Montana Preservation
I’d write a more fulsome history of my 15 years as Montana’s State Historic Preservation Officer, if I could remember them.
That alone is a puzzle. How is it that the defining position of my adult life is, in memory, so devoid of details? I can—without missing a beat—launch into a spiel about why historic resources are important. Or describe my philosophy for dealing with arrogant, intractable developers. Or explain why the Preservation Office belongs in the Montana Historical Society. But query me about any given year or many different projects, and I’ll likely refer you to my friends Milo McLeod and Janene Caywood, whose memories are second to none.
I’m also short on explanations for that fuzzy recall. I had a lot going on: courting, marriage, North Fork weekends, caring for Dave’s parents down the street and mine long distance, Dave’s health, my surgeries, Emily and Amanda with us summers, then Amanda year around. Staff changes, two office moves, three directors. But all of that’s adulthood. Everything really that most people experience. So, I’m perplexed.
What I can summon, though, are moments. The strobe lights of time and memory as they wheel around to catch a person, a moment, an event, a reaction. Followed by the lingering shadows of feeling.
Why not start at the end! My mother died early in January 1995. The legislature was in session. I’d made a very bad hiring decision before I’d headed to Kansas. We were in the thick of defending the importance of the Little Rockies, an island mountain range culturally significant to the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine. The mountains faced another round of open pit mining. I’d already entertained a visit from the crude bully, Pegasus Gold’s hit man. He’d made the purpose of his visit clear when he pulled his chair as close to me as he could get—knees almost touching, his face in mine. We were to change our position, declare the Little Rockies of no cultural import. I didn’t back down.
I’ll tell you about the paper route elsewhere. Suffice it to say that by April, I was weary, overwhelmed. And the Society Director Brian Cockhill invited me over to his office to tell me that Pegasus Gold and other mining and power companies were blackmailing the Society. They threatened to defund the entire agency—all of its museum and archive and library programs (and such was their power) unless I was removed as Preservation Officer.
Bless Brian for his creativity and compassion, and a certain respect for the work our office accomplished. He found a way for us to have our cake and eat it too. The Education Officer slot was vacant and I transferred to that. The State Archaeologist became the Preservation Officer and continued to support the significance of the Little Rockies. The Society kept its funding.
Better moments from earlier. We were uncommonly fortunate to hire Lon Johnson as our historic architect early in 1981. Soft-spoken, skilled, dead-on in his judgements. But when Lon left for another position, finding a credentialed architect who loved and knew old buildings proved daunting. Ultimately, I hired Herb Dawson, an Oklahoma good-ole-boy who’d been Wyoming’s State Historic Preservation Architect. With that decision made, I headed out on a three week summer vacation to the Land. And, for the life of me, couldn’t remember Herb’s name. What I knew was that Herb was a larger-than-life, Harley-riding, gun-owning character. My amnesia seemed Freudian. Especially when Herb arrived—post vacation—roaring up on his Hog and throwing open the office’s double doors. Dodge City or the Preservation Office. Herb brought his own idiosyncrasies to the office, but he knew his stuff and could work with developers. The leathers didn’t hurt.
Mostly my colleagues were a dazzling group of professionals. And creative. During another longish summer North Fork vacation (sans phone), I began to get mail from the staff. Photos showing them climbing into state cars, stowing their luggage. A letter on office stationery described their decision to take a cross-state trip. They explained how they had handed off care of my cat and forwarded the office phone. That was followed by post cards from various unusual locations. All a hoax, of course, but the effort they invested in creating the “story” was so clever that—as they intended—I couldn’t be altogether sure. We reveled in great camaraderie for a long while.
Including the winter of 1989 when temperatures never reached zero and our cars died one by one. We crafted changing circuits around Helena to pick up staff without functioning vehicles. A process that got more interesting after a train crash took out all Helena’s power.
There was the night I rolled into a wooden, double bunk at primitive Camp Maiden in the Judith Mountains, with a young Amanda. And realized that we had both spread our sleeping bags over a heavy sprinkling of mice turds. But the event changed everything about the relationship between conventional preservation processes and Montana’s First People. Dave Schwab, one of our archaeologists, had family ties to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai. Dave had worked patiently, largely by himself, to bridge the process gap between archaeological and tribal ways of knowing—the difference between digging and measuring as opposed to history spoken through generations. And it was Dave who suggested that we invite Native cultural ambassadors and Montana’s many archaeologists to a special event. We would host. Provide good food. Gather informally, eschewing motel conference rooms and written agendas. Be somewhere folks could stay in cabins or vans or tipis. And we would talk . . . . and eat . . . . and thank the Creator, and learn to know each other. Our children could play together. Camp Maiden became a tradition. It changed our commitment to First Peoples and properties of traditional cultural value. For sure it changed me.
