THE LAST REAL AMERICA:

NORTHEASTERN MONTANA. IT’S NOT ON THE TOURIST MAP. AND MAYBE IT SHOULD STAY THAT WAY. BUT ONE THING IS FOR SURE. IT’S MIGHTY SPECIAL.

By Carl Hoffman

In 1916 a Basque shepherd named Jean Etchart stepped off the Great Northern Railway in Saco, Montana, rented a horse, and rode south into the big open. It was a humbling wilderness. Nothing but sky and sagebrush. Not a fence blocked his path. He rode for two days and 50 miles, past mule deer bounding from coulees and grazing pronghorn antelope, into an endless sea of rolling prairie. “My father said he just fell in love with it,” says Gene Etchart. “Can you tell why?”

Gene is 89, as sturdy and full of life as the wiry prairie grass, and we’re standing high atop the same lands that made his father swoon. It is late September and the sky is cloudless blue, the grass gold as far as our eyes can see, which is far: the Little Rocky Mountains 100 miles west, at least 60 miles north, east, and south. Members of the Etchart family co-own 26,000 acres of it. And, save for the occasional barbed-wire fence, it looks unchanged from the day Jean’s eyes first swept across it. Unchanged from 100 years before that, when Lewis and Clark trudged past and the Assiniboin tribe galloped across it. And like the two Etcharts I have simply fallen in love.

You never hear about northeastern Montana because there’s nothing there. Unlike the state’s western Rockies there are no ski resorts, no Hollywood stars, no Wall Street moguls with chichi ranches. But nothing, in this case, is something. Nothing is big and bold and dramatic, a classic American landscape of huge, open, rolling space and sprawling ranches. Nothing is working cowboys in leather chaps and silver spurs herding cattle across the range on well-trained quarter horses. Nothing is the lush Milk and Missouri River Valleys lined with cottonwood trees against a backdrop of prairie, badlands, and buttes. Nothing is little towns with small museums full of Indian tepees and headdresses and the guns of notorious outlaws. Nothing is the white cliffs of the Missouri River, hailed by Meriwether Lewis for their “most romantic appearance.” Nothing is antelope and deer and elk, bald eagles and sandhill cranes, ring-necked pheasants and sharp-tailed grouse rocketing airborne from roads so empty you can drive hundreds of miles without seeing a traffic light. Nothing, in fact, is everything you could ever want.

Northeastern Montana’s Hi-Line, as it’s known, stretching from the western North Dakota border to Havre, is the most quintessential piece of America in America; a region that feels pure and without pretense, as open and epically proportioned as the sea, where a century ago feels like yesterday. The land remains wild and full of stories that feel fresh and real because so little has changed and the people telling them remain on the same land, having heard them from their fathers and grandmothers. And that’s how I stumbled upon it. Thanks to my great-aunt Ruth Olson Moylan Dunnigan, I am a natural-gas baron. My mother’s family homesteaded in North Dakota, and Aunt Ruth married a man from Montana. In 1980, a package arrived at our door from a lawyer in the town of Malta: Aunt Ruth had died, and my mother, sister, two cousins and I had inherited the mineral rights to land in northeastern Montana. Checks started arriving from the Williston Basin Interstate Pipeline Company—and we laughed. I still have one of the first stubs for two years of royalties: $14. It was a family joke, the “Northeast Nelson Tract” a dream, the checks a funny souvenir of a time when the land provided everything.

But then, suddenly, the checks started coming monthly. The price of gas was up. Two years ago they amounted to $100 a month; during the dead of winter I got a monthly check for $250. And never once had any of us ever talked to anyone at the gas company. Shallow though it may sound, the more money I got, the more I wondered about where the checks were coming from. I wanted to see the well. To see the land. I poked around. Maps showed a big blankness cut by two rivers and sprinkled with little towns. Guidebooks devoted but a few pages to what was known as “the Big Open.” I pictured some sort of derrick pumping away amid desolate flatlands. But the gas company was gracious. “Meet me in front of OB’s Bar in Saco,” said Dennis Zander, who works with the company, “and I’ll show you your well.

Truth be told, it was an anticlimax: a tangle of pipes tucked in an earth-colored aluminum shed. The gas, almost pure methane, flows day and night into a buried network of more pipes, bound for homes and businesses throughout the West and beyond. But I was happy to see that the well didn’t mar the scene; once I recognized the little sheds I realized they were everywhere around Saco.

