A few thoughts… About the real West

By Sandy Compton
Reader Columnist

They’re making hay in southwestern Montana; cutting record harvests in the Big Hole, Horse Prairie, and the Beaverhead and Madison valleys. These water-rich bottoms are sandwiched between spectacular Montana ranges — the Pioneers, Anaconda-Pintler and Beaverhead; the Ruby, Gravelly and Madison. These stony sources feed the rivers that coalesce into the Missouri at Three Forks: the Red Rock, Ruby, Wise, Big Hole, Beaverhead, Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin. It is big country, anchored economically to the critters that eat the hay come winter. A lot of “what’s for dinner” starts in Beaverhead and Madison counties. 

Horse Prairie is so named because it’s where the Corps of Discovery traded with the Shoshones for horses. Five friends and I meet here annually at Horse Prairie Station, an ancient Forest Service line cabin — complete with mice — in the upper reaches of Horse Prairie Creek. The Station is southwest of not-so-urban Dillon and Bannock, ghost-town-turned-state-park and first territorial capital of Montana. It’s far enough up slope toward the Continental Divide that we can almost see Clark Reservoir on I-15, 20-plus miles away. 

Halfway between the cabin and the Interstate on Montana Highway 324 is Grant, consisting of a drive-up dumpster site; a two-room school; and a conglomerate of well-weathered buildings, dilapidated corrals, abandoned farm equipment and various vehicles in miscellaneous states of repair. 

Patched together in the middle of this hodgepodge is Horse Prairie Stage Stop, a steakhouse serving decent draft beer and local beef. The bar television’s only setting is rodeo. 

Two tiny outposts in the Big Hole proper are Jackson and Wisdom, each with a little survival store. Wisdom has a gas station for the desperate. And Jackson has Jackson Hot Springs. But Dillon is where the ranchers go for supplies and equipment.

Dillon may have a college — University of Montana Western — and a Patagonia outlet, but the permanent population is a bit less than 4,000, about the same as it was in 1960. The Dillon High School Beavers excel at football and basketball. The Montana Western Bulldogs have a pretty fair football program, but their real sport is rodeo. They are a perennial force at college rodeo nationals. 

Patagonia outlet or no, Dillon is firmly rooted in the land in which it sits. It has an authentic Western flavor, including that sense of things left behind that many small Western towns have: the grand old hotel turned to cheap apartments, a repurposed Masonic Temple and an elegant Union Pacific passenger depot converted to a museum. Dillon’s close-to-Main Street residential section reflects the late-Victorian age, including a beautiful Carnegie Library. It’s not yet turned downtown into a reproduction Deadwood.

East of Dillon, Virginia City — second territorial capital of Montana— and Ennis — cowtown refitted as fly-fishing resort — have embraced tourism and the benefits and challenges such embrace inspires. Both look like Western theme parks, where one might expect a faux gunfight at any moment. Local ordinance prohibits anything that looks newer than 1870. Jackson and Wisdom are far enough out of the way to have escaped this fate and the hordes it brings. 

I’m the native Westerner on these soirees. The majority grew up in the mid- or Deep South. Two live in the East. The others moved west — well, to live in the West. 

They are smart, well-informed men deeply involved in public land and wilderness policy. Their discussions boggle me; about law and process and the frustrations of being in the business of the preservation of wild places. But sometimes I feel a like a translator of “Westerness.”

We’ve gathered here often, and note a house that mushroomed out of the plain, possibly during our last long absence. A brand-new gravel driveway convinces at least me that the house is truly new. I posit that it may have been built for a kid who decided to stay home and work the ranch so Mom and Dad might get a winter off sometime. No matter if I’m right about this particular house, it happens here often enough to keep the hay-making machines running. Which is good. 

As I leave this year’s gathering, I find a young couple on horseback pushing a herd of cows along the right-of-way of Montana 324. Maybe the couple is living in that new house. Cow dogs keep frolicking calves and their recalcitrant mothers in line. I slow to a crawl as I pass, not wanting to cause a spontaneous rodeo. 

A few hundred yards down the road, a car with “foreign” plates is paused. I see them pull a U-turn in my rear view mirror. I figure they are going back to take pictures. At least they will get a partial view of what it really means to live here, and not some contrived idea of how things used to be. Hopefully, they won’t get in the way. 

Sandy Compton has been studying the real West for decades. Find more of his place-based essays at bluecreekpress.com/write-on.