontario, Red Lodge became even more important to Gary. “The community was a stable, loving base which I could use to find my way out of the darkness of grief.” Gary’s 2014 book, The Carry Home, chronicles the role wilderness played in helping him through his grief and in rediscovering himself. He married cultural psychologist Mary Clare in 2014.

  Q: How did you get started writing?

  GARY FERGUSON: I started writing back around 1981 full time. I was very interested from a young age in the natural world. Could I not write about nature, I do not know if I would have followed the writing path.

  Q: What were some of your early experiences out in nature?

  GF: I told my parents when I was 9 that I was moving to the Rockies. I sent away money I had earned mowing lawns for a subscription to Colorado Rocky Mountain West magazine. I sat in the basement in South Bend and drooled over those for years. We went on a family vacation to Colorado when I was 10. After high school graduation, a friend and I took our first backpacking trip. We had gear strapped with seatbelt webbing to our backpacks. We had Dinty Moore stew for dinner. Not exactly the poster children for backpacking, but when you’re 18, you can get away with a lot. Looking back, it was a seminal trek for both of us.

  Q: What about as an adult?

  GF: I certainly loved my work for National Geographic’s book division on Hawks Rest. I walked 144 miles from my front door in Red Lodge to extreme southeast Yellowstone. I was supplied several times with items a mule train brought in. To be in that level of wilderness for that length of time was extraordinary. I’ve logged over 30,000 miles of trail and thousands of miles of river.

  Q: You spend so much time in the wilderness. How do you adjust to life back in town?

  GF: Red Lodge is an open friendly place. As much as I like to think of myself as independent and a loner, community is critical.

  Q: If a visitor wanted to get a sense of the true Red Lodge, not just the galleries on the main street, what would you recommend they do?

  GF: The first thing I’d do is park the car and not only walk Broadway but the neighborhoods as well. It has a wide range of abilities, talents, and socioeconomics. Go to Sam’s Tap Room, go to Café Regis, of which I was a former owner, go to places like Honey’s on Broadway and just sit around and talk and actually engage in the conversations of the people who are there. You’ll find an openness and friendliness that perhaps you’re not used to. There doesn’t need to be a pre-existing relationship in place to engage with Red Lodge.

  CAFÉ REGIS

  “If you want to be in the know, pronounce it café reh-gis,” says author and former Café Regis owner Gary Ferguson. “Not ree-gis.” Even if you’re not hungry for fresh, organic, locally sourced food, it’s worth stopping by. Before it was a cafe, the building, which dates from 1941, was in continuous operation by the Regis family as a grocery store. In fact, some of the trees and gardens behind the building are the same ones that miners bought produce from on their way to work.

  The 1941 Regis Grocery is likely the only art deco building around for at least 100 miles. “I heard it was a case of function driving form,” Gary says of the building’s design. The family had observed “that if you angled the front door, the prevailing winds would blow it free of snow, and sure enough, that’s exactly what happened,” he says. 501 S. Word, (406) 446-1941, www.caferegis.com

  Earlywood

  Brad Bernhart doesn’t make wooden spoons that look like spoons just because that’s what they’re supposed to look like. In fact, his aren’t spoon-shaped at all, but flat. “It didn’t take me long to realize that traditional wooden spoons are not that good at what they’re supposed to do,” says Brad, whose company Earlywood is based in Red Lodge.

  What really got Brad thinking about an alternate design was using a traditional spoon to clean out a pan. “The traditional spoon part is round, so only one point of it makes contact with the bottom or side—you just get little squiggly marks,” he says. With Earlywood’s flat sauté spoon, which Brad says is Earlywood’s most popular product, “you can get the whole side or bottom in one swoop.”

  Earlywood was featured in the food magazine Bon Appétit just before Christmas 2016. As a result, “We had a 3-day period where we did more sales than we did in the first 10 months of the year,” Brad says. Orders on the company’s website have slowed down since, but it’s obviously been discovered. Brad’s had to hire several new staffers, but “everything is still made in Red Lodge,” he says. “It’s going to take a lot to make that ever change.”

  LOCAL LOWDOWN HIGH COUNTRY COWBOYS

  The High Country Cowboys are an unlikely group. “We’ve never had any schooling musically,” says John Kosel, one of three brothers in the group (Joe and Marty are the other two). “But we have a large family, and growing up, we always played one kind of music or another.” There’s also the fact that the brothers are rather shy. After they started singing three-part harmony and playing together in 2006, “none of us wanted to take it anywhere,” John says. “We were just doing it because we liked playing and singing together.”