BUT THE LAND. WELL, THE LAND IS SOMETHING ELSE. Driving to meet Zander that morning I pull the car over on two-lane Highway 2 just to take it in. The landscape is sublime and so rich with American icons it seems like a living museum diorama of the Old West. The Milk River, 100 yards wide, meanders gently through a valley of yellow cottonwoods and brilliant green fields of alfalfa. Beyond the fields to the north a half mile, golden prairie undulates to the horizon; to the south is a tabletop of high, arid cliffs. Deer are everywhere in fields dotted with silos and piled with yellow bales of hay. A bald eagle eyes me from atop a roadkill, as a long freight train passes in the distance.

The well anchored in my mind, I am overcome with the desire to get out on the land. A few telephone calls and I find Eric Albus. A fourth-generation rancher—the Albus family works 8,000 acres—he also guides hunters and folks like me on land he owns and leases from the government. “Come out tomorrow morning and we’ll go riding,” he says.

“A neighbor of mine is vaccinating his calves and I thought we might first go help him out,” Albus says the next morning, as we bounce down dirt roads in his pickup just west of Hinsdale, trailering two horses behind. “It’ll be a sight for you.” He is tall, 37, with a silver goatee, wearing black cowboy boots, a gray cowboy hat, and a leather vest. “As long as there’s a cow in this country, there’ll be a horse,” he says, when I express surprise that cows aren’t herded in pickup trucks or ATVs these days. “There are just certain things a four-wheeler can’t do. You can’t rope a sick calf. You can’t cut a stray pair out of a herd with a four-wheeler. The country’s just too rough for ‘em; I won’t ride one.” We snake along dirt roads that get bumpier and narrower, pass through a succession of barbed-wire gates, and pull up at a portable corral and cattle chute in a little valley. Albus’s father is already there, as is the owner of the cattle, a man named Calton Melby, wearing leather chaps and silver spurs. Eric unloads the horses and hands the reins of a big brown gelding to me. “His name is Bump. Let’s go.”

Bump knows his business, and so does Albus. The Angus cows had calved in the spring, and mother and young are spread wide over rugged brown grassland, and must be gathered and driven into the corral. Five of us fan into the hills. It is, I confess, one of those travel moments where you can’t believe your luck. One moment I’m a tourist, the next a cowboy on the open range. The sky is vast, the wind warm. We hear the sound of 150 head of cattle mooing and lowing, as Albus and I trot and canter up and down hills, and back and forth across shallow streambeds. I’m no horseman but Bump is so well trained he makes me look good, heading right for the big black cows, each with a calf, cutting them off as we gather them from a square mile or so like drops of water into a growing river of moving, bellowing beef. Albus shouts instructions to me, gallops off in explosions of horsemanship, whistling to drive the cows, sending Bump and me alone down steep ravines to guard the herd’s flank. Horses, cows, men, not a building or utility pole within sight; it is noble, physical work that transcends place and time. “I could never sit in an office all day,” says Albus, as we trot behind the now gathered mass of black cows toward the corral. “We don’t make much, but our pay is our way of life—to be on a horse and helping a neighbor. And a horse, well, a horse gets better with every use, not like a piece of machinery.”

Once inside the fences, Albus and the others cut the mothers from their calves, then drive groups of six calves at a time into a narrow chute, as I operate one of the doors and Calton sticks them with a syringe, then lets them free. We work, we rest and drink coffee from thermoses, chat and work some more until the job is done. No bosses, no e-mail. Just horses and cows and sky.

That afternoon we trailer the horses to the top of 200-foot bluffs overlooking the Milk River near Saco, and take off at a leisurely walk. To the south is more of that forever prairie; to the north, a rainbow arches over miles of the green valley below. We wind down trails worn by buffalo a hundred years before, scare grouse and iridescent green pheasant into the air, mule deer out of stands of brush. High overhead a flock of migrating sandhill cranes honks and whirls. The bluff falls away into a sort of step; we descend a steep path and ride beneath 80-foot cliffs. “Buffalo jump,” Albus says, pointing up. Here, hundreds of years ago, Indians drove buffalo off the cliffs. Albus dismounts, roots in the grass, and pulls up bone fragments, a pile of buffalo teeth, and two hide scrapers made of chipped stone. “No more buffalo,” he says. “And we have fences. Other than that, nothing has changed, My great-grandfather came here after nearly dying one winter in North Dakota. And my great-uncle, he was ten when his parents died, and he was put on a train and arrived all by himself in Saco. Can you imagine that?” Two small gray rattlesnakes slither into a hole in the ground. A Cooper’s hawk floats over.

