One more time, the Pegasus Gold Inc. big shots hoped that if we saw the Little Rockies, checked out an archaeological site or two, viewed just how ragged and raped and desolate the mountains already were that we’d change our mind. That we would decide to discredit contemporary accounts, oral histories, the stories that documented this island mountain chain as a sacred landscape for Montana tribes. I never understood their thinking: that fond last ditch hope that looking a site in the eye would dissuade us; that our respect for a place—our understanding of its role in history–would diminish once we stood on the ground. When isn’t the real powerful?
But we went that day– several of us from the State Historic Preservation Office. We had specific sites to check out and then that broad sweep of hacked-away mountain laced with orange streams, its rock and giant sky melded together, to consider.
I’ve lost too many details to recall why I wandered off by myself—and where we rendezvoused. I just remember this: finding the tiniest of cabins, sided inside and out with flattened arsenic cans. Arsenic cans.
I couldn’t take it all in. The when or the who or lord knows the why. Others in my profession would read the clues more accurately and turn to written records for thin answers. Create the site report.* I was there only wondering.
Over whose threshold was I stepping? Perhaps a Great Depression runaway. In all the successive waves of Montana gold mining, those years of historic desperation might have brought a small-time miner. An outlaw (Phillips County made claim to such). A Garfield County farmer’s son whose parents finally gave up the ghost and moved to Billings to work in the sugar beet plant. A Gros Ventre man whose wife and five kids were so far beyond food, so far beyond hope that leaving home, breaking his own soul for any form of support was all he could do? A woman running from the busiest of red light districts at Fort Peck Dam. For sure, someone with little left to lose.
No bunk. No rough table. No wood burning range leaning drunkenly on three legs. No curled calendar pegged to the wall. No graffiti either across the orderly crinkled tin red and white rows. Just a shelter from rain and snow. Already situated in the lee of the mountain facing southeast away from the west wind.
All these years later, I wonder if it was a ghost cabin. If I was too tired or too hot or too fraught. Except that ever since, the memory has felt both undeniable historic truth and prophesy, an alarm sounded across the West foreshadowing the coming rush to oil and gas. The Bakken. Or the Smith River copper mine. Or one more land-gobbling pipeline. The visible commitment to killing ourselves for something the world treasures more than life. ©