  But their older sister Theresa, the manager of Red Lodge’s community center, had other ideas for them, albeit not on the scale the brothers now perform. She asked John, Joe, and Marty to perform at the community center during lunch. “We told her we guessed we could do it,” John says. “We weren’t so excited about it at first. I didn’t think people would like the old music we do.” But the High Country Cowboys were a hit and the community center wanted them to return.

  Word got out ab
out this awesome new local group and the Pollard, the historic hotel in downtown Red Lodge, asked them to play there. John recalls, “We were really hesitant about that. That really wasn’t what we wanted to do.” After their first night at the Pollard, the manager pulled the brothers aside and told them he wanted them to play there as often as they could. “That was when we decided we had better get serious about it,” John says. From 2014 on, the High Country Cowboys became a weekly fixture at the hotel. Since then, the brothers have played at Billings’s Alberta Bair Theater and at that city’s St. Johns Summer Concert Series and have recorded four albums.

  “From our earliest album to our latest there’s a big difference,” John says. What hasn’t changed, however, is the style of music the brothers play. “We’ve always been Roy Rogers fans and fans of Sons of the Pioneers. This was our dad’s favorite kind of music when he was growing up. He’s pretty excited how things turned out with our music.”

  The brothers only got into singing western harmony in 2006, after watching a DVD about learning to sing in this style by Riders in the Sky. “If Riders in the Sky could do it, we thought we could too,” John says.

  While they’ve graduated to singing some original songs, John says, “even when we write a song, it is in the style of traditional cowboy music.” Marty, the youngest brother and lead singer, wrote the three original songs on the group’s fourth album, Cowboy. (In 2015, Marty was recognized as Yodeler of the Year by the Western Music Association.)

  When not on stage, the three brothers have other artistic pursuits. Guitarist John is an oil painter, bassist Joe a luthier (he made the guitars he and John play), and Marty makes leather goods from saddles to chaps. Find the brothers’ schedule on their website at www.thehighcountrycowboys.com.

  As much thinking as he puts into each Earlywood design, it’s difficult to believe Brad started making wooden utensils as a way to relax. He was living in Bozeman and studying mechanical engineering. “I was always kind of creative, and, after 4 years of studying engineering, I was missing it,” he says. The house he lived in had a lawn mower shed in the backyard. “I got a couple of simple tools, one or two pieces of wood, and started cranking away in the shed just to clear my head.”

  It wasn’t until he was working full time as an engineer in Portland, Oregon, that Brad began thinking he could turn his hobby into a business. “I went to work during the day, and, if I wanted to relax at night, I’d go out and make a couple of spoons,” he says. “About a year in, I started thinking about art fairs.” Eighty percent of the designs Earlywood sells today are designs Brad came up with during his time in Portland. “I always put function ahead of fashion,” he explains. “If I were to design something that I thought looked cool at the time, then I’d have to change it as time went on. But when function dictates, there is no reason to change, as long as it is designed well in the first place.”

  Combine Brad’s timeless designs with some of the hardest woods out there, and you get wooden utensils that will be around a long time. “If a cherry spoon is around for 50 years, I wouldn’t see why one of my Mexican ebony spoons wouldn’t last three times as long,” Brad says. All of Earlywood’s utensils are made from one of four woods. The softest wood he uses is hard maple. The three harder woods are bloodwood, jotoba, and Mexican ebony. How hard are they? Well, jotoba is used to make railroad ties, just to give you an idea. www.earlywooddesigns.com

  Festival of Nations

  In its early days, when it was still a mining town, Red Lodge had residents from around the world who were mostly European immigrants. In 1951, trying to come up with a way to keep the town vital after the coal mines had closed between 1924 and 1932, officials founded the Festival of Nations. The annual, multiday ethnic festival continues to this day every August. The festival has everything from bagpipers to Celtic fusion dancers, accordion concerts, Munirah belly dancers, Scandinavian dancers, Highlands games, an ethnic potluck, readings of Roma (gypsy) folktales, and drum circles. www.redlodge.com

  ROAD TRIP 5 COOKE CITY

  Cooke City–Silver Gate’s small number of year-round residents and location (between Yellowstone’s Northeast Entrance and Beartooth Pass) make Gardiner look like an urban transportation hub by comparison. Cooke City has one road through it, and, for 8 months of the year, the road is closed at the east end of town, making Cooke City the literal dead end. Even in summer, Cooke City takes a little work to get to, but it’s worth it, whether you take the time to check out the art gallery at the town dump or not.