The creak of the leather saddle, the smell of grass and Bump, the epic landscape untouched by Starbucks and T-shirt shops and Disney; I feel like I’ve discovered the hidden wellspring of the American soul. This is the dream, the fantasy—a vision in Marlboro ads and Billy Crystal films. But here it is, bright and dusty and sweet-smelling and inspiring, hundreds and hundreds of square miles of it. “You can tell a horse is good when he doesn’t start rushing for the trailer,” Albus says as we head back and the truck comes into view. But I think Bump feels just like I do: in to hurry at all to end our walk.

The next day I climb in the car and head east. Two hundred miles east to a place where people drive 300 miles to go shopping (and you could drive 85 mph, easy). I pass clumps of grazing pronghorn, pause in the town of Wolf Point on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, where the state’s oldest professional rodeo is held every summer. I am so taken with the gestalt of it all that I nearly buy a used shotgun in one of the trading posts on the main drag. Two centuries ago last year, Lewis and Clark traveled through this country, following the Missouri River, and near the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone they paused for two days, regarding it as a good spot for a trading post. In 1828 John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company built Fort Union here. It is hot and clear when I veer off the highway onto nine miles of gravel road and pull up at the fort, right on the North Dakota border.

Thirty-foot-high stone bastions anchor two corners of the square fort, surrounded by a high wooden stockade overlooking the silvery river. A fire burns in the trading room, hung with buffalo skins and beaver pelts. Some of the greatest artists of the American West came to Fort Union, journeying two and a half months by paddleboat up the Missouri from St. Louis. George Catlin painted here, sitting on a cannon in the riverfront bastion. Karl Bodmer stayed here in 1833, as did John James Audubon a decade later. Theirs and other drawings enabled the National Park Service to restore the fort perfectly. The surrounding landscape today is unaltered, and the fort—unlike most historical places—isn’t a bubble unto itself. Gaze in any direction from atop the stockade and time stands still.

I lived a year once in Colorado, visited in-laws a half dozen times in New Mexico. But this is the first time I’ve been so captivated with the West as an idea. This is the West that pulls at souls, a legend that defines a country’s sense of itself. You can feel it at Fort Union. So big and open and rugged and wild it stretches your mind, making the years all run together. And perched beneath the fort on the banks of the Missouri, hearing nothing but the wind in the trees, I feel elated that it is still here, still intact.

This sense of time and discovery is still percolating when I arrive at the Fort Peck hotel. The Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri here in 1938, creating what was then the largest earth-filled dam in the world and Fort Peck Lake, now 134 miles long, with 1,500 miles of shoreline. The wood-frame hotel had been built for workers in 1936 just below the dam, and with its long screened porch it looks on the outside more Adirondacks than Montana, with a creaky charm. Inside I find a small bar in a big lobby with a stone fireplace, hung with stuffed fish and deer and antelope heads (the glass coffee table is literally a pheasant under glass), where a group of locals drink from their own mugs and watch Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson on a video. It is a Saturday night. “We either bring our instruments and have a jam session,” says Bonnie Meyer—when I sit at the bar, pointing to a wooden dance floor half-hidden by the rugs—“or bring our own videos.” A woman in her fifties with a stiff helmet of gray hair, Meyer says she’s never lived more than 100 miles in any direction from Fort Peck. She was raised on her family’s ranch with no electricity and no indoor plumbing. Her elementary school was five miles away, “and there were no snowplows, baby,” she says, arching an eyebrow. High school was 65 miles away, so far she boarded with another family, 14 kids in three bedrooms. She married one of them, and here they are 30-odd years later. I watch Waylon and Johnny. And I sip a couple of $2.50 scotches, before ambling off to bed down the wooden hallway, happily unsure of which century I’ve landed in.

Reading about Lewis and Clark and seeing the Missouri River made me want to get out on it, and so one rainy morning I meet Larry Cook at a little place called Virgelle. There isn’t much in Virgelle: an old one-room brick bank, a general store and a grain elevator, but the place looks like a metropolis compared to the river beyond. Virgelle is one of the last towns before the Missouri turns “wild and scenic,” and Cook knows every crook and cliff. He guided historian Stephen Ambrose a dozen times, who noted in his bestseller Undaunted Courage: “Of all the historic and/or scenic sights we have visited in the world, this is number one.”

