Just because other people see fit to fling their old, tired footwear over the limbs of a ponderosa pine on a backwoods road doesn't mean you have to. But if you do, be sure there's a story behind it.
This is a land of lore, not to mention jaw-dropping, almost heartbreaking beauty. And it can be a land of surprise if you drive the backroads.
There are others like it in this world, one as near as Park City, Utah (predominantly ski boots) and another in a small west Texas town (cowboy boots, of course).
A twisted, leafless sprig on the plains of western Australia boasts three pairs of work boots that hang like vultures. In the English market town of Bishop's Castle, a tree is decked with boots and shoes of all kinds. Someone posted a sign on a branch too. "Boot Sale," it says.
So, no, what you see when you drive around a corner of a dirt road a couple miles north of Highway 200, in a corner pasture of heaven called Ovando, can't be called unique.
Neither is the Train That Never Came, or the long-gone city by the lake, or the grave of the man who saved Major John Owen's bacon a century and a half ago.
There are many others, of course, but the following four will do for today. All are on somebody's property, and parts of some wild thing's habitat. If you go looking for them, for the sake of the valley and its good-hearted residents, search but don't touch.
Bring a bike and see the country in full summer flush. Mosquito repellent is a smashing option. While here, be sure to talk with someone, anyone, from Ovando or Helmville. No matter what else you see, that will make the trip worthwhile.
"For myself may there always be woods with pine needles, slick under my feet, rain drumming on the roof at night, a rainbow arch unbroken by towers of steel."
- Edna Geary (Eickman)
of Helmville and Ovando, as a high school sophomore in the 1940s.
"May there be snow in my world. It will come drifting in huge, lazy white flakes or lashing and biting, driven by the wind."
- Edna Geary
The Boot Tree
Maybe 30 years ago, an unknown logger started the tradition.
He was coming out of the North Fork woods with boots worn to the nubbins, said Woody Needles, a lifelong Ovando resident. How better to dispose of them? Others followed suit.
"When the logging was over for the spring break and their boots was wore out, they'd pitch them up in that tree," said Needles.
Needles, 72, was once one of those loggers, but said he never joined in the pitching.
"I could have. Should have, probably. I don't know why I didn't," he said.
In the early years, it looked like everybody else did.
"I can't give you the names of the people but, my God, there was lots of them," said Needles. "It just hung with boots of all sorts."
At one point, Plum Creek Timber Co. removed the whole bunch of them and hauled the whole lot of them away.
"It was a heaping pickup load, literally," recalls Howard Fly, local historian and proprietor with wife Peggy of the Blackfoot Inn and Commercial Company in Ovando.
Plum Creek also trimmed off the lower branches where the boots had hung. Talk about a challenge.
These days, at least 30 pair of footgear dangle from higher branches. There are logging boots, yes, but also basketball shoes, winter packs, hiking shoes, cross-trainers and one pair of rubber overshoes. The highest twist in the wind some 25 feet up the tree.
"It never hurt anything, really," said Fly. "Heck, it's kind of a landmark now."
"After the storm, the countryside will be quiet and cold as if holding its breath in hope of warmer weather."
- Edna Geary
The phantom railroadIt seemed like a good idea at the time. On the May morning in 1911 when the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad's first Olympian train passed through Missoula and up the Clark Fork River, an alternate route was already under consideration.
"Even now, the Milwaukee railroad is planning on shortening the main line 150 miles by building a cut-off east from Missoula, up the Big Blackfoot river to Ovando, over to Great Falls and striking the main line of their road in the eastern part of the state," the Missoulian reported.
Such a line would "take in a rich section of the state which has been hitherto void of railroad facilities," the paper added. Another route, through Helmville to Avon, was considered as well.
Over the next few years, the Milwaukee acquired the rail line from the Big Blackfoot Milling Co. (Anaconda Copper's lumber producer). Eventually, rail was laid to the west end of the Ovando Valley. Surveyors and graders plunged on to Ovando and an expectant settlement on Brown's Lake in 1912, a few miles to the southeast. But the trains never came.
"By 1914, World War I had started in Europe and the financing and capital for rail projects in the United States just dried up completely," said Michael Sol, a Missoula attorney who writes about the history of the Milwaukee Road.
Meanwhile, the Panama Canal was completed, forcing the Milwaukee, the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern to drop their rates dramatically.
"The railroads were coming under a lot of financial pressure just to keep going, let alone build anything new," Sol said. "By 1915, the idea of building through Ovando over to Great Falls was pretty much dead."
Today, stretches of the rail bed are visible through what Meriwether Lewis dubbed "Prairie of Knobs" in 1806.
"Our little park in Ovando was made possible through a grant from the Montana Department of Transportation because of the railroad grade," said Barbara McNally of the Brand Bar Museum in Ovando. "We could call it a historical thing."
"I want to stand on a hill and look off into the distance to where the trees are touched with crimson and gold and the hills, rolling gentle along, have become tall purple mountains."
- Edna Geary
Lake City
If you're at Brown's Lake, you're probably there for the fishing. You might also be there for a quiet that's interrupted from time to time by the trills of meadowlarks, bluebirds and red-winged blackbirds.
In 1913, these bare hills buzzed with the song of progress. The railroad was coming.
"Mike McCormick of Helmville is reported as building a place of business at Brown's Lake," reported the Granite County News in April of '13.
In December, it was the Daily Missoulian's turn.
Harry McNally of the Big Blackfoot Valley, the paper reported, "had completed the purchase of his big stock of goods and all the fixtures of his new store, which is soon to open at Brown's Lake, or the place at the end of the grade of the Blackfoot branch of the Milwaukee, named Belair."
