FREE PHOTO ARTICLE: Whimsical Montana

Because the KKK was hard-going

So last time out was Indiana, and it was pretty grim and hard-going thanks to the KKK and their general sh*thousery. So I thought I’d go less depressing this time. We’re off to Montana, to celebrate some of the state’s notable residents, because I really loved road tripping through there, stamping my National Parks passport and looking at dinosaur bones, steam trains and military history stuff. Even 100 years ago I think MT was not for the faint-hearted, so get ready for some characters…

Yankee Jim. He hated trains.

James George ‘left home on the toe of his father's boot,’ and like many, he went looking for gold in Montana. Arriving aged 22, in 1863, he set up shop around what is now Yellowstone National Park. I don’t think he found much gold, but he supplied meat to the Crow Indian Agency at one point. He did make money by taking hold of a toll road in 1873, which led through a canyon into newly created Yellowstone. It effectively made him a gatekeeper to the National Park from the north.

Depending on who you ask, he was either the most loveable of men, or a complete bastard. The local country sheriff put it down to whether he happened to be drunk or not at the time. ‘It all depends upon whether old ‘Yankee’ is drinking or not,’ he said. ‘He puts in on an average of about five days lapping up corn juice and telling the whoppingest lies ever incubated on the Yellowstone, and ten days neutralising the effects of them by talking and living religion.’

Jim outside his cabin. (Distinctly Montana)

The canyon is named after him now, and his cabin is still there. All sorts of people stopped there. Teddy Roosevelt, and a young Rudyard Kipling. He recommended that his readers stop by to see Yankee if they wanted good fishing. ‘Yankee Jim,’ he wrote in Sea to Sea:

‘Saw every one of my tales and went 50 better on the spot. He dealt in bears and Indians — never less than 20 of each; had known the Yellowstone country for years, and bore on his body marks of Indian arrows; and his eyes had seen a squaw of the Crow Indians burned alive at the stake. He said “she screamed considerable.”’

The old man was later unimpressed with Kipling’s account of his visit. My favourite thing about Yankee Jim is his unmitigated hatred for the Northern Pacific Railroad, which put down tracks going right past his cabin and robbed him of some of his monopoly for people passing through. ‘Every day when [he] heard the train coming,’ a neighbour claimed, ‘he would rush out, his long snow-white...beard waving in the breeze, and with his bony hands clinched into fists fling...cuss words from a seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary of profane language.’

You go Jim.

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Curly. Champion B*llsh*tter

Sticking with Montana’s raconteur contingent, I give you: Curly. AKA Bull Half White or Ashishishe. To be fair to him, he started off honest. In 1876, when he was roughly 20, he joined the US Army as a scout. In June, he had the misfortune to be serving under General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn (awesome battlefield to visit). Two days after that crushing defeat, Curly reached the outside world (an army supply boat) and broke the news about what had happened, apparently by miming, which I don’t know why, but it makes me giggle. He said he hadn’t fought in the battle, but watched from afar.

Over time, however, Curly’s story began to change, until he was apparently claiming to be the sole survivor of a massacre. At various times he claimed that he crawled to safety, that he hid under a Sioux blanket, and even that he had tried to persuade Custer to retreat. (By miming?) He became a celebrity. The more people that turned up to hear Curly talk about the battle, the more he made up. His family tended to believe that he had at one point gutted a dead horse and hid inside the carcass. In some quarters, people began to catch a distinct whiff of b*llsh*t. Another of Curly’s claims was that he had disguised himself as a Lakota warrior and escaped. On the 10th anniversary of the battle, an actual Lakota warrior pulled him up on this and remarked that Curly was known to have run away scared before the battle started. As for escaping the Lakota, he demanded to see Curly’s wings: ‘Nothing but a bird’ he said, ‘could have escaped after we surrounded the whites’.

One MT newspaper claimed that Curly was the most photographed Native American in America. (Wikipedia)

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To be fair, Curly couldn’t read anything printed about him. He also spoke hardly any English, so just how much he claimed himself and how much he just shrugged and nodded as newspapermen got mileage writing stories about him is unclear. He was a decent guy, a friend said, he just didn’t see any point in correcting the record when people began telling tall tales.

When he wasn’t fending off fans, Curly was a member of the Crow Police. He died in 1923 and I realise I’ve been past his grave. He was laid to rest at the cemetery at the National Monument where the Battle of Little Bighorn took place. His earliest story is probably closer to the truth, and I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Chicago Joe. Mortgaged her underwear.

How do you take on the world and win when you are an illiterate immigrant without a penny to your name? Ask Mary Welch. Born in Ireland in the 1840s, she emigrated to NYC with her family at 14, about a decade and a half after Gangs of New York takes place. She worked in a sweatshop for a while, and then decided she’d had enough. At 18, she reinvented herself as Josephine and moved to Chicago where she took up prostitution, diligently banking her money. She was determined to achieve something. In the mid-1860s, about the time Yankee Jim heard about the gold rush in Montana and ran off there, she heard the same. She also heard that there were a lot of men there, and not enough working women. At 22 years old she decided to corner the market and set off on her own.

(Legends of America)

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She washed up at Last Chance Gulch, a typical, makeshift gold rush town, where about 1,000 miners were flush with cash. Joe wanted it. She bought a log cabin, hired girls from Chicago and opened a brothel. Last Chance Gulch became the town of Helena, the capital of Montana Territory. Joe had a reputation for looking after her girls and she was more than competent as a businesswoman. In fact, she was ruthless. At one point it was even claimed that she mortgaged her underwear to expand her red light business interests. She was becoming a pillar of the community on the other hand, charitable and a member of high society, such as it was in Helena.

