It might have been worse

by Beatrice Larned Massey

The next day we went through another hundred miles of cattle and grain ranches. We were told that these towns, a hundred miles apart, had been trading-posts and stage-stops in the early days. Dickinson, Glendive, Miles City, and Billings, Montana, are all fine, thriving cities—excellent modern hotels, wide paved streets, fine churches, stores, office buildings, and theaters, not overlooking the movie houses. In passing, I wish to speak of the movies—a national, educational institution, to be reckoned with. If we were not too dead tired after a scrub, change of clothes, and dinner, we went to a movie and saw excellent pictures and the world’s doings to date. Usually there were plenty of electric fans, and always one big “paddle” fan outside the front entrance. This we found the case with banks, office buildings, and shops. (Solve that if you can!) In many dozens of canaries were singing a jubilee. There was always a large clock in full view of the audience—another sensible idea. These cities were equipped with every modern device and invention. They claimed your admiration and deserved your unstinted praise. It was almost impossible to believe that the next morning, ten minutes after you left the pavements, you would again be out on the prairies, and perhaps meet no one for hours.

At Dickinson, North Dakota, we found the St. Charles Hotel very good. We had been told to have lunch the next day in Medora, at the Rough Riders Hotel, one of the few buildings left of the early cowboy days. The town is nothing—a new school and store and a handful of old buildings. It is quite near the ranch where Colonel Roosevelt lived for two years. They instantly tell you that with real pride, for these people loved the man as they knew him. Like the buffalo, the picturesque cowboy is almost extinct. On the big cattle ranches we saw near cowboys—boys in their teens herding the cattle, and some ordinary, dirty-looking men on horses. There were half a dozen men eating noon dinner at the hotel(?), a tumble-down old building about as romantic as any old woodshed. One grizzly old fellow was pointed out as having been a guide for the Colonel. The place was dirty, the food impossible, greasy and cold, and the few bullet-holes in the far-famed bar were not sufficient to make this member of the party rave over the place. It seemed like a travesty, or a ghost of some former existence. You may infer that we did not care for Medora!

For the next hour we climbed steadily up, the roads growing narrow and rocky and full of chuck-holes. Everything that is rough and bad going in the Far West is “chucky,” and we were soon to get acquainted with real chuck-holes. Presently we came out on a plateau, and before us lay the Bad Lands of North Dakota. You may read of them, see pictures of them, or see them from a train, but you have never really seen their wonder, their grotesquely beautiful grandeur, until you stand in their midst as we did. High cliffs, deep canyons, queer formations of stone and earth that look like great castles or human heads. Again they resemble mushrooms of mammoth size, in all colors—gray, pink, orange, black, greens of a dull hue (not from the verdure, for there is none to speak of), yellows, and even purplish and chalky white. Here again you can see the outline of some giant creature, as if it had been carved in a prehistoric age. We are told that the sea once covered these lands. You can plainly see the ridges, like a rock on the ocean shore where the water has receded. I suppose they are called the Bad Lands because they are arid and nothing will grow. They are the wonderlands of this country—geological wonders, left from some glacial period before the foot of man trod the earth. No pen can adequately describe that scene; no brush could do justice to its weird beauty. The stillness of death reigned. Not a bird or a living creature did we see. The way winds around these strange cliffs, now up a steep incline, where you look down at the road below, again in the bottom of a ravine or chuck-hole, and you wonder how you could drive the car either down or up again.

“Did you ever see anything like this, anywhere?”

“No, but it looks like what I imagine the bottom of hell must look like.”

All that day we drove in and out, with an ever-changing panorama of fantastic shapes and colors. We were awed, thrilled to our very marrow, and even now, weeks later, as I write of it, I realize that my hands are cold. Believe me, my friends, this is the acid test of driving. If you qualified, well and good; but if you lost your nerve or your head—a long good-night, and a perfectly good funeral! Glendive, Montana, and the comfortable Jordan Annex looked human and mighty good to us that night. We all admitted that we were scared half to death. But, oh, the wonder and majesty of that sight! We blessed our good car, we blessed our Maker, and we slept as if we had been drugged.

X
THE DUST OF MONTANA

Poor Montana! Burned, scorched to ashes from four summers of drought, and no rain in six months! Everywhere the people told us the same story. The rivers and streams were dry as bones. “Don’t stop here for water” was a familiar sign. We met hundreds of families driving out, in old “prairie-schooners,” with all their household furniture and their cattle. These poor souls had to find water for their cattle and themselves. They had tried to raise crops, and were literally driven out. The children looked pinched and starved. The women and men were the color of leather, tanned by the scorching sun of the plains, the dust, and the dry, hot winds. They had lost everything. Their faces were pathos personified. It wrung your heart to see them. We always slowed down and waved to them, and often stopped and talked. It was rare to get a smile from even the children. When we would give some little kiddie an orange, it was the pathetic mother who tried to smile. Before we had covered the four hundred miles across the state, our faces were burned, our lips so dry and cracked that they bled, and our eyes nearly burned out of our heads. Yet we had but a few days of it, and they had suffered for four summers! At night we would soak our hands and faces in cold cream, but the next night they were quite as bad. The dust was from six to eight inches deep, and the roads were either through sand or chucky. We know now why Lohr named his song “My Little Gray Home in the West.” It could not possibly have been any other color. A dozen times we thought our springs were gone. The road looked like a level stretch of dust; then down you would go to the bottom of a chuck-hole with a thud that made your teeth chatter.

The cattle looked as starved as the people. We came to one valley that had been irrigated, and for a mile or so the crops were green. The ditch was full of water—real wet water. Horses and cows, dogs and people were standing in it. We filled our radiator and bottles and laved our hands and faces. Germs or no germs, we drank our fill. In half an hour or less your throat and mouth would be as dry as ashes, and your thirst was insatiable. We found that fruit, especially oranges and pears, quenched the thirst better than water; so we always kept plenty of fruit in the car. The going was so bad that we did not reach Miles City until late. After leaving Fargo, each morning we had taken the precaution to wire ahead for reservations, always adding “driving,” so, if we were belated, the rooms would still be held for us. We had been told that the Olive Hotel at Miles City was the only poor hotel on the route. Everyone had given it a black eye. We had mentioned it to the manager at the Jordan Annex in Glendive. “I think you will find it very comfortable. Our company has taken it over and refurnished it.” When we were sending our usual morning wire, he very politely said that it would be his pleasure to notify them of our coming.

To digress for a moment—the people of Montana pride themselves on their universal courtesy to strangers. Time and again, we had people say, “You have found our people polite and obliging?”—“Yes; they are kindness itself”—and they were.