by Peter Millar
It is not as if all these people knew each other before they boarded the train. It’s just that way middle-class Americans of a certain age have of meeting one another and within minutes sharing their life stories. In her book The White Masai (which I translated from the German) Swiss writer Corinne Hofmann described something similar among the Samburu people of Kenya: a genuine and sincere fascination with the lives, experiences and families of strangers from the same background, even though they have not the slightest interest in the ‘world at large’ which is beyond their grasp or experience. These women chatting and knitting would be shocked by the comparison even as they exchange endlessly detailed interrogations about family life, the whereabouts of sons, daughters and grandchildren they will never meet. It’s a communality of lifestyle, mutual reassurance. A big village attitude that is surprisingly prevalent outside America’s metropolises. You could hear a dozen life stories in a morning in the Empire Builder observation car; you just have to ask yourself if you want to.
The knitters glance up for little more than a second or two even when the broad sweep of the majestic Missouri comes into view. When Lewis and Clark first explored this area in 1805 in the attempt to find a passable route across the continent, it is easy to see how the river was not just the closest thing to a highway but virtually the only means of orientation. If they followed the river they had to be heading towards the continental divide that they hoped against hope lay ahead, despite having just sketchy information from friendly Indian tribes who themselves knew nothing beyond their raiding parties’ farthest foray into the territory of other tribes.
This was Sioux country, and they were one of the tribes who early on had an idea these white people coming through might eventually prove not just a trading opportunity, but a serious nuisance. Happy enough at first to barter furs for guns like the other tribes, they also managed to demonstrate that they quickly learned how to use them, and were deadly shots with their traditional bow and arrow too. Both on the outward and return journey, Lewis and Clark’s little group learned that if other tribes were friendly and at times indispensable, the Sioux on the whole were best avoided. This has naturally tended to give them a bad press down the years – although it has also served to make their name well remembered while those of their other more accommodating neighbours faded – but only because they were first to suspect that one day the strangers would no longer be just ‘passing through’.
Those of us passing through now stretch to catch a glimpse of the little white picket fence that surrounds Fort Buford, just south of the tracks. Just beyond the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers where Lewis and Clark were forced to make a brief diversion to find out which body of water to follow, Fort Buford was by the 1870s the army’s frontline outpost in the Sioux wars and later provided protection for the railway builders. Seen from the passing train it seems tiny, far too insubstantial to have been important in the conquest of a continent. Yet it was here in 1881 that Sitting Bull handed over his Winchester .44 calibre rifle to Major D.H. Brotherton, and effectively ended the last major Native American resistance to the European invaders.
Half an hour down the line we cross Muddy Creek to pass the Fort Peck Indian Reservation just outside the nondescript little town of Culbertson. This is where Sitting Bull came to live out the rest of his life. He wasn’t forced to leave his homelands, but he must have felt them visibly shrink around him.
When the train crosses the state line between North Dakota and Montana – invisible though it means adjusting watches back one hour as we move into Mountain Time – we are officially in ‘Big Sky’ country. This is no exaggeration. Rocky bluffs rear up on one side, then yield again to endless plains of wheat, and eventually back into scrubland and prairie. We pass the occasional homestead that looks just like you imagine a ‘homestead’ – as opposed to a home or even a house – ought to look: a rickety shack with peeling paint, a pickup and a couple of rusted indeterminate vehicle chassis outside, a few broken fences and a skinny horse nibbling at the stubble. Sort of the place Jed Clampett left before they discovered oil on his land – okay so that was down south and the land was a swamp – but you get the idea. You just know that if you got stranded there in the middle of the night, the folks would either welcome you with hominy grits and fiddle-playing until the small hours, or shoot you on sight and bury you in a shallow grave by the horse trough.
The reality, of course, is that these are descendants of nineteenth-century homesteaders who fled Europe in poverty, risked violent death and starvation to drag their families and few belongings out west because the government promised them ownership of any land they could work for long enough. The government may have kept its initial promise, but the land by and large did not. Little enough this far north is arable and most cattle ranchers today barely scrape a living. ‘These towns up here are just dyin’,’ says Sue, a south Montana resident I would meet later that evening. ‘Did you see some of those homesteads out there in the middle of the prairie? I mean who the hell ever said: Martha, stop the wagon here!’
And then all of a sudden, my wagon stops, as the scrubland gives way to a few low-level wooden houses, a couple of trailers and then a giant grain elevator towering over a couple of rusting freight trains, and a little grey-and-yellow painted clapboard station that announces my destination: Malta, Montana. Only two other people seem to share my enthusiasm.
I have decided to get off the train in Malta partly because this is pretty close to the geographical centre of the entire North American continent, partly because it seems about time to stretch my legs after 22 hours non-stop travel, partly because I am intrigued by the idea of naming a tiny town in the middle of an enormous land mass after a Mediterranean island. But primarily because even though Montana may not have many people nowadays – less than a million in an area more than one and a half times the size of the entire United Kingdom – it does have one of the world’s biggest populations of dinosaurs. It seems to me that I ought at least to make an effort to get acquainted with the absolutely original native Americans.
