by Ivan Doig
• • •
Ray Heaney and I went together to the induction station at Missoula in September of 1942, about a week after my eighteenth birthday. And we saw each other during basic training at Fort Lewis out in Washington. In the war itself, though, we went separate ways. Ray spent a couple of years of fighting as a rifleman in Italy and somehow came through it all. These days Ray has an insurance agency over in Idaho at Coeur d’Alene, and we keep in touch by Christmas card.
I wound up in a theater of World War Two that most people don’t even know existed, the Aleutians campaign away to hell and gone out in the Northern Pacific Ocean off Alaska. Those Aleutian islands made me downgrade the wind of the Two country. There is not a lot else worth telling in my warrior career, for early in our attack on Cold Mountain I was one of those who got an Attu tattoo—a Jap bullet in my left leg, breaking the big bone not far above the ankle. Even yet on chilly days, I am reminded down there.
When the army eventually turned me loose into civilian life I used my GI bill to study forestry at the university in Missoula. Each of those college summers I worked as a smokejumper for the Forest Service, parachuting out of more airplanes onto more damn forest fires than now seems sane to me. And in the last of those smokejumping summers I began going with a classmate of mine at the university, a young woman from there in the Bitterroot country. The day after graduation in 1949, we were married. That marriage lasted just a year and a half, and it is not something I care to dwell on.
That same graduation summer I took and passed the Forest Service exam and was assigned onto the Custer National Forest over in eastern Montana. I suppose one of the Mazoola desk jockeys thought it scrupulous, or found it in some regulation, that most of the state of Montana should be put between me and my father on the Two. But all that eastern Montana stint accomplished—hell, even the name got me down, that dodo Custer—was to cock me into readiness to shoot out of the Forest Service when the chance came.
Pete Reese provided the click. As soon as his lambs were shipped in the fall of 1952 Pete offered me a first crack at the Noon Creek ranch. Marie’s health was giving out; she lived only a few more years, dark lovely doe she was; and Pete wanted to seize an opportunity to buy a sheep outfit down in the Gallatin Valley near Bozeman, where the winters might not be quite so ungodly. I remember every exact word from Pete in that telephone call: “You’re only an accidental nephew, Jick, but I suppose maybe I can give you honorary son-in-law terms to buy the place and the sheep.”
I took Pete up on his offer and came back to the Two Medicine country so fast I left a tunnel in the air.
On the twenty-first of March of 1953—we kidded that going through a lambing time together would tell us in a hurry whether we could stand each other the rest of our lives—Marcella Withrow and I were married. Her first marriage, to a young dentist at Conrad, had not panned out either, and she had come back over to Gros Ventre when the job of librarian opened up. That first winter of mine on the Reese place I resorted to the library a lot, and it began to dawn on me that books were not the only attraction. I like to think Marce and I are both tuned to an echo of Dode: “Life is wide, there’s room to take a new run at it.”
In any event, Marce and I seem to have gotten divorce out of our systems with those early wrong guesses, and we have produced two daughters, one married to a fish-and-game man up at Sitka in Alaska, the other living at Missoula where she and her husband both work for the newspaper. We also seem to be here on Noon Creek to stay, for as every generation ends up doing on this ranch we have lately built a new house. Four such domiciles by now, if you count the Ramsay homestead where I was born. It cost a junior fortune in double-glazing and insulation, but we have windows to the mountains all along the west wall of this place. These September mornings when I sit here early at the kitchen table and watch dawn come to the skyline of the Two, coffee forgotten and cold in my cup, the view is worth any price.
The thirty-plus years of ranching that Marce and I have put in here on Noon Creek have not been easy. Tell me what is. But so far the pair of us have withstood coyotes and synthetic fabrics and Two country winters and the decline of sheepherders to persevere in the sheep business, although we have lately diversified into some Charolais cattle and several fields of that new sanfoin alfalfa. I am never going to be red-hot about being a landlord to cows. And the problem of finding decent hay hands these days makes me positively pine for Wisdom Johnson and Bud Dolson and Perry Fox. But Marce and I are agreed that we will try whatever we have to, in order to hang on to this land. I suppose even dude ranching, though I hope to Christ it never quite comes to that.
