Tag Archives: Montana

Into The Storm

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It was the usual warm day up in Montana that early morning of June 25th. The sun was out, bringing a sky so blue it hurt to look at it. A few big, bulging clouds made their towering way across the sky, like huge slow moving dreadnoughts under all the sail they had, billowing and straining, moving majestically from West to East.

The scuttlebut was that today was the day. Something big was going to happen and the tension was so thick it made the hair stand up on your arms. The enemy was close and everything felt like it was going to bust loose any second.

Like happens every day in Montana the weather changed. The slow moving clouds so white and pure the moment before began to turn into that dark ominous grayish black underbelly that foretold a storm was coming. A big one from the looks of it. Thunder and the occasional lightning strike was seen and heard across the low rolling hills to the West. That and the electricity of the moment had the horses on the picket lines spooked as the wind picked up.

Suddenly all hell broke loose as the advance group of troopers already mounted and riding along the picket lines, the bugler sounding “To Horse, to horse” on his bugle, let everyone know this is it, mount up. They were about to ride into the storm.

Ghost Child

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The battle at the Little Bighorn was a tremendous victory for the gathered tribes against the white soldiers of the United States Western Frontier Army entering their hallowed ground. There had been many smaller engagements between the two adversaries with the Indians normally realizing small victories if any. This time it was different. The overwhelming number of warriors engaged the soldiers and took the victory in fairly short order, handing a defeat to the cavalry unlike any they had ever seen before.

The number of the soldiers of the 7th cavalry killed in the battle at the Little Bighorn river is placed at approximately 260 killed and buried in place where they fell. The number of Indians that were also killed is not exactly known although they were far, far less than their adversaries numbering perhaps in the dozens if that many. Most if not all of the bodies of the slain warriors were removed from the field of battle immediately after the fight was over and taken back to the camp and their families.

The battlefield became a quiet eerie place where the only sounds were the rushing of the wind through the tall Montana grass where the dead had lain and the occasional call of a raven flying overhead. The gunshots, battle cries and the screaming of the victors over the moaning of those still alive after it was over were long gone. Silence reigned supreme over the Greasy Grass. It became a place where the spirits wandered over the low hills and along the riverside. It was a place of big medicine.

As time passed there were the occasional reports of things that couldn’t be explained occurring. A shadowy figure riding slowly in the near dark of impending dusk. The sound of hooves breaking the surface of the gently moving river. A pale rider just visible in the light of a full moon as he crossed slowly from one bank to another. It is unknown whether the young rider was a participant in the battle, becoming a casualty, or simply a dream produced by the medicine of the battle. In any case if you happened to be there now on that long ago battlefield, and by chance stayed until the river was illuminated by the light of a full moon, you might see the ghost child riding on his endless vigil. Remember there is big medicine there. And there are things that cannot be explained.

Split Horn Ermine Covered War Bonnet

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Not every war bonnet was made of eagle feathers. There were a host of different styles made from many different things such as buffalo scalps, where the top of the *buffalos head, including the horns, was adorned with important spirit items of the maker and formed into a head covering. Leather caps covered with feathers and perhaps a set of horns were used as well, and the ermine covered war bonnet with the set of split buffalo horns pictured above is often seen at various tribal functions.

It is thought that the plains tribes were the first to wear headdresses but all Indian groups had their own style of head covering. This image is of a Crow warrior at a parade during the famous Crow Fair held every August at Crow Agency in Montana. But many other tribes wore the same style, but vastly individualistic types of headdresses or bonnets.

This view is a strikingly dramatic presentation of a tribes culture and history and an honor to be able to see and photograph this amazing piece of living history. If you’re ever able to visit a powwow do so, it’s an incredible glimpse of a people’s culture as they live it today.

* http://www.bigshotsnow.com/regalia-buffalo-headdress/ for an example of an incredible buffalo headdress check out this link. This is one of the most spectacular examples you will ever see.

Time Travel

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The photo above was taken at the North American Indian Days or NAID held every year by the Blackfeet tribe at Browning, Montana. There, members of the tribe gather and celebrate their heritage by dancing, singing, displaying their treasured regalia and horses, and their culture in all of its splendor.

Sometime during the celebration they hold a parade and it’s a grand parade. Everyone shows up as the participants walk, ride or are carried in decorated vehicles through the streets of Browning. Many with their own interpretation of how things were before modern civilization entered the picture.

This woman riding her prized horse with its foal walking along side in the parade is an example of how the culture and traditions of the tribe are upheld. As an observer you can choose to view this scene as it actually occurred, where the parade passed in front of a large store with crowds of people standing in front, cars parked along the roadway, the street itself in stark relief with its blacktop reality as an element in the image, a strict documentation of the event as it actually was, or you can choose to see it another way. As an artist first and photographer second and a hopeless romantic thrown in to boot, I chose to see her as a member of the tribe on a journey to the summer camping grounds, where there was plenty of new grass for the horses, the game was plentiful in the mountains, and space in the lush valley to set up their lodges while they lived their lives as they always had in the past.

