1 Church and 13 People: Welcome 2 Hogeland, Montana!

Photo by Caro Pemberton

When I was growing up, my mother accused my father of being married to his business (Ford tractors and Dearborn implements). On the rare vacations that we took, mostly car trips within Montana, every time we slowed down to enter a new town, my dad would start looking for the local equipment dealerships to see what was on their lots. He kept a mental inventory of who had what piece of used equipment in which town just in case one of his customers might need something he didn’t have on his lot in Chester. This cruising of equipment lots exasperated my mother, my brother Gregg and me. Some vacation! We thought we were supposed to be taking a break from Dad’s Tiber Tractor Company. My mother would finally coolly suggest that we drive further into and around town to find something more culturally inspired, and that usually meant hunting for the local churches, as ubiquitous as machinery in Montana.

Great Northern Railroad Depot, Hogeland
Photo by Kit Muller

So, when our band of prairie pilgrims approached Hogeland on a late spring afternoon suffused with that exquisite northern plains sunlight imbuing land and sky with endless possibility, I wondered what was left of this little town named for Nancy and Caro Pemberton’s great-grandfather, Albert Hogeland, chief engineer of the Great Northern Railroad. The same town in which my sister-in-law Pauline Murray’s father had been the last station master for this end-of-the-line Great Northern spur, which closed in 1977. How many people were still there? Would there be a café or filling station, a school, a church? And what had become of the hockey rink built during Hogeland’s heyday? We had learned about that from an old photo in the Blaine County Museum in Chinook. The hockey coach had played on the US Olympic team!

Photo by Kit Muller

Photo by Kit Muller

We found grain elevators and machinery. Oh, my gosh! Machinery! There was machinery galore, every kind of semi-truck and trailer designed to haul tons of wheat and barley, and huge tractors and plows, seeders and hay balers, lining the road into town and up and down the maybe 15 blocks, mostly vacant lots, that defined Hogeland. The railway station looked stalwart but shuttered. The post office still functioned; it was open two hours on weekday mornings and one hour on Saturdays.

Photo by Kit Muller

And way across town, to the east, a steeple appeared, then a full view of a church, beautiful in its elegant simplicity. 

Up close, we could see it was lovingly maintained. It turned out to be a Lutheran church, built in 1925. It was open (it always is), and we went in to admire the eight stained glass windows.

Nancy, Caro and the American Lutheran Church

Nancy and Caro at the Lutheran Church

Roaming north, we saw the old school which is now home to the parents of Frank McGuire who we encountered at his machine shop (what else?) next door. Frank was waiting for a delivery from Great Falls (five hours away). I asked him with some incredulity why Great Falls rather than Billings—wasn’t Billings closer? Nope, about equidistant, but Great Falls is a tad closer. Wow. That established Hogeland’s place in the universe for me. Five-plus hours north-northeast over two-lane highways from the big cities.

Photo by Caro Pemberton

We liked Frank a lot. He was in idling mode and amenable to our questions about Hogeland and his life there (born in California, he moved to Montana as a boy). He told us that there were 12—no, upon re-counting—13 people who lived in town. Once upon a time, there had been an 18-hole golf course. The Lutheran church was well cared for and the heart of the surrounding community, but it wasn’t the only Lutheran church around. Just down the road in Turner, 12 miles east (where Pauline Murray had also lived), those Lutherans had built their own church. And midway between Hogeland and Turner, Catholic families built their church. 

Photo by Kit Muller

Since the closure of the old Hogeland school, kids are bused 26 miles south to Harlem or go 12 miles east to Turner, a bigger town (60 people). In fact, some Harlem kids go north to Turner to high school which they consider better than Harlem’s. (He didn’t offer an explanation, and we didn’t probe why, but Harlem has long had a reputation as a “tough” school because of the many Native Americans enrolled there.) Frank spent a lot of time on Montana roads driving Harlem sports team buses. In that, his livelihood is similar to my father’s who combined an implement dealership with running the Chester Public Schools bus fleet.

Hogeland's Old Great Northern Depot
Photo by Kit Muller

Photo by Kit Muller

We finally said good-bye to Frank, and drove slowly back through town savoring the pleasure of having made it here, the genesis of our prairie pilgrimage. The deep pleasure of being here in the company of friends (though it was bittersweet without Bill Mitchell), feeling at home in this remote place, remained with me all the way south to US Highway 2 and Malta, our jumping off point to the American Prairie Reserve. 

Photo by Kit Muller

Photo by Kit Muller

Photo by Kit Muller

Photo by Kit Muller

Finding Our Way 2 Hogeland, Stopping in a Place of Sorrow

Bear Paw Battlefield, Nez Perce National Historical Park
looking west toward the Bear Paw Mountains

Driving east from Chester to Hogeland on US Highway 2, our band of Hogeland pilgrims approached Chinook. I have always loved that word. I love the way it feels rolling through your mouth (I love speaking Italiano for the same reason!). As a child, the coming of the Chinook meant warm wind sweeping down from the Rockies to the plains around late February, relieving a long winter just in time for basketball tournaments. The snows melted, the roads cleared, and spring seemed imminent as new basketball champions were minted.

