Crossing America by car with camera, part 2
Montana
Montana, long considered “The Last Best Place,” experienced a boom in the 1980s. The book “A River Runs Through It” and the corresponding film starring Brad Pitt sparked a fly-fishing craze. Writers like James Lee Burke, Richard Ford, and Thomas McGuane, as well as media mogul Ted Turner, bought ranches. Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and Harrison Ford—they all wanted a piece of the Wild West. The boom was concentrated in the area north of Yellowstone National Park, including Bozeman, Missoula, and Paradise Valley. People with money but no star power flocked to Flathead Lake and the town of Whitefish. The trend has now been revived thanks to Kevin Costner’s eerie “Yellowstone” series, and today “The Last Best Place” is just another big real estate market.
Montana today is part of the commercial empire found everywhere in the country. A kind of purgatory for the poor, a desperate struggle for upward mobility for the middle class, and a playground for the rich. Missoula is like a bubble in the middle of desolate cowboy country, where MAGA flags flutter over dilapidated trailer parks. The landscapes, the mountains, the forests, the vast grasslands are still a dream, their expanse and beauty seeming almost incomprehensibly wild to Europeans. Large parts of the enormous state appear depopulated, pointing to a world of declining populations.
Far out on the prairie, not far from the town of Augusta, we see a young grizzly bear and herds of mule deer. If it weren’t for the constant traffic on the highway, it would almost feel like stepping back into the days of Lewis and Clark, or at least that’s how I imagine it.
At Two Medicine Lake on the eastern slopes of the mountains in Glacier National Park, I watch a young bull moose walk along the shore. It’s early morning and no one has gotten up yet. The moose ambles through the campground, past tents, gas stoves, cars, and folding tables, and disappears into the undergrowth. This side of the mountains has always been my favorite spot in the park. I camped and hiked here for weeks in the 1980s. Everything still seems the same as it was back then, and later I see another moose grazing in a mountain lake.
Adjacent to the park is the Blackfoot Indian Reservation. The present-day park was once their tribal land, and, as so often happens, the Piegan, the Blackfoot Confederate members living in the US, lost the parkland and large parts of Montana. Nothing new in the West, I think, the path of broken treaties. Might makes right. Near the administrative town of Browning, where they try to mask poverty and alcohol and drug problems with enormous Jesus signs, the situation is dire. The town looks worse today than it did thirty years ago, which is astonishing in itself. Our German friend, Angelika Harden-Norman, lives a little way out on her small ranch, where she was married for many years to the recently deceased Blackfeet artist Darrell Norman. She still maintains a few cabins, which she rents to tourists, and runs a gallery with art objects, including a few of my paintings.
The Piegan are like the Lakota Indians in nearby South Dakota. The so-called “Horse Indians” were a short-lived, macho culture that lasted for about 150 years. It wasn’t until after the great Pueblo Revolt in Spanish New Mexico in 1680 that the horses brought by the Spanish spread so widely that Native American tribes like the Blackfeet, Lakota, Comanche, and Cheyenne became the masters of the Great Plains. A warlike, hierarchical culture emerged, whose hard labor was based on enslaved wives. Today, many Native American historians claim, without evidence, that the horse has existed in North America since time immemorial, that it did not become extinct at the end of the Ice Age, and that the Horse Indian culture has existed since ancient times.
It’s no wonder that these self-pitying, macho men struggle to acknowledge their defeat by Western civilization and to reorient themselves. Neither in Browning nor in Pine Ridge among the Lakota has anything changed for the better in the last hundred years. The people wallow in their misery and refuse to accept reality. They look back at a glorified world that never existed in that form. This is all cheerfully supported by an entire industry of books, films, and aid organizations about Native Americans. Money is raised, projects are launched, and yet nothing changes on the reservations. It’s a vicious cycle of self-pity and guilt.
Every winter, a memorial ride is held to commemorate the Wounded Knee Massacre. One might wonder why they don’t commemorate, for example, the Battle of Little Bighorn or the end of Red Cloud’s War, where the Lakota actually won. One could also recall the massacre of the Pawnee Indians, when the Lakota slaughtered 150 Pawnee Indians, mostly women and children, at Massacre Canyon in 1873.