Ambrose knew what he was talking about. We drift past beaver lodges and bald eagles standing sentinel atop dead trees. The river twists, the banks changing every quarter mile or so, sometimes lined with cottonwoods and grassland, sometimes hard against rugged white sandstone cliffs and crazy natural rock formations. Ambrose called Lewis’s description of the cliffs “one of the classics of American travel literature.”

“The water…has trickled down the soft sand cliffs and woarn it into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little imagination…are made to represent elegant ranges of lofty freestone buildings…statuary…long galleries…the remains of elegant buildings…nitches and alcoves of various forms and sizes…[sic].” There are freestanding walls, and formations that look like children’s sandcastles made from dripped, wet sand. Red-tailed hawks wheel overhead and cry from high above.

The only man-made structures are the occasional ruins of homesteaders’ cabins, and yet American history, human stories, crowd the river like condos. We pass Lewis and Clark’s campsites of May 30 and 31, 1805. Pull the boat on the banks and hike a mile into the hills where faint petroglyphs of horsemen are etched into the white sandstone by the Blackfeet Indians. Slip along the river beneath rock formations that Bodmer had painted in 1833, as Cook quotes from Lewis’s journal and recounts tales of dueling steamboat captains.

By late afternoon, as we head back upriver, a cold wind blows and rain soaks me. By chance I stumble into the Virgelle Mercantile and find Don Sorensen, drinking tea by a piping hot, six-burner wood cookstove in the kitchen. Sorensen, bearded and wearing sweatpants, grew up on a ranch nearby. “I bought the whole town in 1975,” he says, passing me a cup of tea, “and now I live in the bank. The former owner bought it from a man who’d ripped out the bank’s oak floor one winter to pay the taxes on his farm.” Sorensen has moved six original homesteader’s cabins, which he renovated and rents in the summer, from the surrounding countryside to fields overlooking the river; the upstairs of the store is a four-room B&B, complete with sitting room and his grandmother’s pump organ. He has other ideas. “Maybe open a restaurant in the grain elevator someday,” he says, as I leave, counting 40 mule deer grazing outside of his window.

Still, it is spending a day with Gene Etchart that brings it all together. After Etchart’s father had finished his two-day ride back in 1916, he’d come upon a cabin in the Larb Hills. The cabin and surrounding lands were for sale; Jean bought it, and returned two years later with his French bride, fresh off their honeymoon in Paris. She was wary, Etchart says, of a “land with Indians and wolves and no civilization,” so Jean, who soon became John, promised he’d take her back to France in two years if she was unhappy. She never returned, and today the Page-Whitham Ranch, as it’s known, is one of the largest in the state—and placed under a conservation easement that makes the land publicly accessible.

At the original homesite John Etchart built a stone house, and we pull up to a place that looks right out of the French Pyrenees. “This country was wide open,” Etchart says, standing by the ranch’s former chuck wagon, “and the last area in the U.S. to be brought under law and order.” The stories roll out of Etchart, who has lived in the stone house and worked the land as a cowboy until the ranch became so big he managed it out of the town of Glasgow, then sold it. He points to a butte where a miner toiled every summer looking for mysterious lost gold; to a stand of brush where the sheriff shot a cattle rustler; to a rounded hill that signals that you are almost home. It had taken us nearly an hour to drive here from Glasgow. “Think about it,” says Etchart. “They’d bring hundreds of pounds of flour and beans and potatoes from town in November and wouldn’t get out until April.

Etchart hustles me back into the truck and we bounce down dirt roads, turn right onto the grassland, and drive up a long hill. A lichen-covered pile of rocks marks the top. “Basque shepherds built these,” he says. “They built ‘em just to pass the time or to use as landmarks. At one time my father had 15,000 sheep. He could graze them and his cattle 240 miles all the way to Great Falls. No fences. No limits.”

The view is dizzying; I can see for 100 miles. Now I know that what looks wild and open is touched and known and worked by people like Etchart and Albus, and has been for a hundred years. It is the first of the month. When I get home I find a monthly check for my oil holdings for $212 waiting for me. It suddenly seems more than money. It’s a tangible link, an umbilical cord, to an epic land and a way of life that I hadn’t known even existed anymore. A big chunk of America is still out there, still providing. Food for the table and food for the soul. And the check is just enough, I think, for a fine dinner of grass-fed Angus beef.