“Yeah, hell, we’re getting all different kinds of flags out of this, for the same price as one!” issued from someone else, which set the crowd to really cheering and clapping, waves of sound to match the flapping symphony above.
Mariah had been clicking the overhead parade of banners as if motorized, but she stopped now and jiggled me in the ribs.
“What a zammo morning. We’re next, Jick,” she announced as keenly as if she and I were ticketed on the next ascension of wind.
So to speak, so we were: the mountainline of the Two country up over English Creek and Noon Creek that the two of us had stitched on came flapping free, Roman Reef and Phantom Woman Mountain and Flume Gulch and Jericho Reef dancing in the sky. I had to chuckle at that, the geographical pennant of the McCaskills, as Mariah
swiftly moved low to one side of him and captured the picture to go with these words, of Jick with his bearded head thrown back as he laughed upward at the multiplying banners of the centennial. As she clicked, day’s arrival was definite, the sun articulating its long light onto the land.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY GROUND RULES FOR myself in this novel have been the same as in the first two books of this trilogy, English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair: the heartland of the McCaskill family is the Rocky Mountain Front near what is actually Dupuyer, Montana, but the specific places and people are of my own invention. Similarly, except for a handful of irresistibly emblematic Montana institutions—the M & M in Butte, the Country Pride cafe in Big Timber, the Wagon Wheel cafe in Ekalaka, and the sign on the Elk Bar in Chinook—the RV parks, bars, eating places and so on that are my Bago travelers’ ports of call across the state are not actual.
Again, too, a community of friends and acquaintances unflinchingly lent themselves to me and the making of this book these past three years: Mike Olsen, Ann McCartney, earring consultants Bryony Angell and Gilia Angell, Bob Simmons, Liz Darhansoff, Jud Moore, Laird Robinson, Michael Korn, Marshall Nelson, Lee Goerner, Sharon Waite, Richard Maxwell Brown, Barry Lippman, Hazel and Gene Bonnet, Barbara A. Niemczyk, Sue Lang, Pete Steen, Joy Hamlett and two generations of Bradley Hamletts, Bill Robbins, Merrill Burlingame, Ted and Jean Schwinden, Laurie Paris, Dorothy LaRango, Sven H. Rossel, Dore Schwinden, Thomas Blaine, Germaine Stivers, Marsha Hinch, Barbara Arensmeyer, Laura McCann, Tom Chadwick, Herb Griffin, Tom Stewart, Jim Castles, Brian Kahn of the Montana Nature Conservancy, Nancy McKay, Jean Roden, John Roden, Jim Norgaard, Vern Carstensen, Peter Haley, Dave Carr, Linda Foss, and Elizabeth Simpson.
Nor could a book of this sort have been done without these libraries and their helpful staffs: Great Falls Public Library; the Montana Historical Society at Helena; the Mansfield Library of the University of Montana at Missoula; the Parmly Billings Library; the Renne Library of Montana State University at Bozeman; the Shoreline Community College Library at Seattle; and the University of Washington Library at Seattle.
Throughout the decade of research I’ve spent on these books, I was rescued time and again by the extraordinary skills of Dave Walter, reference librarian of the Montana Historical Society. Among other things, this trilogy is a monument to Dave’s patience.
My, and Riley’s, versions of history have been derived and inspired from numerous sources, these perhaps main among them. The Indian quote about buffalo that “the country was one robe” is from The Last of the Buffalo, by George Bird Grinnell. For historical backdrop of Virginia City and the Alder Gulch mining era, and much else in Montana’s past, I’ve gratefully relied on Montana: A History of Two Centuries, by Michael P. Malone and Richard B. Roeder. Butte’s story is voluminously told, but specifics about mining fatalities were drawn from the annual reports of the Montana Inspector of Mines and “The Perils of Working in the Butte Underground: Industrial Fatalities in the Copper Mines, 1880–1920,” Brian Shovers, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Spring. 1987; about the Montana National Guard’s 1914 occupation of the city from “Butte: A Troubled Labor Paradise.” Theodore Wiprud, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Oct., 1971; and about the Company’s use of “rustling cards” from The Gibraltar, by Jerry W. Calvert. Detailed research on women’s exigencies in the frontier environment is in Paula Petrik’s chapter, “Capitalists with Rooms: Prostitution in Helena, 1865–1900,” and elsewhere in her book No Step Backward.