In 1991, facing a mastectomy, I was showered with get-well cards from around Montana, good friends as well as prickly adversaries. And Salish tribal elder Tony Incashola called to tell me that he and the other elders would be asking for blessings for my recovery and good health. His was the face and voice I remembered as I rolled into the operating room—along with Dave’s.
I gave a lot of presentations in those 15 years: encouraging, explanatory, admonishing. Depending on the audience, I’d use props to hold their interest: a beloved stuffed animal from my college years and my dad’s ingenuously designed family syrup pitcher to help explain National Register criteria. A doll house to talk about how historic buildings could be “read” and described. I’d tell the story of my preservation conversion at Gettysburg—the power of standing on the places where history happened. And on the occasion of the Cascade County Historical Society’s annual awards banquet, I was to celebrate their successes. When invited, I learned that the organization’s members usually dressed in historic period clothing and enjoyed seeing each other’s choices. I was encouraged to join them. Which meant that after much internal debate, I bought a girdle and squished myself into my mother’s 1950s church dress. It featured big aqua and brown flowers, a side zipper, and an asymmetrical neckline with a fabric bouquet. In fact, I didn’t try to don the dress until I’d reached Meadowlark Country Club and changed out of comfortable clothing into that number. Only to realize, as the group gathered for dinner, that no one else was dressed in historic outfits.
Speaking, meeting, explaining meant a whole lot of travel. In fact, I’m so struck now by the time-saving possibilities that Zoom would have offered then. Well, and lifesaving. I have distinct memories of gliding ever so slowly but surely, off I90 just outside Missoula in freezing rain. Dave Schwab was my unlucky passenger but chivalrous enough to tromp through feet-high barrow pit snow, climb a fence, and find a phone. Then there was the icy night coming back from Red Lodge in our brand new family Toyota 4-runner. I did a one-eighty on top of Bozeman Pass and could see semis coming up at right angles behind me. I managed to turn around.
I walked out of only one meeting in my tenure. We were in Missoula and the owner of a cultural resource consulting firm, long on making the most money he could by catering to his developer clients, told me that we (hear I) were crazy to believe in the significance of some historic site (I wish I could remember what). That we didn’t know anything about Montana history. No arguing on the merits. Just on our judgment.
Montanans mostly embraced National Register of Historic Places designation for elegant homes, one room schools, main streets studded with turn-of-the century commercial buildings. But we had a far harder time convincing people that the resources most distinctive to Montana and our particular human past were significant. In part because those very vernacular, organic resources too often got in the way of land management and development. Think historic bridges, roads for heaven’s sake, ranch headquarters with all the attendant corrals and shops and bunkhouses. Trails and railroads. Cultural landscapes—whole chunks of discrete unchanged valleys. Irrigation districts. Tipi rings, stone drive lines. But there was moment in a meeting with Forest Service regional office staff that I felt the tide shifting. I’d been explaining the significance of backcountry fire lookouts and ranger stations to an annoyed crowd. This was their history. A green uniformed man at the edge of the room spoke up. He allowed as he was a baby boomer and he didn’t know about the other guys in the room, but when he retired he doubted that he’d want to pitch a tent at the end of a day’s hike. He’d rather, he said, sleep off the ground and cook his breakfast on a wood stove. Maybe turning those Forest Service back country structures into rental cabins wasn’t such a bad idea. His perspective helped to launch one of the singularly most popular land management preservation efforts still in place. Ever so slowly but surely the importance of other vernacular resources gained acceptance.
Other flickers of light, of memory:
The time I was so hornswaggled by Dave that I forgot to send out legal notices for our quarterly State Preservation Review Board Meeting. Nothing like having to call nine professionals around the state to confess .
The annual last minute, frantic, whirlwind of a time to gather the statistics for both our year-end report and our application to the National Park Service.
The year that the evil, slimy director demanded that I bargain for management against Dave who was bargaining for the employee union.
The heart-to-hearts I needed to have with every single secretary to promote filing.
My fraught and inadequate search for house that would fit a new archaeologist arriving from California with his family and children and a rabbit and a dog. Bless the whole family for their bravery!
The arrival of the heart-throb of a consulting archaeologist when I could hear sighs of longing in the office space behind me. Or the tongue-tied agency archaeologists there to meet with either of our two gorgeous female archaeologists, one of whom had been Miss Montana.
The coup de grace to my departure from the Preservation Office in 1995 came when the preservation community honored me during their biennial ceremony. Smooth-talking, chameleon Governor Marc Racicot (a sweeter friend to industry than he let on) took a moment as he started to hand me the award, leaned in, smiled for the camera, and, knowing full well why I was leaving the Preservation Office, had the audacity to whisper: “Everybody has a shelf life.” ©
