Hello Everyone,
You’ll be very happy to hear that I am no longer in Missoula. I have left the mountains entirely for the moment and am writing to you this week from Great Falls, Montana on the edge of the Great Plains. It’s definitely different to see flat landscapes stretching out towards the horizon after so many months in the mountains. I do plan to loop back into the Rockies in a couple of weeks, but for now it’s just good to be on the road again and moving. It’s been a pleasant week even though I haven’t gotten too far from where I started. I spent much of the week split between Helena, Montana’s capital city, and Great Falls. Shadow Catcher is driving so much smoother than it was last week and I’m really glad I took it back in for another look. Great Falls is a great place to give it a good test, because the streets in town are absolutely terrible. I’m really hoping that the rest of the summer will be smooth sailing from here.
After I finished up this post last week, I heard from Kerry at Rocky Mountain Diesel who was taking care of my van. He told me that while they had rebuilt my drive shaft the week prior, there was still something wrong with it and it needed to go back to the shop that had rebuilt it. He told me that I could pick up my van for the night and that they would get on it first thing in the morning. It was pretty late at that point, so I picked it up and headed just down the road to Highlander Brewing Company. Highlander is a perfect example of something I’m surprised I don’t see more often in places. Highlander Beer is an historic Missoula brand first brewed in 1910 and named (with full permission) after the New York Highlanders baseball team (later renamed the Yankees). Highlander was brewed right there in Missoula until 1964 when the brewery was demolished during the construction of Interstate 90 and the beer went dormant. The branding was purchased in 2015 by a start-up Missoula Brewing Company. While they don’t brew the original Highlander beer, they sure capitalize on the name and the nostalgia with a brewery chock-full of old bottles, signs and memorabilia. The taproom is beautifully situated along Grant Creek, the beers they are brewing are pretty good and overall it’s a wonderful place to be. It’s also a quiet and easy place to park overnight which was an added bonus.
I was up bright and early on Thursday so that I could hit the gym and get my van in right when they were opening up. They had told me it probably wouldn’t take too long, so I wandered up to Starbucks to read for a while. I finished up my book, Dragon’s Teeth by Michael Chrichton which he had written back in 1974 but wasn’t published until after he died. I really enjoyed this book, as I have most of Chrichton’s books which I’ve read. It was a novel, but one which wove a lot of historic characters into the story. It followed a young Yale student who went west to Montana in 1876 to dig up fossil bones with a team of paleontologists. They encounter all sorts of characters on their travels into the unexplored regions of the territory. It was an easy read and a lot of fun, especially while I’m here and know a lot about the history and geography of the region. Anyways, I had just finished the book when I got a call from Kerry telling me they needed to replace the slip yoke in the driveshaft and that they couldn’t find one until Tuesday and I almost lost it. That was going to be another five days tacked onto the month I had already been in the greater Missoula area and my spirits just crashed. I was never going to get out of that town. Thankfully they ended up finding one, replacing it, returning the drive shaft and reassembling everything by the end of the day which felt like a minor miracle at that point. When I took it out for a test drive, it felt like a whole different van from when I pulled out the first time last week. I tried to keep my hopes in check, though, and decided I better hang around Missoula for one more night and drive it around as much as possible before taking off.
I did just that, but by Friday morning I decided to go ahead and cruise towards Helena and see how we did on a longer ride. We did just fine and I really enjoyed driving along the Blackfoot River and through the mountains to get there. After a quick workout, I made a beeline for the Montana Historic Society Museum which is right next to the State Capitol. Aware that the following day was the 4th of July, I wanted to see these two places just in case they were closed for the holiday, which it turned out they were not. The history museum had been getting a refresh for the last few years and had just reopened in its expanded space last December. I thought it was excellent and spent about 4 hours making my way through, reading up on Montana’s history and learning a lot about the state. I thought the coolest things in the collection were a 200+ year-old bison hide teepee cover and several examples of “Winter Counts”. A Winter Count is a piece of tanned hide which many of the Plains Tribes used as a sort of diary of their existence. Every winter, the elders would gather and discuss what they thought was the single most important event that had happened since the previous winter and then someone would paint that event onto the Winter Count hide. These are incredible to see and I found them absolutely fascinating. The museum also has a stuffed white bison in a hidden nook upstairs which is open to the public but not exactly advertised. The bison has a brown crown tuft and had blue eyes so it wasn’t an albino, which made it even cooler. Named Big Medicine, it lived its entire life on the National Bison Range on the Flathead Reservation and was well cared for, living to the age of 26. Historically only about one in five million bison were born white and those that were were considered sacred messengers when they arrived.