Although almost nobody is getting on or off the train there are a few people hanging around the station. This doesn’t immediately strike me as too unusual – I had already observed that in some of the smaller towns Amtrak goes through, even without stopping, sitting out to watch the train go by is considered a valid form of amusement. There is also of course the possibility that the two rather prim middle-aged ladies standing around indecisively really are about to board the Empire Builder themselves though neither has any luggage, and they look to me definitely the sort of ladies who travel with luggage.
It’s only after a minute or so standing there by the side of dusty track looking up at the impressive steel grain elevators that are by far the most dominant element in an otherwise almost empty landscape that I seriously hesitate to call remotely urban, and wondering how far the motel I had booked for the night might be, that I hear one of them say, ‘Mr MillAR?’
There’s a tone of doubt in her voice probably because she’s been expecting someone younger, or possibly someone older, but almost certainly someone more impressive, or at least vaguely respectable looking, rather than a dishevelled middle-aged bloke with a Guinness rucksack. But they’re gracious enough to look modestly pleased when I confirm that that is indeed me.
I don’t pronounce my name like that, and have never come across anyone who did – it being the common Northern Irish and Scottish form of ‘Miller’, and is there pronounced accordingly – except for my first boss as foreign editor at the Daily Telegraph who started out by stressing the last syllable disproportionately as if it were some unusual Anglo-French name that required a suitably aristocratic pronunciation. Actually I suspect my ancestors just ground flour.
As it happens, however, they have a concrete reason for mispronouncing my name: and after whooshing me off in an air-conditioned saloon all of 200 metres down the road to the Philips County Museum they introduce me to him. A large ra
ngy beanpole of a man in his early sixties wearing jeans, a lumberjack’s checked shirt and the inevitable baseball cap comes bounding up and greets me with a grip that would make a grizzly bear wince. His name is Jack MillAR, and he and his family have clearly pronounced it like that since they came out here with the original homesteading movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Yes, a fellow Millar’s ancestors were among those who told Martha to stop the wagon.
The welcoming party is all thanks to the wonders of modern technology that has done miracles to bring places like Malta, Montana, into unexpectedly close contact with the rest of the planet. Only 15 years ago I would have found it almost impossible to find the telephone number of Philips County Museum – in fact I probably wouldn’t even have been aware of its existence – but by now, thanks to the internet and email, I’m already on first-name terms with Sharon the curator. And Sharon in turn had got hold of the people I really wanted to see, inside the Judith River Dinosaur Field Station.
I had made a point of emailing in advance because I had noticed from their website that the field station usually closed up for the winter in early October. I had scarcely expected a trackside welcoming party as a result, but they are friendly folk out in Montana. Also they don’t get many visitors. Which isn’t too surprising when you consider the population is just 2,120, which makes it one of the biggest cities around. The next nearest settlements are more than 20 miles in either direction and have a population of 224 and 122 respectively. The nearest place of any size at all is Havre and that’s more than 100 miles west and still has a population of just over 9,000. By any objective terminology Montana is virtually empty. And that’s despite containing, on the face of it, some of the most famous place names in the world. Quite apart from Malta and what was originally Le Havre, you can also find Belgrade, Moscow, Zürich and Glasgow, not to mention the state capital, with a whopping 3,926 inhabitants, Helena, which was named after St Helena, Minnesota, which in turn had been named after the British south Atlantic island where Napoleon ended his days.
I’ve been waiting to ask somebody why Montana seemed so singularly blessed with the names of great cities or exotic places and Jack seems as good a choice as any. His answer is disappointingly mundane: ‘This place was originally Siding 54. The trains had to stop somewhere to take on coal and water. When the rail company decided they wanted to give them proper names, they just spun an old globe of the world and poked it with a finger to make it stop, and that’s the name you got.’ I suppose I should have guessed.
They have enough civic pride though in Malta to have mustered together a collection of exotica to make their little museum actually worth a visit. It includes local Wild West memorabilia such as ‘wanted’ posters issued by Pinkerton’s Detective Agency offering a $4,000 reward for the capture of ‘George Parker alias Ingerfield and Harry Longbaugh alias Alonzo also known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’. The photographs on display of this shady pair, with the kid in a pork-pie hat, make them look older and a lot less glamorous than Robert Redford and Paul Newman who would come to immortalise and romanticise them nearly 80 years later. Alongside is Harvey Logan, better known as ‘Kid Curry’, the other leading member of the Wild Bunch, aka the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, named after a mountain pass hideout in Wyoming.
