Clinton

On the Road to No Where and Everywhere

In his classic memoir – This House of Sky – Ivan Doig writes of the country in the very middle of Montana, the country where he grew up, and he celebrates the beauty and the challenges of the landscape.

“The country’s arithmetic tells it,” Doig wrote. “The very floor of the Smith River Valley rests one full mile above sea level. Many of the homesteads were set into the foothills hundreds of feet above that. The cold, storm-making mountains climb thousands of feet more into the clouds bellying over the Continental Divide to the west. Whatever the prospects might seem in a dreamy look around, the settlers were trying a slab of lofty country which often would be too cold and dry for their crops, too open to a killing winter for their cattle and sheep.”

Even after a generation of trying to carve a life and a living out of this rough and beautiful country, Doig remembered, “a settling family might take account and find that the most plentiful things around them still were sagebrush and wind.”

Welcome to Meagher County, Montana.

The county seat of Meagher County – White Sulphur Springs – is close to little that “modern civilization” would value and in the middle of all that is important. The county, current population estimate is 1,868, is named after a complicated (notorious) Civil War general, was birthplace of Doig and once attracted the investment dollars of John Ringling, the circus entrepreneur and railroad builder. There isn’t much in Ringling, Montana (south of White Sulphur) these days, but John – one of the five circus brothers – once dreamed of a railroad linking Yellowstone and Glacier Parks with his luxury hotel at the half way mark. As Ivan Doig says, many came to this rough and lovely land with big dreams and not all made it work. Ringling’s railroad made it 22 miles and the hotel never got built.

Two remarkable people who did make it work in central Montana – Jamie and Jock Doggett – have made a major difference in Meagher County, Montana and beyond. The Doggetts live on the old place that Ivan Doig once called home and they are the kinds of people who make the West – and the world – work.

Jamie has been a country commissioner, organizes the annual – 6th annual this weekend – Meagher County Book Festival and seems to serve as the unofficial hostess of the county. Jock seems at one with this place – hard working, serious, very smart and, even better, wise. He is quick with a quip and quicker with his courteous, yet candid take on all things from the price of lambs to what’s happening at the Senior Center in town. He’s the kind of guy you trust with the keys to the new pick-up or your safe deposit box.

I met Jamie more than a decade ago when we served together on the board of the Federation of State Humanities Councils. She had chaired the Montana council. I’d done the same in Idaho. As two “non-academics,” given a chance to see what the power of “the public humanities” can do to change lives, we found some of the greatest change in our own lives. Both Jamie and I are nuts for history and love to examine the interplay and interdependence of cultures. Continuing her work in the humanities, Jamie is now a presidential appointee to the National Council for the Humanities.

Last Friday night, Jamie helped organize a talk in White Sulphur Springs by a Crow Indian woman and former National Park Service ranger, Mardell Plainfeather, that had a crowd enraptured. Her presentation focused on the tradition of Crow clothing as art, but her real message, as she said gently, is that we are all just people who can learn from one another.

The real power of the humanities is the liberation and power contained in critical thinking, leavened by a dose of history, literature and the other humanities disciplines. If you want to understand the world – and each other – a little better, check out the website for your state humanities council. It just might change your life.

I had never been this far into central Montana until last Thursday when we rolled into the Doggett’s Camas Creek Ranch and spent two unforgettable days beginning to understand how in touch with the land and their neighbors the Doggetts truly are. Living in a city – even a modest sized city like Boise – often precludes a chance to listen to the silence, watch a thunderstorm develop, or simply sit and swap old stories with an old friend. The pace in the Smith River Valley may not be slower, just better.

At the same time, life is demanding on the high plains of central Montana. Lots of folks – This House of Sky is my proof – just couldn’t make it here. It is not country for the uncertain. Maybe that’s why sensible talk about the latest book read, a Friday night conversation about what the Crow culture has to offer to a bunch of late arrivers, or how the high school football team will do this fall seems a little more important and a little more human.