After leaving the museum, I drove over to have a wander up Last Chance Gulch in Helena’s historic section. Helena was the site of Montana’s last great gold rush, and the prospectors who staked the discovery claim were just going to take one last chance before calling it and moving on to another location. I’m sure they were glad they did as the Last Chance Gulch coughed up over $3.6 billion worth of gold in today’s money. Today, Last Chance Gulch is a lovely pedestrian mall lined with historic buildings, bars and restaurants and is really a nice place for a stroll. I stopped in for a beer at the Windbag Saloon which is housed in what was once one of Helena’s longest running brothels. Opened as such in 1927 by Ida Levy, it was taken over in the 1950s by Dorothy Josephine Baker, affectionately known as "Big Dorothy”. Big Dorothy ran the place until she was run out of town in 1973. The Windbag has a lot of subtle nods to Big Dorothy and they had a really decent blues band playing while I was there. From there I wandered over to visit the Rathskeller which is in the basement of the original Montana Club, once the men’s club to be a part of in the whole territory. The speakeasy-style bar pays tribute to the Montana Club’s first bartender, Julian Anderson, who worked there from 1893-1953 and served drinks to the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain. It was pretty quiet when I was down there, but the bartender was friendly enough and it was a cool place to see. After that, I was feeling pretty tired, so I made my way back to the Capitol which had some excellent places out front to park overnight.
I headed straight into the Capitol Building on Saturday morning, as there was only one tour scheduled for the day and I didn’t want to miss it. Montana’s Capitol is exactly how I imagined and hoped it would be – full of beautiful historic paintings of cowboys and Indians and great architectural style. I particularly liked the statue of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress back in 1917. She was a lifelong pacifist and was one of 50 representatives to vote against U.S. entry into WWI. She left office after two terms, but ran again and was elected again in 1940. She was the only member of congress to vote against U.S. entry into WWII. In her 80s, she led anti-war marches against the Vietnam War and considered a third run for congress in 1972 at the age of 91 to try and extract the U.S. from that war. She did a lot more throughout her life, and was a pretty amazing woman and I’m glad she is remembered with one of three statues inside the Montana Capitol. She is also one of Montana’s two statues in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall in my hometown of Washington D.C. I also enjoyed hearing the story of the statue on top of the capitol dome. Long referred to as “Lady Liberty” as it looks quite similar to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the sculptor’s granddaughters were on a public tour several years ago and looked at their guide as if he were crazy when he called it that. They set the record straight that their grandfather had, instead, sculpted “Ms. Montana” which is how she is now referred to (to be fair, Ms. Montana and the Statue of Liberty could be sisters). The last story, which came at my request, was how Helena became the state capital since I knew there was funny business at play. Back in 1889, an election was held to determine a new state capital, with seven choices on the ballot. The top two vote-getters were Helena and Anaconda, so a runoff election was held. Without getting into the details, Helena won by about 2,000 votes. There is an oft-told local story that many decades later, during an extensive home renovation of an old Victorian mansion in Helena, several thousand ballots for Anaconda were found behind a wall. This story seems to be a myth, but it’s also not impossible to believe. The Montana Capitol was the first state capitol with electricity (thank you Butte and Anaconda) and the first with elevators and I really liked the fact that every seat in the public galleries has a slot underneath for you to store your cowboy hat as no hats are allowed in the legislative chambers when they are in session.
From there, I went back across the street to the museum to check out the art galleries. I really enjoyed the Charles M. Russel Gallery which is a fitting tribute to Montana’s beloved adopted sun and famous cowboy painter (Russel is Montana’s other entry in the U.S. Statuary Hall in D.C.). Then it was time to get some 4th of July fun in my day. I headed over to Centennial Park to see some live music, eat some free hot dogs provided by the Lions Club and enjoy a fine, sunny morning in the Montana capital. Afterwards I went and enjoyed a beer or two at Lewis and Clark Brewery and then settled in for a nice afternoon nap.