Dodging run ins with the law, she opened a $30,000 theatre for variety shows in 1889. A few years later, she lost most of her wealth when the economy took a hit, and she died in 1899. She may have been penniless (almost) but the town gave her a huge sendoff. Even a Governor of Montana proudly attended the former prostitute’s funeral despite the sideways glances. Chicago Joe is buried at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Helena.

Stagecoach Mary Fields. Part woman. Part Bear. Apparently.

Much like Chicago Joe, Mary Fields was born with nothing. In fact, less than nothing. She was born a slave on a plantation in Tennessee in 1832. One description was that: ‘she was...about six feet tall and 200 pounds with.. the strength and, sometimes the temperament of a grizzly bear.’

If you pissed her off. If you didn’t she was apparently delightful. After emancipation she worked on a maid and a domestic servant, before in a roundabout way, she ended up joining her former master’s sister at a convent near Cascade in the mid-1880s. No more emptying chamber pots for Mary. She was a maintenance woman, a gardener, worked in haulage, chopped wood, did security work and was the forewoman on a building site. An African-American woman, doing men’s jobs, and talking no sh*t from anyone. She was eventually booted out of the convent for using obscenities and after ‘an incident with a disgruntled male subordinate’ on the building site (which involved guns) she was fired. She opened a tavern in Cascade, but made nothing because if people were poor she fed them for free, and eventually went bankrupt.

(Wikipedia)

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Which is when she became the first African-American woman to deliver mail on a star route (basically as a USPS contractor). At the age of sixty, she went too and fro with her stagecoach in all weathers, armed with multiple weapons, of which she favoured a .38 Smith and Wesson that she kept under her apron. She was never known to miss a day of work, and when winter set in, she strapped on snow shoes, slung the mail sacks on her shoulders and did her rounds on foot. She retired in her 70s.

Terrifying, she might have been, but Mary was loved. The town closed down every year to celebrate her birthday, she babysat everyone’s kids, and when her house burned down her neighbours rebuilt it for her. My favourite fact? When MT passed a law forbidding women from going into Saloons, Mary was granted an exemption. Gary Cooper lauded her, Whoopi Goldberg has played her. She died having lived a full, adventurous life in 1914.

Josephine Doody. Everyone’s favourite kind of wrong’un

‘The bootleg lady of Glacier Park’ arrived in MT on the run around 1890. Originally from Georgia, Josephine Doody was working in a dance hall in Colorado when she killed a man. (possibly self defence, possibly not so much) She had rocked up in the seedy town of McCarthyville. Whilst passing the time at one of the town’s 32 saloons (Slippery Bills) a fur trapper named Dan Doody spotted her and was apparently not dissuaded by her rampant opium addiction or her frequent profanity. He is said to have tied her to a horse and dragged her to his homestead where she kicked the habit and set up home with him.

Fast forward about twenty years and Glacier National Park was created and now surrounded their property, which remained privately owned. Dan was hired as one of the first rangers in 1910, but was predictably fired  soon after for “excessive poaching.” Try telling the Doody’s that their backyard was not theirs anymore. Josephine referred to it as “her” park. In fact, she went one better than her husband and his hunting mountain lions. When he died, she began making bootleg whiskey, illegally using wood from the park, again, illegally, to fire her stills. Prohibition came along and business boomed. Men on the Great Northern Railroad apparently blew their train whistles to order X quarts of hooch and aged 70+ she’d row it across. She died in 1931, in her eighties.

(Glacier Nation)

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Which leads me to the state of MT needing a round of applause for its response to prohibition. It came in in 1919, and soon, MT above all states had decided: Prohibition can suck it. Within two years apparently the people of Butte were consuming more alcohol per capita of illegal booze than anyone else. The Bootlegger Trail ran across the border into Canada. Federal authorities did their best, but the locals were not interested in their cause. Teenagers were walking the streets in front of them with hip flasks. By 1926, seven years before prohibition ended, MT had had enough, and declared it wouldn’t enforce it. Cheers, Montana.

Montie Montana. Lassoed a President

A member of the Rodeo Hall of Fame and one of Montana’s most beloved cowboys, Owen Michael was born in Wolf Point, MT in 1910. He spent a career trick-roping, acting and being a stuntman in Hollywood for the likes of John Wayne and Roy Rogers. His catchphrase was: ‘If you can't do it on horseback, it probably ain't worth doin.’ Which is nearly as funny as the fact that he was in a film called Arizona Bushwhackers.

An announcer forgot his actual name in 1925, which is why he ended up with his unimaginative nickname, but at that point he’d already been spinning ropes for nine years.

As a grown up, Montie was partial to a publicity stunt. He once took his horse (Poncho Rex) to the top of the Empire State Building so that it could have a look at NYC, and he once roped five running horses with one single lasso toss. The horses all happened to be draped with attractive cowgirls. His crowning glory, though, came in 1953. Remember Eisenhower? WW2 legend and President? Montie got one over on the Secret Service by roping him during his inaugural parade just for the lols.

Montie spent his later years touring elementary schools, doing tricks for the kids and handing out photos. He died in 1998, and is buried in Chatsworth, California.

(Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame)

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The Montana Medicine Show’s Genuine Montana History by B. Derek Strahn was the inspiration for this article. It’s based on a radio show and I picked up a copy in a dinosaur museum somewhere. It’s good fun, and full of stories that you can dip in and out of.