Posts Tagged Montana

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There are many sides to literary Montana. One is the Montana of the poet and painter. That is the Montana of landscapes and mountains, of blue-ribbon trout streams and elk herds and wide-open spaces under a wide-open sky.

Another Montana is the Montana of the Western. That is the Montana of small tough towns, and cowboys, of people who live close to edge of the ever-present natural and human wilderness.

There is I suppose another Montana as well that has developed over the years. That is the Montana of literary carpetbaggers. It is the Montana of college-educated interlopers from tamer places who think it is fun to slum in a tough town bar every now and then, or to work their own boutique-herd of cattle purchased by hook or crook, by Hollywood exploits or New York-lauded literary sales. But in the end, their books always seem hollow because they know only part of Montana, the tourist part, the view out the window. Hence they do not know Montana at all.

They have never had to work someone else’s cattle, or build someone else’s fence-line. They have never sat in a town bar and known what it is like not to have enough money for another beer, or enough money on a Monday morning to put enough gas into their  pickup truck so they can work another day at a soul-killing job they hate. They do not know what it is like to have rich outsiders buying up all the ranches, driving up prices, wanting to change the way things are.

Montana is beautiful and it is violent. It is hard-fought high school football and basketball games that really matter to county pride. It is crushing rural poverty. It is back-breaking employment that takes a toll on your body and soul for a wage that would be laughable in any tamer place. It is a place where outside businesses and outside interests are always to be suspected because they see the place where you live as only a commodity, a place to be bought cheap and sold to the highest bidder

There are many ways to write about Montana. Gary Cook has chosen the hard-boiled way.

Cook creates the kind of characters that would be at home in a Carl Hiaasen novel or an Elmore Leonard one and then gives them one great stage to act on, the “real” Montana… or at least the gritty and noir-ish edge of the real one.

A Murder of Wolves is available at Amazon.

Here are the opening lines of the Chapter Two. Read them and you can easily see why I enjoyed A Murder of Wolves so much.

Enjoy!

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(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

On the day of my mother’s funeral, over 30 years ago now, I took my Great-Uncle Carl for a drive around Beaverhead County, Montana. It was a Chinook-warm winter-day and he had driven from Eastern Washington with other uncles and aunts and cousins for my mother’s funeral and he asked me to take him on a car ride so he could see the country around Dillon, Montana.

The oldest child of immigrant homesteaders, Uncle Carl had dropped out of school after 8th grade to support his younger brothers and sisters, many of whom ended up as teachers and nurses. One of his many legacies was that as long as he lived each brother and sister and niece and nephew and grand-niece and grand-nephew who graduated from high school received a new watch from Uncle Carl. Mine was a Timex with a gray leather band.

He spent his life as a ranch hand, living in bunkhouses. I remember my mom telling me once that he and my Uncle Rudy, who was also a life-long bachelor, had both had great loves at one time that never worked out. If she knew what happened, she never told us.

When I was in elementary school, we lived in the town in Eastern Washington where my mother had grown up… in the house right next door to the one she was born in, and where she grew up. My Uncle Carl had a room in our house that he would stay in sometimes, usually on weekends.

Quite often he would load my brother Paul, my cousin Jimmy who lived next door, and me into his old car and take us for a ride around in the country, looking at farms and old homesteads and hayfields: “That’s the old Munson place… Your Uncle Rudy and Aunt Chris saw a cougar over there… I lost the milk wagon on this bend….”

Now on the day we were burying his niece and my mother, it was my turn to return the favor. We drove on small country roads, stopping every now and then to look at steers or horses or an irrigation ditch. What I remember most about that drive was something he said as we were passing a stack of hay bales. He said how much he loved in the winter to break open a bale of hay and how the sweet green smells of summer tumbled out. He said you could close your eyes and feel summer, no matter how cold it was.

I have thought of that image often over the years and always wanted to write a poem using it. This is not the poem I imagined, but is the one I recently wrote.

Enjoy!

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As I continue combing through old computer files, I find the bare bones of poems written some time ago. This one looks to have been started sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. It is difficult to tell.