A generous use of photo editing software allowed me to time travel and remove the modern day distractions, the cars, the buildings, the crowds, hopefully recreating that feeling of a bygone era. Romanticized, of course, but that’s how I see a lot of the world. Whether it actually existed like this doesn’t matter, Art is what you see in your minds eye whether it’s a gritty fact-filled stark reality with all its warts and blemishes, or  an idyllic imagined peaceful scene. There’s no political agenda here, just an attempt to show the beauty and history and yes the nostalgia of an incredible people as it may have been in a long ago time. Time travel and an emotional escape to a place that may never have existed as portrayed but certainly should have.

If you get an opportunity go and see the powwow of the Blackfeet tribe at Browning, Montana. You might just see your own vision, all you have to do is look and imagine.

The Hanging

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My name is Rafe McCleary and I’ve been running this livery stable here in Mothersell, Montana for the last 32 years. I’ve seen a lot of folks come and go, eager to make their fortune or simply to set a while and figure out what comes next. The story I’m about to tell you ain’t pretty and is one of the most heart breaking events ever to happen here in Mothersell and to this day it still makes me maudlin and close to tears when I think back on the dark deeds done that day. It involves a family of farmers from Sweden that stayed for most of the winter and the effect they had on the town and the effect the terrible events that happened to them changed us all. And the hanging. The hanging I’ll get to in a minute but first I need to tell you why we had a hanging. It is this story that is a dark stain on Mothersell’s history and one that makes us sad to hear recounted to this very day. It’s about a family, a wonderful family that was visited by the worst luck ever I knowed about.

The Olstrom Twins were one of those rare moments of beauty that occurred in the West occasionally. Twelve years old at the time Ansgar and Blenda Olstrom were part of an immigrant party that passed through Montana on their way to the wilds of the far northwest where they intended to begin farming in the hard dry earth in what is now the panhandle of Idaho.

Fair blond hair, startling blue eyes, pure white skin the color of the finest alabaster, they were a sight seldom seen in the tough hardscrabble mining town of Mothersell Montana. Blenda was particularly beautiful and was called Maj as a nickname which meant Pearl in Swedish, as her skin was the same color as one of those lustrous jewels. Since they were twins it could be said that Ansgar was beautiful too but back then we didn’t speak like that about boys. But he was sure a handsome young lad and sought after constantly by the few young girls we had here at that time. The miners that lived here were more accustomed to the weatherworn, wind scarred faces of those who had survived the brutal winters and scorching summers of the high Montana mining country. To see untouched innocent beauty like the Olstrom twins was a surprise and a blessing, showing all, that beauty was possible and still existed despite the hardships of their daily lives.

The Olstrom wagon was on its last legs as were their stock and the men that drove them. The trip so far had been as arduous as any journey can be and they needed to stop and repair their equipment and their spirits before completing the last portion of their journey. Mothersell seemed to be that perfect resting spot and as Winter was fast approaching they felt it prudent to stay and continue on in the Spring. While here the men helped out around the town doing handiwork and fixing things and being good with wood in their spare time they whittled things like animal figures and spoons and carving fancy designs into wooden plates, an art form not seen in these parts and sought after by those townsfolks who wanted to add some beauty to their severe dwellings. The womenfolk took in washing, baked marvelous pastries and pies and sewed and repaired clothes. All were an asset to the town and highly thought of.

But it was the twins that were the jewels that graced the mean unlovely town of Mothersell. Brighter than any gold dug up or panned out of the streams they were blessed not only with beauty but voices that could sing the wings off an angel. Pure, high, impossibly beautiful voices that could bring hard men to their knees in a fit of crying because they had forgotten how beautiful life could be. They sung songs about the glory of God, they sung songs in Swedish that nobody could understand the words to. They learned some of the songs the miners loved to hear and sung those. They just sang, It didn’t matter what. They could hum and people would cheer. Their harmony made the sound of their combined voices even more impossibly wonderful and there was never a time when they sang that they didn’t get the whole town to turn out.

And that was their glory, and due to the devil’s workings, their downfall. Like in all towns Mothersell had its share of unsavory people. Those that you just knowed was going to cause trouble and do a mischief if they got the chance. Such was Leopold Baron von Klesser, also known as The Kraut, a soiled little weasel that did not live up to his fancy name, which some thought was made up anyway. Slight, squinty-eyed, with a nasty disposition and behavior that got him shunned by anyone who ran acrosst him he was forced to live in a ramshackle hovel some ways out-of-town and subsist on the edges of people’s good will. And he was totally and obsessively smitten with Maj. Due to some of his previous behavior he was never allowed to get in arm’s distance of any of the young children in town and was watched constantly when he showed up to get supplies or whatnot.