  Cooke City Museum

  Cooke City Museum is more than its name suggests. Located in the chamber of commerce building downtown, the museum tells the history of the communities of Cooke City, Silver Gate, and Colter Pass through nine permanent exhibits curated by lifelong resident Kelly Hartman, who also works as curator of the Gallatin History Museum. Kelly had returned to Cooke City after earning her bachelor’s degree in fine arts. When the director of the museum suddenly passed away, Kelly ended up taking over and loved it. “My parents being wildlife people, we didn’t learn that much about the area’s mining history. I enjoyed learning about my community in a way I hadn’t touched before.” Since working at the Cooke City Museum, Kelly has started writing a book on the area’s history between the 1870s and the 1940s.

  LOCAL LOWDOWNKELLY HARTMAN, Curator of the Cooke City Museum

  Kelly Hartman was born on the other side of Yellowstone, in Jackson, Wyoming, but her parents moved to Cooke City before she was a year old. “When my family moved here, the one-room schoolhouse was actually closed, but it reopened right before I started to go,” she says. Kelly graduated from the Cooke City School in 2003 and then went on to high school in Gardiner, Montana, 2 hours away. She later got her BFA in painting and has been the director of the Cooke City Museum since 2013 and recently moved to Bozeman to take a position as curator at the Gallatin History Museum.

  Q: How many grades were there in the school?

  KELLY HARTMAN: It was kindergarten through eighth grade.

  Q: And how many students at once are we talking about?

  KH: One year I was in school, we ended up having seventeen kids, and that was a lot. I had one boy that was in my grade for at least half of my schooling.

  Q: What were the logistics of class?

  KH: Each grade had its own schedule, like you would at any school. All of our desks were in one room though. The youngest kids had their own small table. There was usually a teacher’s aide that would work with us in addition to the teacher. We’d work at our own pace. Maybe start with English and do however much of your assigned work you could do in that hour. If you finished, you could move onto the next thing or help other students, which was great. We’d have recess and do lots of skiing for physical education and take trips to the dump on Friday.

  Q: When you transitioned from the Cooke City School to Gardiner High School for ninth grade, how’d you do academically?

  KH: Both my younger sister, who started in Gardiner in sixth grade, and I were way ahead in reading. Academically, I was always at the top of my class. My sister was way ahead in math. I think the one-room school was great academically.

  Q: So did you ride the bus 4 hours a day to and from high school?

  KH: My parents ended up renting a house in Gardiner. We’d go up for the week. My parents own a gallery in Silver Gate, but my sister and I would stay put in Gardiner.

  Q: Aside from academics, how was transitioning to a bigger school?

  KH: It was very difficult. Your freshman year of high school is hard anyway and I went from having one student in my class to twenty, which isn’t large by any means, but socially, I found it hard to move into a new group of people. I think my sister, because she came in a little younger, adapted a little better.

  Q: If there were just two kids in your Cooke City class, was there a graduation ceremony?

  KH: Yes. We had a valedictorian and speech and the whole community came. When I graduated, I know I was the first kid to gradua
te who had been to the school for all grades in 25 or 30 years. The community was always really supportive of the school.

  Prior to World War I, there were an estimated 200,000 one-room schoolhouses in the United States. Today there are only around 200. Montana has about sixty one-room schoolhouses, more than any other state, but historians are worried about their future as rural residents continue to move to towns and cities. In 2013, the National Trust for Historic Preservation added Montana’s one-room schoolhouses to their list of the Nation’s 11 Most Endangered Historical Places. Cooke City is home to one of the state’s one-room schoolhouses.

  “It’s not a huge space that we have,” she says, “but we have touch screens at each exhibit that can fit a lot of information.” Her current favorite is a temporary exhibit that opened in 2016 and will be up for several years entitled “He Might Strike It Still.” The exhibit includes letters by Anastazie Zucker, an immigrant from Bohemia and a Cooke City resident from the 1890s into the 1930s. She came to Cooke City with her miner husband, Anton, who for decades maintained the belief they would hit it big someday. They never did though. “We had some people come in and they’ve almost cried reading these old letters,” Kelly says. “As I’ve learned more about Anastazie and Anton, they’ve become these great-great-grandparents of mine. They never struck it big enough to leave. They dug a 250-foot tunnel in their time here. I think these letters are one of the most important things we have because they tell such a story of life here.” 206 W. Main St., (406) 838-2203, www.cookecitymontanamuseum.org