• • •
Along English Creek, the main change to me whenever I go over there is that sheep are damn few now. Cattle, a lot of new farming; those are what came up on the latest spin of the agricultural roulette wheel. About half the families, Hahns, Frews, Roziers, another generation of Busby brothers, still retain the ranches their parents brought through the Depression. The Van Bebber ranch is owned by a North Dakotan named Florin, and he rams around the place in the same slambang fashion Ed did. Maybe there is something in the water there.
And Dode Withrow’s place is run by one of Dode’s other son-in-laws, Bea’s husband Merle Torrance. Dode though is still going strong, the old boy. Weathered as a stump, but whenever I see that father-in-law of mine he is the original Dode: “What do you know for sure, Jick? Have they found a cure yet for people in the sonofabitching sheep business?”
Anyway, except for big aluminum sheds and irrigation sprinklers slinging water over the fields, you would not find the ranches of English Creek so different from the way they were.
• • •
The Double W now is owned by a company called TriGram Resources, which bought it from the California heirs after Wendell Williamson’s death. As a goddamn tax writeoff, need I say.
• • •
How can it be twenty years since my father retired from the Forest Service? Yet it is.
After this summer I have told about, the next year was awful on him, what with Alec gone from us to the Deuce W and the decision from Mazoola in the winter of 1939 to move my father’s district office from English Creek into Gros Ventre. Access realignment, they called it, and showed him on paper how having the ranger station in town would put him closer by paved road to the remote north portion of the Two. He kicked against it in every way he could think of; even wrote to the Regional Forester himself, the Major: “Since when is running a forest a matter of highway miles?” Before long, though, the war and its matters were on my father’s mind and the mail was bringing Forest Service posters urging “LET’S DELIVER THE WOODS: SHARPEN YOUR AX TO DOWN THE AXIS.”
The way the water of a stream riffles around a rock, the Forest Service’s flow of change went past my father. Major Kelley departed Missoula during the war, to California to head up the government project of growing guayule for artificial rubber. “I’d rather take a beating than admit it,” my father confessed, “but I was kind of getting used to those goddamn kelleygrams.” The Two supervisor Ken Sipe was tapped for a wartime job at Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., and stayed on back there. Their successors in Region One and the Two Medicine forest headquarters simply left my father in place, rangering the English Creek district. I have heard of a ranger out in the state of Washington who spent a longer career on a district, but my father’s record wasn’t far behind.
His first winter of retirement in Gros Ventre was a gloomy and restless time for him, although my mother and I could never tell for sure how much of that was retirement and how much just his usual winter. It was a relief to us all when spring perked him up. I had a call from him the morning of the first day of fishing season:
“Bet you a beer you’ve forgotten how to string ten fish on a willow.”
“I can’t get away” I had to tell him. “I’ve got ewes and lambs all over creation out here. You sure you wouldn’t like to take up a career as a bunch herder?”
“Brook trout,” he informed me, “are the only kind of herd that interests me. You’re missing a free chance at a fishing lesson.”
“I’ll cash that offer next Sunday, okay? You can scout the holes for me today. I want Mom to witness your count when you get home, though. It’s past time I was owed a beer, and it’s beginning to dawn on me that your arithmetic could be the reason.”
“That’ll be the day,” he rose to my joshing. “When I don’t bring home ten fish on a willow. As will be shown to you personally next Sunday.”
When he hadn’t returned by dusk of that day, my mother called me at the ranch and I then called Tom Helwig, the deputy sheriff. I drove across the divide to English Creek and just before full dark found my father’s pickup parked beside the North Fork, on Walter Kyle’s old place. Tom Helwig and I and the men from the English Creek ranches searched and searched, hollering in the dark, until giving up about midnight.
With first light of the next morning I was the one who came onto my father. His body, rather, stricken by a heart attack, away back in the brush atop a beaver dam he’d been fishing. Nine trout on the willow stringer at his side, the tenth still on the hook where my father had dropped his pole.
• • •
“Jick, the summer when Alec left. Could it have come out different? If your father and I hadn’t kept at him, hadn’t had our notions of what he should do—would it all have been different?”
My mother brought this up in the first week after my father passed away. In a time like that, the past meets you wherever you turn. The days do not use their own hours and minutes, they find ones you have lived through with the person you are missing.