In the late afternoon, I returned to Last Chance Gulch to take some photos and then headed up to nearby Reeder’s Alley. This is a cool, historic part of town with some original buildings, including an 1864 cabin from the earliest days of Helena’s gold rush. It’s named after Pennsylvanian born Louis Reeder and looks more like a Philadelphia street than a Montana street in many ways. I wandered up the hill to the Original Governor’s Mansion which is currently getting some much needed work done to it, and then past some beautiful historic homes to the Cathedral of St. Helena. This is truly one of the most spectacular cathedrals in the country, and was built between 1908 and 1914. Feeling quite pleased with all of these historical buildings, it was time to head out to see some fireworks. I went up to Mountain View Park which was having a wonderful community gathering with live music, food trucks and games. It was cooler up there, especially when the sun started to set, and was a lovely place all around. The main fireworks show started about 10:30pm and was really enjoyable, but the view from up there took in the whole valley and every backyard show for miles and miles in every direction. I’ve honestly never seen so many fireworks in my life which I thought was pretty cool. Afterwards I went for a few beers at Hap’s Bar down by the old train depot, which is definitely the coolest bar I found in Helena.
I took it pretty easy on Sunday as I wasn’t quite ready to leave but I also didn’t have much left that I wanted to see in Helena. I got a solid workout in in the morning and then spent some time at the library trying to catch up on some things. I enjoyed a couple of beers at the Blackfoot brewery and a lackluster dinner at the Windbag Saloon and then returned to Reeder’s Alley for a ghost tour. It turned out that I was the only one there for it, but the guide, Kevin, didn’t seem to mind at all. We sat and chatted for a while and then wandered all over the place for the next 2.5 hours (it was only supposed to be an hour-long tour). He told me that Helena had once had the furthest north Confederate memorial in the country which I found very interesting. He told me stories about all of the fascinating old buildings around town, including the mosque and minaret which had literally stopped me in my tracks when I drove past the day before (it was built as a social hall by the Shriners and currently serves as Helena’s Civic Center but was never actually used as a mosque for prayer). He even told me a few ghost stories which were also a lot of fun. I was only disappointed that I didn’t bring my camera (it was only supposed to be an hour!), because the sun was setting by the time we finished and the sky was really beautiful that night. When we finally finished, I had to wander back past some of the places he had talked about to get a better look, but I was pretty tired, so I called it an early night.
I was up an out on Monday morning and headed up the road to hop on a boat tour up the Missouri River through a section known as the Gates of the Mountains. It got that name from Lewis and Clark who realized as they were cruising up the river that they were going to have to abandon their boats and make their way over the mountains on foot. The only experience they had with mountains was in the Appalachians, and they were going to have some challenging days ahead of them to get through. Luckily for them they had Sacagawea with them who, in what must be one of the most fortunate coincidences of all time, was the long lost sister of the Shoshone chief with whom they wanted to trade for horses. They got their horses, and guides to get them through the mountains, but the idea of an easy waterway to the Pacific was dashed. Anyways, the boat tour was great and an excellent value at just $20. We even saw two bald eagles in a tree which was pretty cool.
From there I continued on up the road to Tower Rock, a landmark which the Shoshone had told Lewis and Clark about. It was a symbolic end to the Great Plains for the Indians and marked the place where bison could no longer be found and food in general would become scarce. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but there was a large group of bighorn sheep grazing nearby. Further up the road I stopped at First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park. In the times before horses returned to the new world with the Spanish, the Indians would use these “buffalo jumps” to hunt. One very brave Indian would dress up like a bison calf and call out to the lead cow like it was in trouble. She would go to investigate and the rest of the heard would follow. The “bait” would start to speed up and other Indians would come out with blankets to startle the bison into moving faster. At the last moment, the runner would jump over the cliff’s edge to a safe ledge below. Even if the lead cow saw the precipice, it would be too late to stop as the whole herd would run into her back and they would all fall to their death below. This obviously took a lot of planning and a reasonable amount of luck and wasn’t always successful. When it was there would still be a ton of work ahead as the butchering and preparing of the bison was quite a chore, but there would also be feasting and celebrating for many days among the hunters and their families. This was a cool little state park with a nice museum in the visitor center.
