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If you go to France and you go to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which is just down from the left bank McDonald’s, you will find a famous painting by Jean-François Millet, a French guy, called the Gleaners (the painting not the French guy). He painted it in 1857 and called it that because that is what was going on in the painting and because they liked short names back then.

It depicts three supposedly French women, we’re not sure if they’re French or not because he didn’t say. They could just as easily been Croatian or Moldavian or even Dutch, but that’s beside the point. What is the point is that these women are called Gleaners because they would go into the fields after the harvest and pick up bits of whatever had just been harvested, take it home, put in it linen sacks, hit those sacks with a stick to settle the contents and store them in a storage unit known as a gleaner locker, for use during the cold winter that was just down the road. Apparently a bunch of people did this as a way to cut the high cost of living. It was way before Costco or Wal-Mart or Sam’s.

A lot of you are probably sitting there right now saying “Yeah, So?” but what you don’t know is that Jean-François Millet, or Johnny Millet as he was known here, was a huge traveler. Not huge like 420 lbs. and having to book two seats all the time huge, but huge as in he traveled a lot. Everywhere he could get reservations. He was never home. He did this because it was hard to come up with new ides every time he wanted to do a painting and like all artists you have got to keep churning this stuff out.

It was on one of his journeys that he came to America and went straight to Rocky Mountain National Park to see what was happening. There he met a park ranger and had an idea that would change the art world completely and earn him a permanent place in Art history classes forever. This ranger whose name has been lost in the dim recesses of the historical past, found Johnny looking down a rock strewn hillside on Trail Ridge road. He was raptly watching many little creatures darting out into the meadow and harvesting huge mouthfuls of grass which they would then bring back to their dens, put in linen sacks, hit those sacks with a stick to settle the contents and store them in a storage unit known as a Pica locker.

“What are those marvelous creatures?” he asked in a French accent that totally gave away where he was from. “They’re gleaners, a form of rodent that lives above the tree line, that harvests grass to sustain them through the long cold winters ” replied the ranger “but as they are from the Lagomorphs family or more precisely the Ochotonidae order we intend to call them Pikas.” “Mon Dieu” said Johnny Millet and then and there the light bulb went off and a work of art was born. The rest is history, or Art History, to be exact. Johnny caught the next clipper ship back to France and soon The Gleaners was on the wall at the Musée d’Orsay. Now American tourists pay good money to look at it not knowing that the idea was taken from the side of Trail Ridge road in Rocky Mountain National Park. And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, You know the rest of the story.