I have re-worked it again this week on my Underwood 319. I continue to enjoy  the not-perfect, visual beauty of the typed page over the sterile perfection of the keyboarded computer file. If my hand-writing was at all legible, I would probably enjoy that as well. Creation is after all a physical thing.

Religious themes, as well as mountain and fishing images crop up continually in my poems. This poem is no exception.

For those who have been lucky enough to stand on the shore of a mountain lake early in the morning and seen the trout rising and the sun coloring the peaks, you know in this world that is as close to heaven as you will ever be.

On another cold February morning, I am thinking warm thoughts and of warmer days.

Enjoy!

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Lake Superior Cairns

As a writer, it is natural to return to certain themes and images for the same reason that we all return naturally to certain ways of categorizing and thinking about the world we live in. Ultimately we make sense of things by drawing on our personal experiences and our natural way of seeing things.

As I have written before, I once worked for the United States Forest Service on a trail crew in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness in Montana. I return often in my writing to those mountain summers, to the those wild places where I once had the privilege to work and live.

Today’s poem, “Time,” uses images of cairn-building in a different way than my poem “Ahead of the Next Storm.” Or, maybe it is the same after all. I will let you decide.

On yet another cold February morning, I pull out the Underwood 319 and re-work another poem.

Enjoy!

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Madison River Valley (photo © m.a.h. hinton)

When I was a kid, I always wanted to camp at Madison Buffalo Jump, something they have never let you do. I wanted to put my sleeping bag down inside one of the tepee rings and sleep there. Surely, I thought, you would have visions… somehow be able to “touch” the energy, the spirit of those who once camped and hunted there.

Part Five of “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975″ is the first part of the poem that came to me, walking along Lake Michigan just north of the planetarium more that 25 years ago.

In the Field Museum I had been looking at the exhibits of Native Americans and bison. I was imagining a poem where someone went to sleep inside a tepee ring and woke to find they had gone back and could see the land the way it was before Lewis & Clark, before horses. These are the lines that came to me. For years I worked on that poem….

In the way of art and poetry I was never able to write that poem.  Instead I ended up with “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975″ – a much different kind of poem.

The poem “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975″ and my collection of poetry is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com. Just follow this link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00480P44A

V.

Grass grown buffalo. Herds
upon herds turning earth
to dust. Clouds of dust

turning sky the color of earth.
The sun burning red, the sky on fire.
Ribbons of cottonwoods,

the homes of birds. Clouds of birds
churning the wind, turning wheels
in the cloudless sky.

Grass bending in the wind. Stars
Bending in the wind. Clouds of stars
Blowing across an endless sky.

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detail from Charles M. Russell mural

MontanaWriter will be posting  “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975,” in 5 parts. Today’s posting is Part Four.

Artist Charles M. Russell is second only to Lewis &  Clark in importance to how Montanans see themselves and the place they inhabit. Russell’s mural of Lewis and Clark meeting the Flatheads in Ross’s Hole that hangs in the Montana state capital building was obviously in my mind as I wrote this part of the “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975.”

The mural is Russell’s largest by far  (25 ft. wide and 12 ft. high). It is as big as Montana. As a young kid seeing it in person for the first time, the details of buffalo bones and rattlesnakes in the grass captured my imagination.

Russell was the first artist that engaged me in any meaningful way. That he painted places I knew and things that interested me made him even more accessible. It is no surprise that his art and this painting in particular is linked in my memory and imagination with Madison Buffalo Jump.

The poem “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975″ and my new collection of poetry is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com. Just follow this link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00480P44A

IV.