From there I continued on into Great Falls. I made a beeline for the Sip’n Dip Lounge, Great Falls’ legendary tiki bar with live mermaids swimming in the pool behind the bar. Perri and Dan, who are the couple behind Following Our Blus (formerly Crazy Brave Adventure) were in town but were leaving later in the evening on their way towards Newfoundland. Perri has been following this blog for a long time and I have been following their journey for the last couple of years and it was wonderful to finally meet them in person. I really wanted a maitai, but I also really wanted to work out later, so I held off and just had some water and some conversation as the mermaid swam around behind the bar. We chatted for a while and they felt like old friends which was really nice. I didn’t want to keep them too long though as I knew they had to get moving, so I wished them farewell and headed down the road to the gym. I got in a good workout and then zipped over to a nearby bar to watch what would be the last match of the U.S. men’s soccer team’s World Cup run. From there I had a nice walk around downtown and then stopped in for a quick beer at the Stein House. There were three ladies there: a border patrol agent, a NICU nurse and the bartender/manager and all three turned out to be fascinating people who told me all kinds of interesting things about Great Falls, the hot spots and the places to miss around town (and where to be careful after dark). They also told me about the Hudderites, a group similar to the Mennonites in many ways who live all over Montana and across the border in Canada. It turned out to be a fascinating evening and I was really glad I had run into them.
I started out yesterday morning by actually going to see the Great Falls of the Missouri River. These were once beautiful, powerful natural features, but they have all been tamed over the last century to provide electricity to the region and to cool down a copper smelter (Great Falls is known as the “Electric City”). They were interesting to see, but not particularly scenic. In the midst of them, I went to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, a cooperative effort between the U.S. Forest Service and Montana State Parks. I’ve been to a lot of Lewis and Clark sites over the last year, but I figured since I could get in using my parks pass I would have a look. Most of the staff there were local volunteers, some of whom were old enough that they may have known Lewis and Clark personally. The museum was really well done and very informative, especially about the Great Falls area which required an intense 18 mile portage to get their boats and supplies around the waterfalls. Even though I’m pretty familiar with the story by now, I still spent almost 3 hours in the museum. From there I went to the library for a few hours and then wandered past the beautiful, copper domed county courthouse. I made my way down to the river to check out the old train station of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway (better known as the Milwaukee Road). It’s a beauty, and had a nice little food court in the back where I stopped for a margarita. I continued on to a little restaurant called Magpie for dinner, which had been unanimously recommended to me by my lady friends from the night before. The food was excellent and I enjoyed sitting out on the patio in the cool evening air.
And that’s been my week, y’all. I came to the library this morning to try and take care of something for my dad’s estate with the IRS, but of course they are experiencing a high volume of calls and can’t help me today. So I will go ahead and finish this post while I’m here and have the rest of the day to do with as I please. I’m hoping to head down to the little local history museum here in a bit and check that out and will probably go back to the Sip ‘n Dip this evening for a cocktail and some more mermaid action. Either tonight or tomorrow morning, I am headed up the highway to Fort Benton, Montana’s oldest permanent settlement dating back to 1846. Fort Benton is the furthest navigable port of the Mississippi River system and has been called "the world’s innermost port". There are supposed to be some great museums there and some cool history to check out and I’m really looking forward to it. From there I hope to continue on to the small town of Havre and then out to visit the Bear Paw Battlefield, the site of Chief Joseph’s last stand during the Nez Perce War. Then I plan to pass through the Fort Belknap Reservation, the homeland to the Assiniboine (Nakoda) and Gros Ventre (Aaniiih) Tribes on my way south to Lewistown. From there, I’m not sure which way I’m heading as the weather is going to come into play this week for sure. We’re expecting a serious heat wave in this part of Montana so I’m going to have to figure out how to stay safe and cool and avoid the 110° F heat expected in some parts of the state. Either way, I’m looking forward to the week ahead and to exploring parts of the Treasure State that I’ve never seen before. You’ll just have to check back with me next week and see how it all turned out. Have a great week out there, stay cool and safe, and thank you, as always for reading.
-Mike