Then of course it happened. The bad thing. The worst thing you could ever imagine even if you can imagine bad things. There was screaming and shouting and cries of terror and grief when it was found that the twins was missing. Both of them. Groups immediately formed and went out looking. The Sheriff went door to door checking every building in town. Mine shafts were checked. The river was scouted both up and downstream for five miles in either direction. Nothing. Nothing was found. No bodies, no tracks, nothing. They was just disappeared.

But as it has to be they was found. Dead, both of them. Their bodies totally mutilated and desecrated. The beauty that was them was gone and lost forever. It looked like they was taken by Indians. There had been some Blackfeet around lately and folks thought they had done it but that turned out to be untrue. Indians didn’t have nothing to do with it. They was innocent just there to trade and see how the whites was living. No it was that bastard Leopold. He done it. He snuck in and got Maj and made Ansgar come along under some guise or other and took them way out on the prairie where he did terrible things to them and then killed them to make it look like it was Indians.

The Sheriff went out to Leopold’s place and found some pieces of Maj’s clothing there and after an all night session in the jail Leopold confessed. To say there was a chaotic reaction to this unfolding was the understatement of all understatements. There was talk of moving Leopold to Bannack for safe keeping until the circuit judge could arrive but the Sheriff knew that given how people felt neither he nor Leopold would make the trip to Bannack, so he just ringed the jail with deputies and told everyone that anyone trying to lynch Leopold would  be shot, even if that was what that bastard Leopold The Kraut needed more than anything.

The City Fathers came together and decided that they would hold the trial here in Mothersell and preside over it as both judge and jury given as they run the place anyway, and the Sheriff, bought and paid for by them, went along with it as he couldn’t see no sense in getting his ownself killed by the angry townsfolk over somebody like Leopold. The trial was held, Leopold Baron von Klesser was found guilty of man-killing, or in this case, child-killing and was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead, dead, dead, the dirty son of a bitch.

Normally hangings were an almost joyous event. A bad person was made to pay for his crime, people felt good about the justice that was done and it was a chance to get together and see neighbors and friends you hadn’t seen for a while. Have a picnic, get drunk maybe. Not this time. What Leopold had done was so terrible and what he had deprived them of was so precious to their hearts that although it was one of God’s gifts to see this monster hung they could take no joy in it. He wasn’t going to be given the tumultuous celebration he craved so they all stood there in mute silence as the floor of the scaffold dropped out from under Leopold Baron von Klesser and he went to see his maker to be judged for his life and done with as God saw fit. One thing did happen. The father of Ansgar and Blenda quietly asked the hangman if he couldn’t make the noose a little loose, which was done after being slipped a gold nugget, which to his credit he refused that gold feeling much the same way as the crowd did and Leopold’s last moments were indeed terrible to behold as he didn’t have the quick clean death of that short fall and the snapping stop of a broken neck. Instead he had a very long time of dangling and kicking and gasping, making truly unholy noises until finally he swung slowly back and forth and the deed was done.

The crowd went back to their individual lives. Leopold was left to swing for the rest of the day before being taken down and unceremoniously dumped in a hole out near the landfill. No marker, no one in attendance except the undertaker and he didn’t want to be there either, in fact, in one more act of uncivility by the undertaker Leopold wasn’t even put in a box or given the courtesy of being wrapped in a shroud. Just thrown in a hole and buried like a rabid dog.

A beautiful bright spot and loss of an irreplaceable beauty was left in the town and it was a long winter indeed in Mothersell that year. The Olstrom party departed the following spring and are still raising potato’s in Idaho I hear.

So ends the story of a dark chapter in Mothersell Montana’s history. Like I said it ain’t a pretty tale to tell and the town isn’t proud of it. But it happened and as such it deserves to be remembered with the good and the bad even if it is a painful thing to recall.

Ellis McElry Goodson Gentleman Rancher

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One of the driving forces, if not the main one in the early West, was the rancher. The cowman. The man who put his money where his mouth was. He fought Indians, rustlers, the weather, bad luck, fate itself in establishing his mark on the West. It took more than determination, more than desire, it took iron resolution and the strength and courage to persevere in the face of every kind of adversity imaginable. And he did. It was men like him that created the West.

Back in the mid 1860’s you managed your ranch with an iron hand and common sense, yet with a common core of ethics, a strong sense of morality and a vision. If he was your friend he was your friend for life. And he expected no less from you. This was big land and it took a big man and others like him to settle it.