Were Charlie Russell to paint this place, his eye
would capture the transforming maize and purples
of sage and grass. His studied strokes evoking
the very emotion of stone and shadow.
A triangular composition: three stone
rings balanced between the broken crown of rock
above and the bluing, mountainous sky. His
horseback understanding of prickly pear
and rattlesnakes providing textured light
to the clean, white canvass. Rival Remington,
classically trained but Eastern-bound, would hue these
rings in a different way, his brush strokes giving
an Impressionistic feel to his work…
the contrasting pastels of blues and yellows
showing techniques of Van Gogh. Organically
inappropriate perhaps, but much acclaimed:
being a bit nearer to European
models of Art. (But for that even his “cow-
boy and Indian” art is seldom hung near
Dutch portraits or French haystacks… Western landscapes
and themes making poor subject for serious
Art.) When Lewis and Clark decamped, heading south
and west towards Beaverhead Rock and the Great
Divide, they recorded nothing about a small
cave at the confluent forks. From this we can
conjecture that either they did not find it,
or that having discovered it, found the cave
unworthy of mention. Beneath a rocky
outcropping protected from Montana’s harsh
elements, ancient pictographs can still be
seen– their fading images reminding us
of what we have lost. Archeologist do
not agree on why the pictures were made: stone-
aged hunters merely recording their deeds,
or shamanistic images bestowing
power upon their creators? Scholars are
certain, however, that our present under-
standings of Art do not apply. Suffering
beneath the shadows of Protestantism
and Science icons have lost all sacredness
for us… Art and Religion having become
signposts of existential overcoming.
The gulf between Sacajawea and her
companions even more so for us. Whether
those who made the pictographs also made these
rings is unclear, since many different people
summered along these streams, hunting this spacious
valley. Paintings of Native Americans
usually show clothes decorated with bright
colored beads and dyes… skin garments taking years
sometimes to create. The white tipis that once
stood here would have also been mottled with color:
unfamiliar shapes and significances
bearing the full-weight of their pre-literate
meanings. Russell could have captured this as well:
white tipis spotted red and blue underneath
this brown crown of rock; purple sage highlighting
the gilded motion of wind blown grass; bodies
of laughing children hurtling towards a dog-
greeted party of returning warriors,
the commotion of painted ponies caught mid-
stride, the proud riders colorful and smiling,
their feathered lances raised to the climbing sky.

 

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View from Madison Buffalo Jump (photo © m.a.h. hinton)

MontanaWriter will be posting  “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975,” in 5 parts. Today’s posting is Part Three.

The Lewis & Clark Expedition is the lens through which Montana history is taught and understood. Lewis and Clark spent over half their journey somewhere within the borders of present day Montana. One of the touchstone places for the expedition is the Three Forks of the Missouri. Madison Buffalo Jump State Park is just a few miles from Three Forks and the headwaters of the Missouri River.

My dad loves history. Quite often we would stop by the headwaters of the Missouri on our way to the Madison Buffalo Jump. The two places are intricately intertwined in my history and imagination.

Remember the poem “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975″ and my new collection of poetry is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com. Just follow this link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00480P44A

III.

Just downstream from these rings the cottonwooded
Madison surrenders its penultimate
particularity… one blue-ribbon trout stream
merging with two others. Beneath willowed banks
stone flies and spinners feed the confluent blue;
tremulous rainbows and browns growing trophy-
sized on the abundant hatches. Biologist
tell us that cut-throats once predominated
here, but having lost their fight to exotic
species they have become increasingly rare.
On the pebbly bottom, carp the size of foot-
balls clean what bullheads and suckers miss, their bleached
and rotting carcasses a familiar sight
around better fishing holes. In the long grass
above the banks, quick-tailed foxes hunting
mice and rabbits burrow into the soft earth.
Where spring creeks feed the Madison, slick-coated
beavers build dams of quaking aspen– the ponds
they create becoming homes for mallard ducks
and red-winged blackbirds. Over the water, great
blue herons follow the river’s course between
the trees searching for a quiet place to fish.
Between these rings and the river lay fields
of hay where deer graze, bedding down in the sweet
grass. Above the fields, beneath the climbing
blue, red-tailed hawks and bald eagles circle–
hunting for what the coyotes and fox have missed.
The journals of Lewis and Clark tell us elk
and bear could once be found in this broad valley,
the few they shot temporarily sating
their prickly-peared hunger. Camping at the Three
Forks, Lewis noted that the three rivers were
relatively the same size. Clark agreeing
that not one could be given preeminence
seconded the names that Lewis had chosen:
the Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson
rivers. The eastern most fork, the Gallatin,
mirroring the Madison in size and flow, is
also born on the slopes of Yellowstone Park.
Flowing fast between steep snow-covered ranges,
it finally spills into this quiet valley–
its measured course creating fertile fields
just east of here. The southwestern Jefferson
is slightly smaller, its course and direction
quickly recommending itself to both Clark
and Lewis. Historians tell us the role
Sacagewea played in choosing a course
has been greatly exaggerated… Paxson’s
familiar painting glossing over brutal
fact. Conditioned like us all by time and place,
Lewis (slave owner, wealthy, and male) fails
to fathom the distances between himself
and the pregnant slave-girl standing before him.
When she tells him that they are camped where she had
lost her family, he records her story…
discerning none of her guarded emotions.
Anxious to find her “Snake Indian” people
and the ponies necessary for crossing the
the Great Divide, the expedition spent just
two days at the Three Forks. Long enough for Clark,
fighting fever, to hike about eight miles
up the Madison… easily within sight
of these rings. Returning to camp exhausted
he reported finding nothing. Had he
been more open, he may have found this ancient
place. And understanding its significance
brought Sacajawea here to see these stones.

