Stories from Montana's Enduring Frontier: Exploring an Untamed Legacy

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Part I

PLACES AND PEOPLE

IN THE BIGHORN CANYON

I have come to think of Bighorn Canyon as I had no idea country. That’s mostly because when I tell people about its Lake Powell–like cliff-and-water landscapes, they say, I had no idea it was there. It’s also because even those of us who do know it’s there are continually surprised when we explore.

I’ve been visiting the southern end of Bighorn Canyon—in the far eastern reaches of Carbon County, east of the Pryor Mountains, but accessible only by driving north from Lovell, Wyoming—for seven years now. I’ve been working on a biography of Caroline Lockhart, who in 1926 homesteaded a ranch in the rugged badlands above the canyon. A small thrill of my drawn-out research has been bringing visitors from out of town, telling them we’ll visit the site that inspired the book.

I don’t tell them what we’ll see nearby: wild horses, a driftwood-filled lake, or the thousand-foot cliffs that hide it. So on the long drive through the barren landscapes of Wyoming’s northern Bighorn Basin, punctuated only by oil derricks, bentonite mines, and a sugar-beet processing plant, I can tell they’re wondering how this unearthly journey would be worthwhile. Then we come to the Devil Canyon overlook and it all spreads out below them.

THE CANYON WAS one of the last major continental rivers to be explored by Euro-Americans. When Edward Gillette left Crooked Creek on March 7, 1891, he knew only that the Bighorn was a box canyon with rapids and falls, that nobody had ever run the river, and that a few had tried and perished. (By comparison, though large areas of southern Utah remained unexplored for longer, John Wesley Powell had run the Colorado River itself twenty-two years previously.)

Gillette made his descent in winter so that any hidden rapids or waterfalls would be covered with ice. But even so, by the time he reached the northern end of the canyon, he was almost too late. The ice extending across the narrow canyon floor was so thin that he attached a rope to the lightest member of his party, who squirmed over the undulating ice while I let out the rope, ready to pull him back should he break through.

Gillette, an accomplished adventurer, found this trip most worthwhile. He wrote, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado is an immense chasm, so broad as to reveal a wide valley. The Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River is magnificent for a short distance only and the stream is small, while the Yellowstone canyon is awe-inspiring and gorgeously colored for a comparatively brief space. The Bighorn canyon, however, combines all these features with that of a true box canyon and such features as overhanging cliffs that are not to be found elsewhere.

LIKE MOST CANYON landscapes, Bighorn geology is a story of a stubborn river sticking to its course. When these lands were flat, the Bighorn took a meandering path north to the Yellowstone. But centuries of erosion eventually exposed a thick deposit of Madison limestone. Limestone is relatively water-soluble—and indeed both the Pryors and the canyon walls are pockmarked with caves—so the meanders cut down through it quickly. Later, the river encountered other layers of rock, but the seven hundred feet of Madison is what makes for dramatic cliffs.

That and a lack of rainfall. With just six to ten inches of rain a year, the erosion of the canyon walls is much slower than that powered by the river. It’s like digging a ditch: in mud, the sidewalls would keep falling in, creating a wide, shallow depression. The lack of water keeps these sidewalls vertical. It also reduces vegetation that could hide the dramatic story of bare rock.

Meanwhile, the Pryor and Bighorn mountain ranges rose on each side of the canyon. The Pryors, in particular, were lifted along a steep vertical fault plane, so from the Devil Canyon Overlook you see Madison limestone a thousand feet above you as well as a thousand feet below. But limestone is not the only rock in play here: it’s occasionally capped with a brilliantly red Chugwater siltstone.

With its forbidding Madison limestone cliffs, the seventy-one-mile-long Bighorn Canyon was one of the last in the continental United States to be explored by Euro-Americans. Even today, access is difficult except by powerboat. Courtesy Kari Clayton.

Siltstones—especially combined with the lack of rainfall—make a poor basis for agriculture, which has contributed to this region’s longstanding lack of development. Though indigenous hunter-gatherers created the Bad Pass trail parallel to the canyon ten thousand years ago, and mountain men used that trail during the fur-trading era, there were few permanent settlements in the area before 1900.

Indeed, though Gillette found no significant waterfalls to impede summer traffic, little such traffic ensued. Unlike the ancient river, humans found easier ways to bypass this rugged country. Rail lines and roadways developed east of the Bighorns and west of the Pryors. With prospectors finding few precious resources, agriculturalists barely scraping by, and most of the land north and east of the canyon belonging to the Crow Indian reservation, the area remained remote.

In 1967, the federal government built Yellowtail Dam at the north end of the canyon, near Fort Smith on the reservation. The dam backed up the river for seventy-one miles, turning Bighorn Canyon into Bighorn Lake, a National Recreation Area managed by the National Park Service. In a sense, the dam made the canyon more accessible than ever—as long as you had a powerboat. But the lake is still a long way from any population center.

IN JUNE 2007, my friend Greg Shanks, a Red Lodge semiprofessional walleye fisherman, took a group of us out on a boat tour. We put in at Barry’s Landing, the end of the paved road from Lovell, about halfway along the lake. It was only my second time on the lake and my first time there on a powerboat, able to fully explore the canyon’s expanse.

Greg first took us south, to Devil Canyon below the overlook. I’d had some idea of how impressive the thousand-foot cliffs would be, since I’d seen them from above. But I had no idea how stunningly imposing they would feel from below, my view constrained to lake, cliff, and a tiny patch of sky.