It’s easy to romanticize the American West. It can be, and always has been, a place of conflict and controversy. Nothing comes easy. Not everyone is a saint. Hard work and a few scoundrels built the West. There is no Marlboro Man, never was, only complex people and sagebrush and wind. Still every place – in the West and beyond and Meagher County is lucky – needs a pair like the Doggetts; people who give and care and value history and not just their own.

Like a beautiful book that stays with you forever, good people and good intentions can change a lot for the better.

Ivan Doig’s beautiful book about growing up in Montana is really about the landscapes we all carry around in our minds, forever. I’ve now been to the floor of the Smith River Valley, up the road to Camas Creek, on the road to no where and everywhere. I’ll have those memories of landscape – and wonderful people – with me until the last day and, who knows, beyond.

Tomorrow…some more thoughts from Montana on Doig’s latest book – Work Song.

Anaconda…Then and Now

It has been said that Butte, Montana is where the frontier intersected with the Industrial Age. If that’s true, then just down the road in Anaconda is where the Industrial Age built its monumental smoke stack.

No black/grey smoke pours from the old Anaconda Washoe smelter these days and the smelter jobs left along with the smoke. The smelter has been closed since 1980, but the history – and environmental legacy – remains, as does the stack. Taller than the Washington Monument and the largest free standing masonry structure in the world, the Anaconda stack still looms over the old smelter town as a constant reminder of what once ruled here – copper and the “Company,” as the Anaconda Mining Company was known.

Today, Anaconda is continuing to reinvent itself as an outdoor recreation center and a tourism destination. The stack is a state park and on the National Historic Register. The Jack Nicklaus-designed Old Works golf course is one of the best public courses in the country. Still, the history of the Industrial Age bumping up against the frontier oozes from the streets here. The Hibernians still have a hall, you can still buy fresh pasties and the high school team is called the Copperheads. Among a few spectacular historic homes, the houses once occupied by the smelter workers stand so close together the eaves overlap.

This past weekend was reunion weekend for some grads of what were once the two high schools in Anaconda. We had breakfast with a couple of the graduates of the Class of 1969. I asked one of them, now a resident of Southern California and wearing a USC tee shirt, when he had left Anaconda. “When I was 18 years old,” came his quick reply. In other words, as soon as he could get out of town.

Another charming fellow – with Anaconda in his blood and memory – quickly added that he had worked his last summer job before college at the smelter. “If you were going off to college,” he said, “they made sure you had a job at the smelter. They were good about that…they just didn’t tell you it might kill you.”

The closing of the Washoe Smelter didn’t kill Anaconda, as some had predicted. The environmental clean up continues, as do the memories of one of the most spectacular and most consequential chapters in the industrial development of the American West. Anaconda is worth a visit to see a survival story and an important piece of American and Western history.

What is it About Montana?

A few years ago North Dakota erected some clever signs at its border with Montana. One sign advised anyone headed west to remember what happened to a certain long haired cavalry commander who left North Dakota in 1876 and ended up in a sorry state on the banks of the Little Big Horn in Montana.

With all due respect to North Dakota, given a choice, does Montana sound like a lot more interesting place – to visit, to live, to work?

George Custer didn’t live to contemplate what I think of, and many others think of, as the allure of Montana. It has always fascinated me that the land of the Big Sky has a certain “brand” that states like Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado – not to mention North Dakota – never seem able to match. Maybe its because Montana has been building the brand since that fateful day in June of 1876 when the tourist from North Dakota misjudged his welcoming committee.

I got to thinking about what the Montana “brand” means to the economics and, perhaps more importantly, the image of the state while reflecting on two recent pieces of information.

The first was a program at Boise’s City Club a while back that focused on the “creative economy,” often identified as the critical mass in an area of artists, cultural non-profits and cutting edge businesses. Amoung the laments before the City Club was that 30-to 45-year olds are in danger of – or actually are – picking up and leaving Idaho, while an emphasis on developing home-grown entrepreneurs is waning.