My version of the process of relocating a grizzly bear is an amalgam of techniques and circumstances; I’m greatly indebted to wildlife biologist Michael Madel for his painstaking advice on my grizzly scene. It should be noted that according to the best available figures from the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, there have been two fatalities of grizzlies in more than two hundred bear relocations by that Department. Riley’s account of the Dempsey-Gibbons fight in Shelby is drawn from avid coverage by national newspapers, and valuable background was provided to me during my Shelby visit by Theo Bartschi, Mabel Iverson, and the Marias Museum of History and Art. The detail of Tommy Gibbons disappearing to walk the hills at dawn is in a sidebar in The New York Times. July 5, 1923. In the scenes at the Chief Joseph Battlefield and the town of Chinook, the quote about Alahoos being told the Nez Percé casualties of each day is in Hear Me, My Chiefs, by L. V. McWhorter, and Charles Anceny’s observation about luck-over-genius in the pioneer cattle industry of Montana can be found in the Rocky Mountain Husbandman, Feb. 9, 1882. A Traveler’s Companion to Montana History, by Carroll Van West, was especially helpful in my sojourns into eastern Montana. For purposes of plot I’ve sometimes changed the locales, but I’m much indebted for quintessential episodes of the homestead and Depression eras to Mary Dawson, once of Sumatra; Fern Eggers, once of Vananda; and Lucy Olds of Butte. For historic photos and background before my visit to the Fort Howes Ranger Station, I wish to thank the Custer National Forest headquarters and Dr. Wilson F. Clark, author of Custer National Forest Lands: A Brief History.
The Montanian and the freewheeling way Mariah and Riley go about their journalism are a figment of my imagination, as much a vehicle for this novel as the Bago they resort to. But for basic lore and lingo of newspapering today; I was greatly helped by feature writer Kathleen Merryman, and by Steve Wainwright’s tutoring of me in the newspaper technology of the moment. As for Mariah’s habits of the camera, some are Carol Doig’s, a few are even my own, and I learned bundles from the splendid lensman Chris Bennion letting me watch some of his shoots.
Kudos to Zoe Kharpertian, copy-editing virtuoso, for finding a way to keep the lilt of westernisms amid the logic of style.
To Linda Bierds, my deep thanks for looking over this manuscript chapter-by-chapter with her unique combination of ever-encouraging friendship and poet’s insight.
Similar gratitude to Bill Lang, former editor of Montana: The Magazine of Western History and still a polymath of Montana and Western history.
Finally, all ultimate thanks to my wife Carol, for her photography from Moiese to Ekalaka and for her confidence and care toward this book from A to Z.
IVAN DOIG is a former ranch hand, a sometime poet, has a Ph.D. in American history, and is the author of seven novels and three works of nonfiction. He and his wife, Carol, divide their time between their home in Seattle and the places his writing takes him. Visit the author’s website at www.ivandoig.com.
THE MONTANA TRILOGY consists of English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana.
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ALSO BY IVAN DOIG
FICTION
Prairie Nocturne
Mountain Time
Bucking the Sun
Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
Dancing at the Rascal Fair
English Creek
The Sea Runners
NONFICTION
Heart Earth
&
nbsp; Winter Brothers
This House of Sky
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Ivan Doig All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Scribner trade paperback edition 2005
SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005046551
ISBN 0-689-12019-2
0-7432-7126-2 (Pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4767-4515-2 (eBook)
Contents
Epigraph
The End Toward Idaho
Motating the High Line
East of Crazy
Dawn Articulating
Acknowledgments
About Ivan Doig
Ivan Doig, Ride With Me, Mariah Montana
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