The train robbery in the film was based on the infamous heist the gang carried out at Exeter Creek just a dozen miles west of Malta on 3 July 1901. According to the legend Cassidy had been on the train since St Paul, Minnesota, his hat pulled low over his eyes to avoid being recognised from the wanted posters. Sundance boarded the train right here in Malta, also posing as a passenger, while ‘Kid’ Curry dropped silently onto the train from the water tower. As the train pulled away he produced a pair of six-guns and ordered the driver to stop where he told him. This was at an isolated spot near a bridge over the creek, where the rest of the gang materialised with getaway horses. Butch and Sundance kept the other passengers under control while Curry dynamited the safe. Just how much loot they escaped with remains a matter of legend ranging from $40,000 in unmarked dollar bills to as high as $65,000 though at least one rumour says the safe held nothing but government paperwork (which, of course, could be another way to describe dollar bills). Not least among the Malta museum’s mementos of the occasion is a pistol said to have been used by Curry.
There are also two of the last authentic Indian headdresses or to give them the name the Indians used, ‘war bonnets’, even though they were never worn to war. These were made in the 1920s by ‘Fish Guts’ of the Assiniboine or Nakopa tribe living on the nearby Fort Belknap reservation. ‘It then went to Herb Fish, son of Fish Guts, then to Jake Meyes (who probably paid for it) who then gave it to Walter Phillips in the 1930s’.
‘Phillips’ recollection was that the feathers of two eagles were required in making the war bonnet, and that in the Indian way of valuing things at the time: one eagle = one stallion = 25–30 mares.’ There is also a note to say that the use of eagle feathers was banned in 1940 and that Herb Fish became a well-thought-of ranch hand. The end of a whole world reduced to a one-paragraph note in a provincial museum.
Next door to the museum is its biggest exhibit: a whole house. They insisted on taking me there. It was a wooden house, superficially not unlike a million other clapboard houses you see all over America. The thing about this one, they said with almost awe in their voices, is that it dated from 1900: ‘Yessir,’ said Jack, ‘this here house is over one hundred years old.’ This is the thing about much of America for us ‘Yurpeans’ – it all just came about yesterday. I didn’t know how to tell them that I’d never owned any property younger. To have told them that most streets in much of London have no houses that modern would have seemed not only bad manners but possibly stretching their imagination. Then it would have been equally difficult to explain that what amazed me most about this house was not its antiquity, but its modernity.
H.G. Robinson, a New York schoolteacher who had fallen in love with the idea of the Wild West, brought it out here in 1900. Yes, brought it here, or rather the men from Sears, Roebuck did. Jack thought that was probably ‘pretty normal’. I was standing there open-mouthed: just the fact that in America more than a century ago you could whistle up a whole house by mail order and have it delivered by the modern miracle of the railroad to the middle of nowhere. That’s the difference: in Europe we’re used to a lot of stuff having been in the same place for a long time – we call it roots and tradition – in America they’re used to getting up and moving on, if that’s what makes economic sense – nowadays they call it a flexible labour market.
Back in the main body of the museum, I’m meandering politely around the various cabinets of curios when I stumble across poignant evidence of Malta’s own unearthed roots. Two glass cabinets held uniforms and family photographs of young men from Malta who had fought in America’s – and often the world’s – wars, from Flanders 1917 to Arnhem 1944, Korea and Vietnam. They, I assume, came back. In the front row is the dress uniform of Larry Schwarz who went to Vietnam in 1968 and was killed in action in 1969.
Next to it stands a large framed board containing dozens of photographs, each draped with a yellow ribbon. All of them are local lads who had served – or were still serving – in Iraq. I count 12 currently on duty there, including two brothers. A smattering of their surnames reflects the diversity of America’s ethnic European mix: Simanton, Pekovitch, LaFond, Retan, Salsbery, Ereaux, Wilkes. A dozen at one time seems a disproportionately large number of sons in peril for a community of little over 2,000 souls, barely the size of my own village in Oxfordshire.
I mention this to the two ladies who had picked me up at the station, and they just smile wanly, smiles that express pride and pain in equal intensity. The war was something they didn’t want to discuss. It was the first sign I had seen since leaving Ground Zero of the impact on America of its current global politics on the empire back home. It was not to be the last.
As it happened, however, there
was another matter my two lady hosts were reluctant to discuss: the main reason for my getting off the train in Malta in the first place – the dinosaurs. They had one, downstairs, they were keen to tell me, although he turned out to be quite a small one as dinosaurs go, a mere 33 feet long, a brachylophosaurus, of which there were probably more hanging around here 65 million years ago than there are people now. He is famed for his ‘pristine pelvis’, Jack told me, indicating the bone in question, then added that that was why they called him ‘Elvis’. At least no one was suggesting this one wasn’t dead.
But interesting as old Elvis was, what I wanted to see was how they went about discovering dinosaur bones and unearthing them, the sort of stuff the experts did across the road, at the field station. This, however, seemed to produce a momentary embarrassment for the two ladies who had formed my welcoming committee. Normally, they said, there would be no problem whatsoever popping into the field station even when the actual dinosaur-digging season was over. Right now, however, in fact at this very moment, unexpectedly, today, there were people working in there.