The Sioux and Lakota prefer to portray themselves as victims, suppressing their violent past and thus demonstrating that they are human beings just like us.
The sheer number of Native American men who went to war for the US Army becomes strikingly clear at every powwow on the Great Plains. This becomes especially evident when the veterans, in their uniforms, march in carrying the US flag and the eagle staff to a thunderous drumbeat. The question of why these warriors fought for their oppressors in foreign lands was not to defend their homeland, but to regain their masculinity and self-esteem as warriors and defenders of their tribe, something they had long since lost. And today, as in the past, it is the Native American women who do the work, raise the children, and earn the living.
In Browning, we stop at a gas station. A young woman is feeding a pack of stray Native American dogs. She’s a white American, surrounded by a tangle of squabbling canines. Next to me, a Blackfeet with pockmarked skin and crooked teeth is filling up. He grins and says something that sounds like, “Crazy Woman.” I shake my head, and we share a laugh. I wonder where this comes from that women always want to rescue dogs. No matter where, the first thing they start is a dog rescue organization. Dogs are flown from Ibiza to Switzerland, transported from Mexico to Calgary, and in Oregon, they’re flown in from Oklahoma. I like dogs. I like animals in general. But there’s no danger of dogs becoming extinct. So why do we keep rescuing them instead of spaying and neutering them? There are too many dogs in Browning, there are too many in Mexico.
There’s too much of everything, but apparently, if you believe the media, there’s a shortage of everything. Too few jobs, too little housing, too few bike paths, too little growth, not enough police officers, hardly any money for public services. According to Forbes, there are only enough billionaires and super yachts; otherwise, there’s a shortage of everything except dogs.
A loud barking and growling erupts, and the woman shouts something, throwing food into the swarming pack of dogs. We get in and continue east. The Blackfeet has driven off, shaking its head, enveloped in a cloud of black diesel fumes. In the rearview mirror, a seemingly endless, brown plain of grass, dotted with a few dilapidated buildings, trailers, and dogs, fades like a stale aftertaste. The backbone of the world, the face of the Rocky Mountains, looms behind it. Stoic, magical, and immovable.
In Fort Benton, the town on the Missouri River, a picture book by the cowboy painter Charlie Russell sits on a coffee table in the beautifully renovated Grand Union Hotel.
Fort Benton was the final stop for the river steamers that plied the river here during the fur trade, bringing goods to the Blackfeet and returning laden with furs. The Native Americans, who had long been dependent on these traded goods—cast-iron pots, knives, firearms, cloth, whiskey, coffee, and sugar—hunted bison, deer, and wolves just like the white trappers, all for furs to trade. The ecologically minded savage living in harmony with nature is a myth propagated by writers like François-René de Chateaubriand and countless poets, philosophers, and filmmakers. This myth persisted until the Native Americans themselves began to believe in it.
Charles Russell was a gifted Western painter who came to Montana in 1882 and made a name for himself as an illustrator, painter, and sculptor. Many of his paintings can be admired in the museum named after him in the nearby town of Great Falls.
The sleepy, historic river town makes a peaceful and idyllic impression on our group. We appreciate the historic accommodations Regula booked for us and the next day head east along seemingly endless highways, through dry wheat fields and grasslands, past ghost towns, ghost farms, and old granaries. The Big Sky of Montana is ever-present. The Highwood Mountains and Square Butte lie like forested islands in the sea of prairie. Indeed, 100 million years ago, the Great Plains were a shallow sea that separated the east and west of the continent. Today, the boundary between the arid west and the humid east lies roughly at the 100th meridian, near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota.
Somewhere in the middle of nowhere in eastern Montana, we stop at a sleepy gas station with a convenience store. The place looks like all the other places on the Great Plains and is as characterless as the gas station and the store filled with sugar water and junk food. It has a side room with video slots and a large screen where advertisements flicker. The ads alternate with gladiator sports, and now a few “good old boys” are hawking plastic machine guns that can electrocute insects. America is a veritable maelstrom of consumerism and commerce, becoming unsustainably banal and primitive.
Only after hours of driving do we arrive in the Western town of Glendive and visit the bizarre Badlands landscapes of Makoshika State Park, where eroded clay landscapes stretch across the vast prairie.
