by Ivan Doig
I heard somebody say once that the business section of every Western town he’d ever seen looked as if it originated by falling out the back end of a truck. Not so with Gros Ventre. During those Depression years Gros Ventre did look roadworn. Weathered by all it had been through. But to me the town also held a sense of being what it ought to be. Of aptness, maybe is the term. Not fancy, not shacky. Steady. Settlement here dated back to when some weary freight wagoneer pulled in for the night at the nice creekside sheltered by cottonwoods. As the freighters’ trail between Fort Shaw on the Sun River and southern Alberta developed, this site became a regular waystop, nicknamed The Middle since it was about midway between Fort Shaw and Canada—although some of us also suspect that to those early-day wagoneers the place seemed like the middle of nowhere. Gros Ventre grew to about a thousand people when the homesteaders began arriving to Montana in droves in the first decade of this century—my mother could remember in her childhood coming to town and seeing wagon after wagon of immigrants heading out onto the prairie, a white rag tied on one spoke of a wagonwheel so the revolutions could be counted to measure the bounds of the claimed land—and that population total never afterward varied more than a hundred either way.
This south to north route Mouse and I were taking through Gros Ventre, I now have to say, saved for the last what to me was the best of the town: a pair of buildings at the far end of Main Street, last outposts before the street/highway made its curve and zoomed from Gros Ventre over the bridge across English Creek.
The night during our campjacking trip when I was baptizing my interior with alcohol and Stanley Meixell was telling me the history of the Two Medicine National Forest from day one, a surprise chapter of that tale was about the hostelry that held the most prominent site in Gros Ventre. Stanley’s arrival to town when he first came here to the Two was along the route Mouse and I had just done, from the south, and as Stanley rode along the length of Main Street, here at the far end a broad false-front with a veranda beneath it was proclaiming:
BEER LIQUORS CIGARS
MEALS AT ALL
HOURS
NORTHERN HOTEL
LUNCHES
PUT UP
C. E. SEDGWICK, PROP.
“Looks like it could kind of use a prop, all right,” Stanley observed to a bib-overalled idler leaning against one of the porch posts. Who turned out to be the exact wrong person to make that joke to: C. E. Sedgwick himself.
“If my enterprise don’t suit you,” Sedge huffed, “you can always bunk down there in the diamond willows,” indicating the brush at the bend of English Creek.
“How about,” Stanley offered, “me being a little more careful with my mouth, and you giving me a second chance as a customer?”
Sedge hung his thumbs into his bib straps and considered. Then decided: “Go mute and I might adopt you into the family. Bring your gear on in.”
The Northern burned in the dry summer of 1910. Although, according to old-timers, “burned” doesn’t begin to say it. Incinerated, maybe, or conflagrated. For the Northern blaze took the rest of the block with it and threatened that whole end of town; if there had been a whisper of wind, half of Gros Ventre would have become ash and a memory. Sedge being Sedge, people weren’t surprised when he decided to rebuild. After all, he went around in those overalls because what he really liked about being a hotelier was the opportunity to be his own maintenance man. But what Sedge erected still sat, this Fourth when I was atop Mouse, across the end of Main Street as a kind of civic astonishment. A three-story fandango in stone, quarried from the gray cliffs near where English Creek joins the Two Medicine River; half a block square, this reborn Sedgwick hostelry, with round towers at each corner and a swooping pointed ornament in the middle, rather like the spike on those German soldiers’ helmets. Even yet, strangers who don’t know that the Pondera County courthouse is twenty-two miles east in Conrad assume that Sedge’s hotel is it. Sedge in fact contributed to the civic illusion by this time not daubing a sign all across the front of the place. Instead only an inset of chiseled letters rainbowing over the entranceway:
Sedge sold out in 1928, to a family from Seattle who seemed to somehow eke a living out of that big gray elephant of a hotel even after hard times hit. About 1931 Sedge died of pleurisy, and almost as if she’d been waiting just offstage, his widow emerged as one of Gros Ventre’s most well-to-do citizens and certainly the looniest. Lila Sedgwick was a tall bony woman. Her build always reminded me of Abraham Lincoln. Almost any day she could be seen downtown three or four times, some days six or eight, for she no sooner would get home than she would forget about having just gone for the mail or on some other errand and would go for it again. In her long old-style dresses with those Lincoln arms and elbows poking out she inevitably was a figure of fun, although the one and only time I said something smart about her my mother’s frown closed me down in a hurry.
“Lila Sedge is not to be laughed at,” she said, not in her whetstoned voice but just sort of instructively. “The clouds have settled on her mind.”
I don’t know where my mother got that, but always after when I would see Lila Sedge, creeping along this street for the third time in an hour or gandering up at a cottonwood tree as if she’d never encountered one before, I would wonder about how it was to have a clouded mind. Somewhere in there, I supposed, a bruise-colored thunderhead that was Sedge’s death. Maybe mares’ tails high away in the past where she was a girl. Fluffs which carried faces—aunts, uncles, schoolmates, any of us she happened to meet on the street—in and out of her recognition. Until my mother’s words about Lila Sedge I had never thought of the weather of the brain, but more and more I have come to believe in it.
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 Great Falls it took about three blocks of First Avenue South to add up into a neighborhood of similar local notoriety. Actually, as with any pleasure emporium, the wickedest thing about the Medicine Lodge was its reputation.
The Medicine Lodge had waited out Prohibition behind boarded windows, but Tom Harry more than brought it back to light and life. Also, maybe after those dry years the town was thirsty for a saloon with a bit of flair. Tom Harry had come over from running a bar, and some said a taxi dance joint as well, at the Fort Peck dam project. Supposedly all he brought with him was a wad of cash and the picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt which had adorned the wall of his Fort Peck enterprise. Be that as it may, in the Medicine Lodge FDR was promptly joined on the wall by a minor menagerie of stuffed animal heads Tom Harry acquired from somewhere. Several buck deer and an antelope and a mountain sheep and a bobcat snarling about the company he was in, not to mention the six-point elk head which set off arguments every hunting season about how much his absent body would weigh.
As matters proved out, along with Tom Harry also came a set of invisible rules of saloon behavior which every so often somebody would stray across. I think of the night when my father and I were entering the Medicine Lodge and met a stranger with a cigar in his mouth being forcibly propelled into the street. It turned out that although Tom Harry himself went around under a blue cigarette haze—tailormades; no Fort Peck bartender ever had time to roll his own—he would not tolerate cigar smoke.
In itself, the taxidermy herd populated the Medicine Lodge considerably. But the place also held a constant legion of the living, more or less. These setters, as my father called the six or eight guys who sat around in there—he was not above stepping in for a beer after our Lunchery meal, and if nobody official-looking was on hand Tom Harry didn’t seem to mind my being with him—the setters always occupied the stools at the far end of the bar, and anybody who entered got long gazes from them as if they were cataloguing the
human race.
Decapitated animals and owlish geezers do not, I realize, sound like much of a decor. And yet the Medicine Lodge did three times as much business as Spenger’s or the Pastime, both much more “respectable” places back downtown. I suppose it is and ever will be the habit of the race: people gravitate to a certain place to do their drinking, and logic will never veer them. At least one night a week in the Medicine 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 overstates, 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 treetops 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 brou
ght 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.