McNally, the deputy assessor of Powell County and a great-uncle of Barbara McNally's husband Don, also established a post office at the ranch where he was born. He became postmaster in 1914, when Belair became Lake City, according to Roberta Cheney in "Names on the Face of Montana." The post office, Cheney went on, was discontinued in 1917.
Today, there are no signs of Lake City. Cows graze in east-side pasture land that belongs to Don and Mary Ann McKee of Helmville, where Mike McCormick, Mary Ann's grandfather, constructed his "place of business."
"That's where the old dance hall was, and the bar and the ice house and the barn," McKee said last week.
Just inside the fence, in the tall sagebrush, remnants of the foundations can be spotted.
Across the lake, where the rails were to run, McKee and her daughters were traipsing around some time in the 1960s. They came upon a number of postal box doors.
"Some were kind of buried in the dirt, and some were lying in a pile," McKee said.
Thus the final fate of a place that came so close to attaining the coveted title of "railroad town."
"I want to stand on the banks of the river, rippling clear through sunlight and shadows."
- Edna Geary
George Montour's graveDon't drive too fast on the (mostly) gravel Ovando-to-Helmville road. You'll kick up dust clouds, and you might zip right past the fenced granite marker near the bridge that crosses the North Fork.
It reads: "In memory of George Montour - A half breed scout and interpreter - Friend of the early settlers of Nevada Valley - Killed
Oct. 10, 1877 - Erected by pioneer friends."
Montour was allegedly killed in a whiskey-fueled row at an Indian camp.
"White friends buried him where he met his death," wrote Missoula historian George Weisel in a sketch of Montour in the 1955 book, "Men and Trade On the Northwest Frontier."
The monument was erected by John Blair, a banker in the valley, some years later.
Montour apparently grew up in the Northwest, probably in Oregon and likely the son of a fur trader with the North West Co. Weisel called him "one of the most trustworthy and highly regarded half-breeds in the Rocky Mountains."
Montour's reputation was enhanced in the spring of 1858. His interpreting and diplomatic skills with warring tribes in eastern Washington saved a trading expedition commanded by Maj. John Owen. Owen was on his way home from the Dalles, Ore., to Fort Owen, his trading post in the Bitterroot.
The party was captured by Kalispel and Spokane warriors, and goods and men were released unharmed "only after a long smoke and much parleying," Weisel wrote.
Owen attributed Montour's influence and ability for their release and promptly requested the Army pay Montour "the high salary of $200 a month because his services ... were so dangerous," Weisel wrote.
It's not clear when Montour landed in the Blackfoot. His death in 1877 was noted by the New Northwest of Deer Lodge, which said the man got what he deserved for selling whiskey to the Indians.
"The occurrence created some alarm and one settler sent his family to Helena," reported the newspaper, adding "the death of (Montour) is not a matter of regret. Much of the apprehension on that frontier was in consequence of his supplying the Indians with whiskey and ammunition."
Among the puzzlements that surround Montour is the proper spelling of his name. The New Northwest had it two ways - Montour and Monture. The monument went with "-our."
A creek and ranger station that bear his name are spelled "Monture." Weisel, a meticulous researcher, leaned toward "Monteur."
"I want this to be my world always."
- Edna Geary
Smoke's cabin
Gather around a campfire for this one. Pistol-packing Smoke Deneau is on anybody's list of legends in the upper Blackfoot. The Flys have a "Smoke Deneau Room" at their Ovando inn, and there's a bridge over the North Fork near Deneau's old mining claim that the U.S. Forest Service calls "Smoke's Bridge."
Deneau was a master at campfire stories, which remain the best documentation of a life that took him from a job in a Deadwood saloon to the shooting of his stepfather to a home with the Sioux Indians to the Johnson County War
in Wyoming - all before he was 17.
He rode with Butch Cassidy's infamous gang. He packed for gold miners in the Yukon and was hired as a peacekeeper-or-else during World War-era labor problems in the copper mines of Butte.
Alfred Deneau born in Michigan in 1875 and, like Montour, he was of French and Indian parentage. He died in 1952 in his cabin in Helmville, where he chopped wood for neighbors and kept a garden.
He's remembered there fondly.
"Smoke was nothing but a gentleman," said Rose Marie (Wales) Bradshaw, whose childhood home was near Deneau's cabin. "He wore a big hat and kept candy bars for my sister and me. As far as I was concerned, he was a kind, kind man."
The late Mildred Chaffin of Seeley Lake compiled information on Deneau's life into an article that appeared in the Montana Journal in 1999.
Howard Copenhaver, who wrote four books of his own on his experiences as a hunting and fishing outfitter in the Bob Marshall and Scapegoat wildernesses, found proof of the Butch Cassidy story.
In the late 1970s, a 90-year-old man in Copenhaver's hunting camp told of playing in the streets of Rawlins, Wyo., as a small boy when Cassidy's gang came to town. They rode in shooting and whooping.
One rider scooped the child into his saddle and carried him through the streets to deliver him to the boy's frantic mother. The man then pulled out a gun and shot off the heads of several chickens. He handed the remains to the woman, along with a $20 gold piece for each.
"We'll be back at six o'clock for supper," he told her.
The old man in the hunting camp said the gentleman outlaw didn't seem to have a name. "They just called him Smoke," he said.
Did he have a crooked nose and one blemished eye? Copenhaver wondered.
"How did you know that?" the old man asked, aghast.
"Smoke had told me that story so many times," Copenhaver told Chaffin. "And I didn't believe a word of it - until then."
Reach reporter Kim Briggeman at (406) 523-5266 or by e-mail at kbriggeman@missoulian.com. Reach photographer Linda Thompson at (406) 523-5270 or at lthompson@missoulian.com.
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