 

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"New" sign (photo © m.a.h. hinton)

MontanaWriter will be posting  “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975,” in 5 parts. Today’s posting is Part Two. For Part One, click here.

Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975 is a poem about place and time. Geology and history are the academic disciplines  that try to understand place and time. Poetry and painting are the arts that try to do the same thing. The geologist is limited by categories too expansive to individuate a particular place. The historian is limited by that wall in understanding called prehistory beyond which all is merely conjecture and speculation. This is not to say that the poet and painter are not limited. They are! by the limits of their imaginations.

Theology, of course, is the science that transcends limitation. For this reason it is only religion that can fully understand place and time. History after all without meaning is merely facts. Facts without context and direction are like blades of grass blowing in the wind.

The impetus of this long poem about an anonymous buffalo jump once used by Native Americans in Southwestern Montana is the belief that the universal is conveyed by the particular… that to fully know and understand one place well is to understand all places and times as well.

To my adolescent imagination, this weathered buffalo jump and the long forgotten people who once camped and lived there epitomized human existence: our time is soon gone… and what remains is only the place… and soon that place does not even remember us.

The poem “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975″and my book Montana Poems is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com. Just follow this link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00480P44A

II.

Geologist tell us that the entire
valley was once ocean floor… the sediments
of eons pressing down, transmuting mere mud
to stubborn stone. Where cracks appeared, liquefied
earth boiled through in long fingers of fire,
or defying gravity was hurled sky-
ward in violent eruption. Tectonic
plates of cooling crust buckled here, their seismic
remnant visible on every horizon:
snow-covered peaks climbing nearly three miles
in the air. Between ranges of up-thrust rock
valleys formed, their present shapes still being carved
by forces of wind and water. Melting snow
and ice on the northwest slopes of Yellowstone
Park (100 miles south of here) give birth
to the cottonwooded Madison. The skin
of earth is thinner there. The same forces
that created this valley still visible
in rolling paint-pots and shooting geysers. Just
outside the park (65 miles upstream
from here) the Madison drops through a narrow
canyon where two dams slow its descent . Both are
recently made. The second in a single
night in 1959, when a mountain
sloughed its shoulder into the river—killing
scores of campers, burying cars. High above
the earthen dam, from the visitor’s center,
bone-white trunks of trees can still be seen under
the water. Trophy-sized trout feeding between
the snags. The rounded stones that were gathered here
to make these rings are a dusty brown, somewhere
between coffee and tea. Pock-marked and cracked they’re
scarred with green and white lichen stains, centuries
of wind and weather wearing away any
water-tumbled gloss. There are gullies and dry
creek beds everywhere here. In the late mountain
Spring, melting snows run toward the swollen river–
rivulets of water retracing ancient
routes. Theologians tells us that one writer
of Genesis, dubbed “J”, believed waters
surrounded the earth and that a great crystal
bowl held the waters back. Standing here it is
easy to believe. What those who carried the
first stones here believed about water and earth
is difficult to discover. These mute stones
tell us little about those who first gave them
meaning. Archeological digs have turned-
up the broken arrowheads you would expect;
along with pottery shards and flint knives (proving
that trading between groups was widespread even
before horses arrived from Europe, making
buffalo jumps like this one obsolete). They
would have carried the stones by hand, probably
one at a time. After the first year, it may
have become the work of children, to get them
out of the way, “Find another stone to hold
this side down better.” Generation after
generation using these stones—lifting them
up, putting them down again. Black Elk, a Holy
Man of the Sioux Nation, tells us that these stone
circles are iconic– sacred hoops bearing
something of the power of God. Signs posted
at the visitor’s kiosk tell us that we
are to leave the stones where they lay, almost lost
in sage and grass. No longer sacramental,
they have acquired scientific meaning
and so should not be disturbed. On summer days
rattlesnakes can be found here hunting gophers
and mice. Camouflaged, the buzz of their angry
tails alone give them away. Searching through
the grass, discarded stones can be found. Thrown well
they can easily kill a snake, crushing its
diamond-shaped head. Those who do it for sport, cut-
off the many-chambered tail… some lost
rite bearing marks of vestigial memory.

