Mirage
Sometimes the here and now gets mixed up with the there and then. By Bill Vaughn

[from the beginning] Until someone clones a cow that’s immune to disease, born with a brand and an ear tag, and knows when it’s time to move herself from summer to winter pasture, the daily labor of beef growers will remain essentially the same as it was when the founders of my family, and those of Kitty’s, began ranching not far from here in the 1870s.

My great-grandfather, Thomas Moran—landless, illiterate, and persecuted for being a Catholic—escaped County Waterford when he was 19 and found work as a farm hand near Boston. After he was rejected for service in the Civil War by a recruiter who claimed the Irish weren’t even good enough for cannon fodder, he sailed off in a snit for San Francisco, where he milked fifty cows twice a day, falling asleep with his swollen hands soaking in pails of water. After hearing about a big gold strike in the Montana Territory he headed north with another man, taking turns riding their only horse. While prospecting along Last Chance Gulch in January of 1866 he joined 1,500 other gold-crazed fools chasing a bogus rumor across Montana in what local wags would call the Sun River Stampede. Prospectors froze solid in a blizzard. Moran’s hide was saved by Italian Jesuits at St. Peter’s Mission, a squalid collection of cottonwood shacks on the Missouri.

That spring, after the Blackfeet began killing settlers and shooting their cattle, Moran helped the Fathers move St. Peters to a boxed valley ringed by massive stone buttes carved by the elements into antic shapes—Haystack, Birdtail, Lionhead and Fishback. But the day after the new Mission was dedicated the Blackrobes ran away again, still fearing for their scalps. They left Moran behind as caretaker. He kept his hair because his best friend, who also elected to settle at the Mission, had married the daughter of Heavy Shield, a Blackfeet chief.

When the Jesuits returned eight years later Moran began pouring his relentless energies into acquiring the three things he’d been denied by the tyrannies of the English Crown. First, he built a small church from rough timbers. Then he convinced the Fathers to teach him how to read. Finally, he began buying land with a joyful vengeance, leading some to wonder if he’d struck gold after all, or maybe discovered loot hidden by stagecoach robbers working the nearby Mullan Road.

His 1,700-acre spread was tiny by Montana standards, but more productive than places ten times its size because the pastures were cobwebbed with finger creeks and steeped in thousands of years of bison manure. He married, and did a sweet business selling grain, hay and beef to the stage stations and the U.S. Army garrisoned at Ft. Shaw, which issued him a .50-caliber needle gun for protection against the Indians. He was the first farmer in the area to buy a Wood’s binder, a house-sized implement pulled by horses that threshed grain and bound it into staves. In an era when few frontier people had any schooling he sent his three daughters and my mother’s father to Gonzaga University.

Kitty’s great-great-grandfather founded his fiefdom on cattle his clan stole from the ranch they were managing for a Connecticut corporation. When the old man decided they ought to branch out he divided this pilfered largesse equally between himself and his two sons. Holly Herrin took 320 acres from his pa, 53 cows and twelve horses and set forth to make some real dough. He expanded into the butcher business and added even more value to his product by running meat wagons to the mining camps. He bought and sold progressively larger places until he’d patched together one of the biggest spreads in Montana—the Oxbow Ranch. You could walk all day through these terraces along the Missouri, and when it was time to curl up by the campfire you’d still be on Herrin land. Instead of fighting the sheepmen moving into the territory in the 1880s Herrin joined them, building his flock to more than 13,000 woolies. He was equally famous in the area for being the only man at July 4 festivities in Wolf Creek to lift a 500-pound keg of nails.

Alas, all empires fall, either with a crash or, in the case of our great-grandfathers, with a sigh. Moran’s descendents had no taste for country life and moved to Great Falls when the ranch began to fail. There are now scores of us, more people than any single operation could support. All that remains of St. Peter’s is the church, standing forlorn in an Angus pasture; the shell of an opera house built for the music-loving friars, now used as a windbreak for cattle, and the ruins of the great stone boarding schools for the Blackfeet and Métis operated by the Jesuits and the Ursuline nuns, which burned and collapsed a century ago. Old Tom’s headstone leans in the cemetery on a hill above the church.

Holly Herrin surprised his second wife in bed with a man who would later mastermind a bank seizure of the Oxbow. The tail end of his wealth was a thousand acres in the Helena Valley called the Herrin Hereford Ranch, where Kitty grew up riding horses and bossing around cows. The beginning of the end came the day her mother drove down a country road Kitty had never seen, and stopped to slam open a mailbox and heave in a pair of high heels. After the divorce the ranch fell into the courts and financial ruin. Kitty, her mother, and her four sisters were evicted.

Only two things were passed down to us from our great-grandfathers: A photograph of Thomas Moran in overalls—intense, bearded and haunted-looking in the manner of homeless men who live in crates—and a windup Ingraham clock, which stopped at midnight a few years back and no longer works.

While the ten acres we scraped to buy sometimes make us wistful for all that land other families now own, at least we have a home for our quarter horses, that genius invention of the ranchers. And there’s a certain justice in the reversal of fortune our families endured. After all, the ground that gave them their wealth had been stolen from the Indians, larceny Moran was reminded of one day while riding under the buttes. He came across the scene of an old battle between the Blackfeet and their rivals from across the Divide, the Salish. Outnumbered, the Blackfeet had retreated behind a crude palisade of timbers and rocks they’d thrown up. But their defense failed and every man was slaughtered. I wonder what Moran felt as he held up one of the skulls to the light.

Of course, the settlers didn’t take all the land. Jerry Hamel, the rancher who had let us go along with him to chase strays on his place along the Jocko River, is a descendant of the men in that ferocious Salish hunting party. Maybe because his big chestnut felt more comfortable on its home turf than our horses did, Hamel was able to convince the gelding to step into the thicket.

The mountain lion that emerged was gone so fast the huge yellow eyes and flickering tail seemed like a mirage. We looked at one another with shock.

Maybe we would talk about this later. But right now there was still work to do.

Copyright © 2008 by Bill Vaughn