This is Ellis McElry Goodson. He was an early settler and rancher near Bannack, Montana, a mining town in Southwestern Montana and he sought his fortune in the cattle business rather than mining like everyone else. There was more than one way to strike it rich.  After all miners had to eat too. A man could make a good living for himself and his family by proving the meat for a hungry mining camp. Miners paid dearly for a good steak and the currency was gold. He was essential to the existence of many a town and that made him very wealthy and an important figure in the community. He never called himself a gentleman rancher. That would be unseemly. But everyone else did. When he was mentioned in the ever present conversation that went on in every saloon, street corner, and general store he was called Mr. Goodson, gentleman rancher. He was thought of with respect and he earned it every day. That’s the way it was in the West.

Mothersell Montana

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Town of Bannack, Montana, current time 2017, sister city to Mothersell, Montana. Looking down Main Street towards the East past the Spokane Mining House during an Autumn Snowstorm

This is primarily a story about Mothersell Montana, a mining town in name only most of the time. It is located on the Little Locust river eleven miles upstream from the confluence of the Little Locust river and Grasshopper creek, and is nestled into a low valley surrounded by hills containing some of the richest gold ore ever assayed.

Mothersell is similar in nature to Bannack, Montana, its sister city, which is also a mining town located six miles below the confluence of the two gold-laden water sources, but different in one major aspect. The difference will become apparent as we learn more of the town’s history. Bannack was a major player in the gold rush days being the first capitol of Montana, and a center of much of Montana’s history, but it is best known for making early miners rich as they mined and pulled gold out of Grasshopper creek at a huge rate. Those days were the town’s high point but after the gold panned out the town’s days were numbered. Folks began to move out, marching forward in the eternal quest for wealth and the better life.

Bannack still stands in a faded slightly rundown state, a mere shell of its former glory, near Dillon, Montana in the Southwest part of the state. Now a State park and tourist attraction where well meaning folk come to see what it was like to live in an early Montana mining town. The buildings, most of them now saved from certain destruction by the elements, neglect and time itself stand proudly along the towns main street and can be entered and explored at will. It offers a glimpse of what towns looked like in the mid 1860’s. The good people of Montana have seen fit to invest time and money into bringing the town back from the brink of disaster, not to mention oblivion, and should get a hardy thank you and any other kind of support one is willing to provide.

The difference between the two towns is dramatic and unbelievable if you are able to suspend belief in the story itself. Bannack is rooted in history and the present in a very tangible way. You can go there. You can walk its streets. You can enter the buildings and feel the presence of the souls of those who lived, loved and died there. Whereas Mothersell couldn’t be more different.

Mothersell exists in a place where time acts differently. It is a place where its very existence depends on your good fortune, not its own. If you are one of those people that luck has smiled upon you can stumble across the actual townsite where Mothersell is located and if you have been particularly fortunate the town will come into focus and solidify and exist as it was, or always is, if you will, and you may become a part of its life for what ever time is allotted to you.

As mentioned before time has a particular strange way of occurring here. When you enter Mothersell you leave the current world around you behind and become an active participant in its daily life. But remember, time is strange here, what may be a day or so in your other world may be a year or more in Mothersell. During that time you forget about your other existence and live instead in a golden haze of happiness and contentment. Everything you ever wanted is now available to you but only so long as you reside in Mothersell. The town itself will soon recede from its current existence and return to its place outside of your time. If you are fortunate enough to be accepted by the town you can and will remain with it and leave your old life behind you. If through some terrible act of providence you aren’t accepted, you return to your normal life except you get to keep your memories of that glorious time spent within its confines. Which you will find are both a treasure and a curse. Fate has a way of playing cruel and unusual jokes on the unwary. It’s been said “Make a plan, God needs to laugh.”

Unlike Bannack which will undoubtedly be there for you to visit for the near and foreseeable future, Mothersell is a fleeting unattainable place to revisit. Once is all mere mortals get to have and if it doesn’t work for you it is not available again. It is still there just slightly set aside on a different plane from our existence. Sometimes if the light is just right and you are paying particularly close attention you can see it floating just out of your reach, a treasure, like gold, but even more difficult to obtain.

Unfortunately cameras don’t work in Mothersell. All you get for an image is a golden glow instead. So instead images from her sister city Bannack have been used. The two towns were very close in the style of architecture and placement of their buildings so these images almost convey what it was like to be there. Of course there is no way to convey the actual beauty and undeniably wondrous presence of the town itself but for that you have to have had the most precious gift of all. Being able to have been there for awhile. Who knows, perhaps if the gods decide to take part in our lives again the town may reappear but that of course is up to them. If so I’ll be waiting.