Only that once, though, in all the years from then to now, did she wonder that question aloud. The other incidents of the summer of 1939 we often talk over, when I stop by to see how she is doing. She has stayed on in her own house in Gros Ventre. “I’m sufficient company for myself,” this mother of mine maintains. She still grows the biggest vegetable garden in town and is perpetual president of the library board. What irks her is when people regard her, as she puts it, “as if I was Some Kind of a Monument.” I had to talk hard when her eighty-fourth birthday came this April and the new young editor of the Gleaner wanted to interview her. GROS VENTRE WOMAN HAS ‘FOOLED’ THE 20TH CENTURY was the headline. You know how those stories are, though. It is hard to fit such a life into mere inches of words.
I had never told her or my father of Alec’s refusal, that noon when I phoned him about the Flume Gulch fire. And I did not when she asked could it, would it all have come out different?
But what I did say to her was the one truth I could see in that distant English Creek summer.
“If you two hadn’t had the notions you did, you wouldn’t have been yourselves. And if Alec hadn’t gone his way, he wouldn’t have been Alec.”
She shook her head. “Maybe if it had been other times—”
“Maybe,” I said.
• • •
And Stanley Meixell.
Stanley stayed on with the Busby brothers until their lambs were shipped that fall of 1939, then said he thought he’d go have a look at Oregon—“always did like that name.” Early in the war the Busbys received word that he was working in a shipyard out there at Portland. After that, nothing.
So I am left with the last scene of Stanley after the Flume Gulch fire, before my father and I headed in to Gros Ventre. I went over to where Stanley was stirring a pot of gravy.
“Yessir, Jick. Looks like this feedlot of ours is about to close down.”
“Stanley,” I heard myself saying, “all that about the Phantom Woman fire—I don’t know who was right or wrong, or if anybody was, or what. But I’m sorry, about the way things turned out back then.”
“A McCaskill who’ll outright say the word sorry,” replied Stanley. He tasted the gravy, then turned to me, his dark eyes steady within the weave of squint lines. “I was more right than I even knew, that time.”
“What time was that?”
“When I told your folks you looked to me like the jick of the family.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS IS A WORK of fiction, and so English Creek, the Two Medicine National Forest, and the town of Gros Ventre exist only in these pages. Some of their geography is actual—the area of Dupuyer Creek and the Rocky Mountain Front, west of the town of Dupuyer, Montana. I’m afraid, though, that anyone who attempts to sort the real from the imagined in this book is in for confusion. In general I’ve retained nearby existing places such as Valier, Conrad, Choteau, Heart Butte and so on, but anything within what I’ve stretched geography to call the “Two Medicine country” I have felt free to change or invent. Thus my town of Gros Ventre, on Dupuyer’s actual site, shares with Dupuyer only its origin as a stopover for freight wagons. That, and my love for the place.
Two persons I allude to were actual: Regional Forester Evan W. Kelley and pioneer Ben English. Insofar as possible I’ve sketched them from contemporary accounts or historical records. Where their lives coincide with those of my own characters, I’ve simply tried to do what seems to me the fiction writer’s job—make the stuff up as realistically as I can. My particular thanks to Mary English Lindsey for sharing with me her memories of her father, and to Jack Hayne for contributing from his lode of knowledge about the Dupuyer area’s pioneers.
I could not have created my version of the Two country in the period of this novel without the newspaper files and other local historical material of several northern Montana public libraries. I’m much indebted to Choteau Public Library and librarians Maureen Strazdas and Marian Nett; Conrad Public Library and librarians Corleen Norman and Steve Gratzer, Great Falls Public Library, librarians Sister Marita Bartholome, Howard Morris, and Susan Storey, and library director Richard Gerken; Havre Public Library and librarian Bill Lisonby; Hill County Library and Dorothy Armstrong; Valier Public Library and librarian Sue Walley. And my appreciation as well to Harriet Hayne of Dupuyer, for sharing the taped interviews done for Dupuyer’s remarkable centennial volume, By Gone Days and Modern Ways.
The Forest History Society provided many otherwise unavailable details of the lives led by U.S. Forest Service rangers and their families. Great thanks to my friends there for being so attentive to my needs, whether I happened to be on premises or at my typewriter in Seattle: Kathy and Ron Fahl, Mary Beth Johnson, and Pete Steen.
Much of the 1930s background for this book derives from the holdings of the three principal repositories of Montana history, and I’m grateful to the staff of each. The Renne Library of Montana State University at Bozeman; librarians Minnie Paugh and Ilah Shriver of Special Collections, and archivist Jean Schmidt. The Mansfield Library of the University of Montana at Missoula; librarian Kathy Schaefer of Special Collections, and archivist Dale Johnson. The Montana Historical Society at Helena; Bob Clark, Patricia Bick, Ellen Arguimbau—with particular thanks to reference librarian Dave Walter, who unflinchingly fielded query after query in the years I worked on this book.