When I first came to Idaho nearly 35 years ago, the Boise economy was largely defined by three amazing, home grown success stories. Harry Morrison had started his construction company – Morrison-Knudsen – in Idaho and shaped t into a world-wide powerhouse that pushed the dirt and poured the concrete to construct Hoover Dam and built a good deal of the American military infrastructure in South Vietnam, among many other big projects. In much the same time frame, Boise Cascade went from a small regional timber products concern to a major national player in the wood and paper industry. Joe Albertson pioneered the modern super market from the ground up with his first store in Boise’s North End and went on to build a national brand.

All three of those home-grown companies are still around, but in much different form than just a few years ago and none has the power or influence in the local economy that the old M-K, the old Boise Cascade and the old Albertsons had. The transformation of those three companies makes one wonder where the next great home-grown business will come from? I wonder particularly were the next great business will come from if we’re failing short, as many smart folks think we are, in encouraging a “creative economy.”

I know a handful of smart and aggressive young Idaho entrepreneur’s in the high tech world Idaho, but many of them will tell you they fear Idaho may not be the place where a new Micron, the last really big home-grown business, gets its start. The outlook is cloudy for a number of reasons.

Idaho has whacked its support for education at every level over the last two years. College is costing more and more and we don’t seem to be producing the workforce we need for a 21st Century economy. Idaho high school dropout rates and the number of young kids headed to post-secondary education is abysmal. As the Idaho Statesman reported yesterday the dropout numbers may be even more dismal – by double – than previously thought.

Bob Lokken, who built a successful high tech business in Boise and sold it to Microsoft, asked at that recent City Club event, “What if we took all the money we spend on K through 12 and create an information-age school system, not one that continues to make a labor pool for an industrial-age economy?” Good idea, but Idaho hasn’t even had a serious debate about what kind of education system we want – or need – for more than a decade. Building a 21st Century creative economy without a genuine strategy – a strategy that really engages the education establishment, business and those young entrepreneurs – is a bound to be about as successful as Custer’s trip into Montana. So, Idaho’s creative economy seems, at best, stuck in neutral.

Which brings me back to the Big Sky state and the second data point. The data came to me in the form of a special four page advertising section on – you got it – Montana that appeared recently in The New Yorker magazine. Before you dismiss an advertisement about Montana in the elitist New Yorker as self-serving fluff, consider the Montana message.

The Montana advertisement – really more an essay than an ad – was all about the creative economy. The piece quotes 20-year Montana resident Walter Kirn – he wrote the novel that became the hit movie Up in the Air – and Alex Smith, a film director, who will be making a film this summer based on a novel by Jim Welch – another Montanan – about life on an Indian reservation.

Montana officials say the piece was aimed primarily at encouraging tourism, but I think it works on a deeper level. It says, in effect: Montana values creativity, smart people like it here and we welcome such things.

The ad, or whatever it is, continues: “Montana captivates the imagination of remarkably imaginative people – writers, yes, but actors, directors, musicians, painters, sculptors – not because of what’s so obviously here or not here. Rather, creative people keep finding themselves amid unplanned moments of clarity that resound through their lives.”

That, my friends, is the language of brand building; not to mention the language of a creative economy of the 21st Century.

The Montana New Yorker piece ends with “few states have their own literature; Montana’s runs broad and deep, reaching far beyond familiar titles like the Big Sky, The Horse Whisperer and A River Runs Through It and into the lives of its people.”

Any ad guy, particularly one with a well-considered point of view, sort of like Don Draper in Mad Men, will tell you that a brand can’t last if its built on spin. It must be authentic and it must be true. Montana, I think, has an authentic brand.

Like Idaho and most other states, Montana also has big troubles with budgets, schools are hurting. What might be different, and it might explain why Montana is perceived differently – why the brand works – is that deep down in the land of the Big Sky they get the fact that captivating the imagination of deeply creative people is the economic road map into the 21st Century.