Nor had I any idea how much driftwood there would be on the lake surface, or how strange it would feel to be surrounded by huge waterlogged tree trunks—and no live trees. Many of the trees fall in the mountains and are carried down tributaries to the lake—which, this June, was at its highest level in years, floating such debris to the surface.

The lake’s level can vary by as much as sixty feet, a circumstance that recent drought has turned into a political issue. In some recent years, the lake has never even risen high enough to open boat docks at Barry’s Landing or Horseshoe Bend (with the latter being further hampered by siltation). Yet as Lovell-area recreationists and businesses call to hold more water behind the dam, fly-fishing fans ask for steady releases from the dam to maintain the outstanding trout habitat of the river below Fort Smith. More precipitation might make both parties happy, but without it no easy solution exists.

We stop to do some fishing, and Greg tells some stories of his years visiting the lake. I had no idea that an area so sparsely vegetated could be so wonderfully laden with wildlife. The road to Barry’s Landing goes through the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range, and driving it remains one of the easiest ways to spot those special creatures. But Greg talks also about elk, bighorn sheep, and mountain lions, often coming all the way down to the bottom of the canyon. Indeed, he once even saw a black bear swimming across the lake.

We head back north, and I marvel at the length of the canyon. It goes on and on, the cliffs sometimes lowering to a few hundred feet but then soaring back up. They rarely recede from the lakeshore, which contributes to the stunning verticality but also makes it difficult to land a boat. There’s lake, and there’s cliff—few beaches, willows, or other attributes we associate with a streamside. Two developed areas that do have such attributes, Black Canyon (to the north end of the lake, near the dam) and Medicine Creek (near Barry’s Landing), get a lot of use. As Greg describes the crowds that can overwhelm these spots on a summer weekend, I tell him I had no idea that some of the busiest campsites in a hundred-mile radius would be utterly inaccessible by land.

Today, however, while exploring a side canyon, we discover an undeveloped landing spot. We get out to eat lunch and explore up the tiny creek on foot. It’s a fascinating little ecological back alley, with sage, juniper, cottonwood, grasses, and wild roses mixed with the reddish rock and muddy water. We see raccoon prints and a vein of chalky white substance in the cliff, probably gypsum. We walk no more than half a mile, often in the middle of the two-inch-deep stream, sometimes on rock, and once—as my wife prepares to scramble up a mini-waterfall—in almost eighteen inches of sucking, slurping mud. Greg, who on previous visits has rarely stopped fishing long enough to do such exploring, is impressed. Neither of us had any idea this was here.

Through the afternoon, we continue north to the Ok-A-Beh Landing near the dam, where we refuel before retracing our path back to Barry’s Landing. As we proceed, the rock in the cliffs folds and changes color. So does the water: white, brown, and blue-green, all in the same lake.

I’m especially impressed by the way sound carries. I first notice that you can hear an oncoming powerboat coming around a corner long before you can see it. But as we head up the ever-narrowing canyon of another side channel, mergansers make a more impressive version of the same effect. Their sound carries across the water to a canyon wall and bounces back, echoing and filling the space to its brim.

Exploring a side canyon off Bighorn Canyon leads to a rare landing spot and a tiny creek watering an ecological back alley. Courtesy Kari Clayton.

As the day wears on, I continue to be impressed at the canyon’s expanse. I’ve seen it on the map—where it’s hard to believe such a meandering path could carve such a steep chasm—but trying to cover the canyon’s entire length in a single day is a surprisingly tiring experience.

We barely have time, at the end of the day, to drive three miles beyond Barry’s Landing to the little-visited Lockhart ranch. The wet weather that has raised the lake level has also preserved the lush, almost neon spring green of Lockhart’s former oasis. Cottonwoods arch over the hewn logs of the main ranch house. Nearby, an old outhouse leans into some willows, and grasses climb up rail fences surrounding the old corrals. You can’t see the canyon itself from here, but there’s still plenty of strikingly beautiful Madison limestone in the form of palisades along the east front of the Pryors. The sun is low in the sky, and the ranch exudes a sense of peace. I always hate to leave this place, and I’m pleased to discover the others feel the same way.

Again it’s a spot Greg has never visited. He nods his head in acknowledgement of what has drawn me to the Bighorn Canyon country. I had no idea this was back here, he says, and I grin in appreciation of the region’s refrain.

Montana Quarterly, 2007

THE BEST KIND OF COWBOY HERO

Another Charlie Russell painting sold for over $1 million in 2003. Trail of the Iron Horse, a 1924 watercolor, depicts Indians on horseback puzzlingly encountering a railroad track that runs straight west to the sunset. In 2001, Russell’s watercolor A Disputed Trail had sold for a record $2.1 million. That was two people bucking horns at an auction, said the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction’s Bob Drummond, and given the burst of the Internet bubble, he hadn’t expected a new record Russell.

Regardless, however, it appears that eighty years after his death, Charles M. Russell (1864–1926) is more of a hero than ever. Deservedly so, I say.

Unscholarly scion of a wealthy St. Louis family, Russell came west as an adventure-seeking teen in 1880. He found his adventure cowboying on the big cattle spreads of central Montana, where he also started sketching.

His reputation began with an illustrated letter he sent during the disastrous winter of 1886–87. Titled Last of the 5,000, his sketch of an emaciated cow demonstrated two hallmarks of his future work: