The Elk Bar ...

Even though I've never seen this sign after dark, I'm still willing to bet that it's one of the greatest bits of neon in the state. And I found it in what was for me, at least, a most unexpected place: the little Hi-Line town of Chinook! Who would have thought?

Laboring ...

Since today is Labor Day, I decided that I should post a picture of people who were laboring ... so here's an old Forest Service photo of CCC enrollees chopping firewood. This was taken at the Ruby CCC camp on the Beaverhead National Forest, presumably down in southwestern Madison County.

Fort Maginnis ...

The United States Army had a very strong presence in Montana during the last third of the nineteenth century, in large part a military response to the Custer massacre of 1876. Scattered across much of the territory, the Army's forts were busy and often well-built places ... but most of them also had fairly short lives.

One of the lesser-known Montana posts was Fort Maginnis, situated in a remote but lovely ranching area a little southeast of the Judith Mountains in Fergus County. The fort was established in 1880 and abandoned a decade later, as Montana's perceived "Indian threat" rapidly faded. There's almost nothing left at the site today, except the old post cemetery ... though the military burials there were exhumed ages ago.

This evocative old photo of Fort Maginnis dates from 1886. The buildings in the background are Officer's Quarters, built using standard military blueprints of the era.

Dimming trails of other days ...

There's no doubt that Montana has one of the strongest literary traditions of any of the states, and it's one that extends back all the way to our frontier era. One of my favorite Montana authors from a century ago is a man named Frank Bird Linderman ... a fine storyteller and artist who lived on the Hi-Line and in the Flathead Lake country. His books are filled with wonderfully evocative tales of Montana's Native Americans and frontiersmen.

Today's entry is a sentimental poem by Linderman, printed as an introduction to his 1920 book On A Passing Frontier: Sketches from the Northwest. The volume is dedicated "to the good town of Malta, and to the camps in the Little Rockies where the old west is making it's last stand."

O, dimming trails of other days,
Your lure, your glamour, and your ways
Will last while those who knew you live,
And, fading, to the past will give,
To guard and to forever hold,
A wealth of stories never told.
The winters pass and take their toll;
Where tramped the bear now crawls the mole,
And grasses, spurning steps so light,
Are blotting you from human sight.
The same winds blow, the seasons change,
But white men's ways are hard and strange;
We tread on ants, and lo ! 'tis thus
Eternity will tread on us.

Mountain lake ...

Just one more Glacier photo before we move on ... at least for a while. This is Lake Frances, my favorite backcountry camping spot on the Brown Pass trail, up near the Canadian line. I took this photo about six years ago while on a backpacking trip with two friends up into the Hole in the Wall country ... and though the little lake was freezing, of course I took a morning dip.

Lake McDonald...

I've been trying very hard not to overwhelm this blog with photos of Glacier Park, despite my inclinations to the contrary ... but I suppose a few more Glacier shots won't hurt. I took this one back in July, an evening shot of Lake McDonald taken from the beach at Apgar. Most beautiful vista in the world.

Man and earth in the right proportion ...

Today's quote is from a piece called "Cecil Migrates," by an author named Ellen Meloy; it was published in the 1988 volume Montana Spaces. Meloy was a naturalist, writer, and artist who moved to Montana in the 1970s for graduate school, and stayed for over a decade before emigrating to the canyon country of southeastern Utah.

Before Alaska came along and ruined everything, one of every twenty-five square miles in America was Montanan. This much space has nurtured a healthy Cult of Place in which people find perfection, even divinity in the landscape; they finally admit that here man and earth are in the right proportion to one another.

Big Coulee ...

One of the things I love most about Montana landscapes is the dramatic interplay you often see between the prairies and the mountains. This is a shot I took a few years ago while driving through the Big Coulee country, near the Stillwater-Golden Valley county line. The prairie goes on as far as the eye can see ... but way off in the hazy distance, the Beartooths still loom over everything.