 

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My father was fascinated by history. Any highway sign that pointed to an old battlefield or abandoned town, to teepee rings or a buffalo jump, to some Lewis & Clark site or Vigilante meeting place was sure to have my dad pulling the car over to have a look around. I never complained.

Since I shared my dad’s enthusiasm for all things historical –especially Western– I grew up visiting Montana ghost towns like Bannack, Elkhorn, Marysville, Argo, and Hasel and poking around old homesteads and abandoned ranch houses and mines.

Time takes a toll on ghost towns. The towns I visited in the 1960s and 1970s are half a century older now. Buildings I once walked through are often now just piles of wood and stone, or completely gone altogether. Another generation, and they will all be gone… expect those few that have had enough commercial and/or historical value to warrant some governmental attention.

Teepee rings and ghost towns have always resonated with me, with my sense of history and my sense of the meaning of life. I have visited famous buildings and places in the East and ancient ruins in the Southwest, yet I have never felt the same wonder and awe that I feel when I stand in front of an abandoned homestead or look down on a circle of stones almost lost in sagebrush and grass. The longest poem I have ever written, “Madison Buffalo Jump, 1975,” was my attempt to pin-down… to literally pen-down… that feeling.

Bannack, Montana is the ghost town I have visited most, and the only one I have recent digital photos of. For this week’s Western Wednesday, here is a link to Bannack State Park and some of my photos of Bannack, and of my father who first took me there so many years ago.

Enjoy!

The first Territorial Capital of Montana, Bannack St. Park.

School & Masonic Lodge, Bannack, MT (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

. . .

Meade Hotel, Bannack, MT (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

. . .

Old Church, Bannack, MT (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

. . .

Ghost Town Doors, Bannack, MT (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

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Ghost Windows, Bannack, MT (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

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Al Hinton, Bannack, MT June 2010 (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

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Growing up in Montana you grow up with Charlie Russell. He is the lens through which Montanans see the history and meaning of the place they live.

Off the top of my head, I cannot think of another painter (with the possible exception of Grant Wood, though to a much lesser extent) that is so… synonymous… with one state. To visit Montana and not to go to see either the Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, the Russell collection at the Montana Historical Society in Helena, or the giant mural of “Lewis and Clark Meeting Indians at Ross Hole” (featured above) at the Montana State capital building is to never have visited the state at all.

Russell, outside of Montana and “western-art” circles, remains very much under-appreciated. The same artistic biases that relegate western fiction and western movies to a kind of secondary aesthetic status impact also how Russell and fellow western artists like Remington are studied and collected. There is, after all, no greater blindness than that of aesthetic pride.

Today on Western Wednesday, we feature a number of Charles M. Russell paintings –representative of his “cowboys & indians art”– and two links to the aforementioned Charles M. Russell museums.

Enjoy!

Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls

Charles M. Russell Collection at the Montana Historical Society in Helena

"When the Land Belonged to God"

…

"Meat's not Meat Till it's in the Pan"

. . .

"Cree Indian"

. . . .

detail of "Lewis and Clark Meeting Indians at Ross Hole"

. . .

Buffalo Hunt

. . .

sketch "Last of the Herd"

. . .

sample of one of Russell's "illustrated" letters

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