For their generous encouragement and for rescuing me whenever I got lost in their specific fields of expertise, my thanks too to Montana’s corps of professional historians, particularly Stan Davison, Bill Farr, Harry Fritz, Duane Hampton, Mike Malone, Rex Myers, and Rich Roeder. And I know of no other state with a published heritage of such quality and quantity as that of Montana: The Magazine of Western History; my gratitude to Montana’s editor, Bill Lang, for his skills as well as his friendship.
The University of Washington Library, my home base for this and my other books, again was an invaluable resource. I owe thanks to the Northwest Collection’s Carla Rickerson, Andy Johnson, Dennis Andersen, Susan Cunningham, and Marjorie Cole; to Glenda Pearson of the Newspaper and Microcopy Center; and to Barbara Gordon of the Forest Resources library.
For vital guidance into the historical holdings of the U.S. Forest Service, I’m indebted to Maggie Nybo of Lewis and Clark National Forest headquarters in Great
Falls and Raymond Karr and Jud Moore of the information office at Region One headquarters in Missoula. And I owe specific and special thanks to Charles E. “Mike” Hardy of Missoula, both for loaning me his personal collection of fireline notebooks, cookbooks, etc., and for his cataloguing of the papers of Harry T. Gisborne, longtime USFS forest fire researcher, at the University of Montana archives. I emphasize that while I have drawn from the fire descriptions of Gisborne, Elers Koch, and a number of other Montana foresters of their generation, the Flume Gulch fire is my own concoction.
I benefited greatly from listening to two career Forest Service men as they “pawed over old times”: the late Nevan McCullough of Enumclaw, Washington, and Dahl Kirkpatrick of Albuquerque, New Mexico. My thanks to Mike McCullough for arranging that joint interview.
Many of the details of my Gros Ventre Fourth of July rodeo are due to the diligence of Kristine Fredriksson, registrar of collections and research at the ProRodeo Hall of Champions & Museum of the American Cowboy in Colorado Springs.
Vernon Carstensen, as ever a fund of ideas, brought to my attention the Montana origins of the famous dust storm of May, 1934, which I have appropriated for my Two Medicine country, and was a valuable sounding board about the Depression and the West.
Special thanks to my first and best friend in the Dupuyer country, Tom Chadwick; his driving skills delivered Carol and me to much of the landscape of this book.
My wife, Carol, has been the first reader of all my books. This time, camera ever in hand, she also became geographer of the Two country and architect of the town of Gros Ventre. My debt to her in all my work is beyond saying.
To my agent Liz Darhansoff, and my editor, Tom Stewart—thanks for making English Creek possible.
One of my first memories, a few months before my sixth birthday, is of hearing my parents and their neighbors discuss the radio news of the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April, 1945. Thus it is very nearly forty years now that I have been listening to Montanans. But never with more benefit than during the writing of English Creek. By interview or letter or phone, and in some instances by conversation and acquaintanceship down through the years, the following Montanans have lent me lore which in one way or another contributed to this book. My deep thanks to them all. Bozeman: Jake and Eleanor Mast. Butte: Lucy Old. Byunum: Ira Perkins. Choteau: A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Conrad: Albert Warner. Corvallis: Helen Eden. Deer Lodge: Frank A. Shaw. Dupuyer: Lil and Tom Howe. Flaxville: Eugene Hatfield. Forsyth: James H. Smith. Frazer: Arthur H. Fast. Fort Benton: Alice Klatte, C. G. Stranahan. Great Falls: George Engler, Ted Fosse, Geoffrey Greene, Bradley and Joy Hamlett. Hamilton: Billie Abbey, George M. Stewart. Havre: Charles M. Brill, Edward J. Cook, Elmer and Grace Gwynn, Frances Inman, Frank Lammerding, Howard Sanderson. Helena: John Gruar, Eric White. Hogeland: Adrian Olszewski. Jackson: Kenneth Krause. Malta: Fred Olson, Egil Solberg. Missoula: Henry J. Viche. Peerless: Ladon Jones. Superior: Wally Ringer. Valier: Jim Sheble. White Sulphur Springs: Joyce Celander, Tony Hunolt, Clifford Shearer. Wisdom: Mr. and Mrs. Fred Else.