Montana Myths

TOWARD sunset the little party of miners stopped and pitched their tents between two mountains. The country around them was rough, indescribably rough, and the short day’s march had tired them so that they dropped listlessly after the animals were unpacked. For a long time, until almost dark, each man’s thoughts were his own. Not a word was spoken. There was no need for any because there was no word adequate to express the dejection that was theirs. The beautiful ‘Land of the Shining Mountains’ had played them false, and where once they had dreamed of gold they realized now there was nothing. Their only thought was to get back to civilization and safety.

At last one of the miners got up wearily. After a while he reached for his pick and started down the gulch. The sun, dropping over the western ridge, was the only sign of gold he could see, and after a dozen steps he halted.

‘I’ll try this,’ he said to himself; ‘it’s our last chance.’ His pick bit deep into the gravel bed — bit once and did not bite again, for that single stroke had uncovered enough gold to make the party rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Thus was discovered the famous Last Chance Gulch lode, one of the richest mining properties in North America, and at the same time there was founded the myth about Montana.

At least I think the myth started then, although Lewis and Clark might have had something to do with it when they sailed up the Missouri River in 1806 and beheld for the first time the majestic Gates of the Mountains and the Great Falls of the Missouri. Or again, Gall and yellwhorse and the other chiefs may have started it when they wiped out Custer and his five companies of cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 and left the body of every soldier in the little army drying in the June sun. Or perhaps — but I could go on this way for a long time. I think we had better credit the discoverers of that great gold lode with the birth of the myth.

Myth? What myth? And there you have me. I can’t name it; it is as intangible as the changing purple on mountain peaks at sunset, as intangible as pines talking — but it is there. And when I speak of the myth about Montana I am only gathering and collecting under one head the hundreds of little fables I hear about my state.

The first myth is not that at all. It is a permanent and apparently irrefutable fact to the person living anywhere east of Williston, North Dakota, that all of us in Montana wear our six-shooters to dinner and our chaps to bed!

Ridiculous? Of course it’s ridiculous. I’m quite sure that Thomas J. Walsh, our senior Senator, — who, had he lived, would have served in the President’s Cabinet, — never shot at anyone with a six-shooter, and I seriously doubt that he, in his later years at least, ever appeared aboard a horse in a pair of leather chaps. But no one except a Westerner believes it.

’A boy in New England once asked me if I liked Wild West movies. I told him I had n’t seen any for some years — in fact, not since I was eight. And his answer sums up what thousands of people in the East apparently think. ‘Oh, I suppose you would n’t,’he said. ’I suppose you see all that without going to the movies!’

I let him go on thinking, of course, that his opinions were right and that I lived in a land where the hero rescued the beautiful heroine amid a hail of hostile Indians’ arrows and bullets and then rode into a delicious fade-out to live happily ever after.

It would be nice if conditions in Montana, or anywhere in the West, were that way, but they are not. And the only two famous screen stars Montana has yet given to Hollywood, Gary Cooper and Myrna Loy, are more expert at playing society scenes than romping off to do glorious battle with a herd of angry buffalo and tribes of savage redskins.

But the myth persists that Montana is a wild and woolly place, and when it is at last lived down some of Montana’s individuality will have gone. Yet, when I think about it, it’s proper that such a myth should exist. After all, Custer and the best troops the United States army could gather were ruthlessly destroyed one afternoon by Indians and not one survivor lives to tell about it. That was n’t so long ago, as time is measured in New England, — fifty-eight years, — but the West lives at a swifter tempo than the East and a great deal happens in half a century. The Indians on their reservations are wearing silk stockings now and I suppose many of them are reading Anthony Adverse. But it does not sound convincing.

I am at a loss, however, to account for one belief which seems to be more prevalent than any of the others. During the summer, in New England, a great many — oh, a very great many — people have said, ‘So you’re from Montana. Now I have a cousin living in Michigan myself.’ And they intimate that Michigan is just a good brassie shot from the Montana border. In reality it is about a thousand dusty miles, and while New Englanders may believe Michigan is ‘away out West,’ it’s just ‘back East’ to us.

We in Montana are a friendly sort. We know our neighbors for half a hundred miles on every side and call them all by their nicknames, but sometimes our surprising affability is exaggerated. For example, in Maine I stopped at a filling station for gasoline and the attendant remarked, as had hundreds before him, that I was a ‘long ways’ from home. I agreed and we struck up a one-sided conversation with the fillingstation man doing all the talking.

‘Say,’ he said, as he remembered something, ‘you know, I used to know a fellow here who moved out to Montana. You might know him. His name is Kelly, he drives a Buick, and he lives about eight miles off the road.’

Hiding a smile, I assured him that I did not know the man he spoke of and drove on. But now, as I drive east and west and north and south across Montana, through her mountains and her farm lands, through her beauty spots and her ugly spots, I am secretly keeping my eyes open for the Kelly who drives a Buick and lives eight miles off the road.

I must perpetuate the myth.