Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America

FOURTEEN: Montana’s Emerging Montane Homeland

c h a p t e r f o u r t e e n Montana’s Emerging Montane Homeland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John B. Wright Montana is a place that never was but always is—a fractious, undecided landscape where the essential point of living is to discover what kind of homeland it should become. Montanans share a visceral certainty that they are unique but do not agree on what they are; they live in a culture where, to paraphrase historian K. Ross Toole, “optimism outruns the facts” (Toole 1959, 247). There are at least two Montanas, one based on destructive exploitation and transience, the other grounded on stewardship and a fierce devotion to life spent outdoors. The state embodies both intentions of the essential human mystery. This dilemma is played out vivid and real, like two strands of rope tossed into a turbulent Big Sky. No geographer has ever specified a “Montana” region in a classification scheme. Wilbur Zelinsky referred to “the problem of the West” and relegated Montana to a generic category called “The West,” drawing no distinction between Montana and the Mojave Desert, the Nebraska Sand Hills, or the shortgrass prairies of Kansas (Zelinsky 1992, 129). Donald W. Meinig (1972) fared no better in his classic analysis of “American Wests.” Other than a concession to Butte and Helena as minor cities, Montana was again cast into the bin of geographic miscellany. In the absence of a primate city, the meaning of the place has proven to be elusive. Joel Garreau lumped Montana with other little-known and thinly peopled lands in his “Empty Quarter” region (Garreau 1981). For geographers, Montana is the place no one knows. 225 Historians provide a bit of solace. Frederick Jackson Turner (1920) de- fined a frontier based on low population density and free land, Walter Prescott Webb (1957) perceived a climatological West ruled by aridity, and Patricia Nelson Limerick (1988) revealed a West linked by an unbroken legacy of conquest . However, none discussed Montana in depth nor offered finer distinctions based on emerging cultural geographies. Montana’s historians have. Joseph Kinsey Howard’s Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (1943) remains the finest book of its kind. Howard grasped the singularly confused nature of Montana, writing that its history “has been bewilderingly condensed, a kaleidoscopic newsreel, unplotted and unplanned; that of other states has been directed, molded by tradition into a coherent and consistent drama” (Howard 1943, 3). Howard wrote that “Montana never has had a stable economy. . . . [It] is a country of great intensities [where people] are a cash crop” during frequent economic recession. “What are we then?” asks K. Ross Toole in Twentieth Century Montana: A State of Extremes (1972, 287). He answers plainly: “This ‘thing,’ this ‘place’ called Montana has been cyclically beaten, battered, and bruised. It has often been misgoverned, exploited , lied to, and lied about.” Destructive exploitation is the defining characteristic of the Montana experience. The place has been treated as a resource colony and as a “plundered province” (DeVoto 1934, 355). This history has left psychological and geographic scars that go far in explaining why a healing homeland impress has yet to be created. Few places in America have been treated with more vicious disregard than Montana. Operating more on myth than geographic truth, the exploiters have inflicted or learned desperate lessons. First came the open-range ranchers of the 1880s, overstocking semiarid prairies with 600,000 cows in a country, at the time, incapable of supporting 100,000. When the blizzards came in the winter of 1886/87, the grass was gone and livestock losses in some areas exceeded 95 percent. Following this disaster, barbed wire fenced the land into permanent mixed-stock farms; Terry Jordan calls the pattern the “Midwestern ranching system” ( Jordan 1993, 267). Chastisement replaced conceit in the ranchlands of the state. Then came the “Honyockers” (German slang for “Chicken Chasers”)— greenhorn farmers lured into the state by the passage of the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. This act, rather than any bill passed in the nineteenth century , initiated Montana’s largest homesteading influx. Some 85,000 people 226 . . . john b. wright arrived in the state’s northern plains alone, enticed onto 320-acre tracts by railroad company promises of agrarian plenty. From 1910 to 1916 the rains came, and wheat prices stayed high because of wartime demand. Then World War I ended, prices collapsed, and drought returned. By 1920...