Chinook, the town, is more prosaic, but south of town lies the Bear Paw Battlefield, a place of conflict and sorrow. The battlefield unfolds across gently undulating plains within sight of the Bear Paw Mountains and marks the end of the Nez Perce flight from the US military toward sanctuary in Canada in October of 1877. The Nez Perce had traveled five months and 1,170 miles from their home in what is now eastern Oregon to reach this stopping off place, just 40 miles south of the Medicine Line (the Canadian border) and safety. About 700 men, women, and children faced five days of fighting and siege. Nearly 150 people escaped and made it to Canada. Around 430 were left to surrender. Upon surrender, Chief Joseph spoke one of the most famous lines born of the US - Native American conflicts: "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever."

Standing on the battlefield now on a bright hot June day with barely enough wind to drive away the biting flies, I am filled with sadness and wonder. Given their proximity to Canada, their weakened state, and unlikely return to the US, why didn't the military let them go to join Sitting Bull's Lakota Sioux and be rid of them? Perhaps the answer lies partially in military pride: Company K of the 7th US Cavalry, defeated at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June, 1876, were among the pursuing troops. Vengeance must have been present, and belief in manifest destiny. What a waste.

Artifacts and famous paintings of the battlefield and prairie scenes by Lorenzo Ghiglieri are presented in the Blaine County Museum in Chinook. It's a splendid local museum, one of the best I've visited in Montana. For now, it is the interim visitor center for the Bear Paw Battlefield. I picked up brochures describing a self-guided auto tour of the 1,170-mile Nez Perce Trail, beginning in Wallowa Valley, Oregon and ending here. Now that would be a pilgrimage. But first, we must attend to Hogeland!

Pilgrimage 2 Hogeland, Montana and a Whole Lotta Prairie

Sunset over Chester, Montana at the start of our prairie pilgrimage

Montana is a vast place. What is the chance that a tiny Hi-Line town built to serve the Great Northern Railway connects my family with that of friends whose roots took hold hundreds of miles east of here? Hogeland, Montana is named for Albert Hogeland, chief engineer of the Great Northern and great-grandfather of bosom buddies Nancy and Caro Pemberton. Hogeland is also a childhood home of my sister-in-law Pauline Murray whose father was the last station master. When serendipitous conversation turned up this connection a few years ago, a road trip to Hogeland beckoned.

Fellow travelers with Bill when Hogeland was just a gleam in our eyes
Bill, Jeff, Kit, Nancy, Caro

We were to be six fellow travelers on this long-anticipated pilgrimage. But before we could set off, we lost our dear friend Bill Mitchell to cancer. Bill helped plan this trip and he persuaded us to add a detour south toward the Missouri to visit the American Prairie Reserve in country where he had hunted game birds. Our plans continued to grow until they encompassed a swath of the Montana Hi-Line east of Chester and into southern Canada, Wallace Stegner country. Stegner described this Montana - Saskatchewan border country as "...where the Plains, as an ecology, as a native Indian culture, and as a process of white settlement, came to their climax and their end."

Our journey began on a beautiful day in a Montana as green as I can remember. We set off down the road to the Sons of the Pioneers' "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," part of the soundtrack Jeff made especially for this adventure. Bill was riding shotgun in the sky.

Overlooking the Mighty Missouri just above Ft. Benton
Nancy behind the camera

1960s Dresses 2 Love in Chester, Montana

Late 60s Dresses made for me by Maxine Ward, Chester, Montana

Chester girls growing up in the ‘60s were fortunate to have a talented seamstress to help them realize their formal dance and wedding gown visions in this tiny prairie town far from any fashion capital. Our sartorial angel, Maxine Ward, tailored our dresses styled in the latest fashion. A couple of years ago, I gave three dresses made by Maxine to the Liberty County Museum in Chester, hoping that their display would serve as a tribute to her talent and the happiness her dresses gave to so many Hi-Line girls.

I visited the museum last year and got a huge kick out of seeing the manikins being dressed for display. I particularly liked the choice of wigs. They seemed a little wild for the elegance of the dresses, but times were a-changin’ in the 60s and maybe long, wild hair was appropriate, although my friends and I labored to achieve perfect flips or pageboys lacquered into place. I never got to see what kind of footwear the manikins eventually sported, but I hope the toes were pointed and the heels high and spiked.

The ruffled pink cotton brocade print dress on the left sported a plunging back. 

This was my bridesmaid dress for B. Brown and D. Hess's wedding in 1969. It was originally floor length, but my mom later shortened it to make a cocktail dress version. Note the empire waist style--the height of fashion in the mid-to-late 60s--is featured again in the middle gown, the velvet, fur-trimmed bridesmaid dress for D. Gummer when she married C. Haddock in 1968. The straight-line, unadorned look in vogue in the mid-60s really allowed all three dresses to show off skillful tailoring and beautiful, luxurious fabrics. 

Maxine made the satin dress with velvet-trimmed stole on the right for my 1966 Rainbow Girls' installation as Worthy Advisor of Joplin (Montana) Assembly 63. Rainbow installations were public and communal events and Rainbow provided an opportunity for young women up and down the Hi-Line to participate in an activity that transcended our parochial hometown activities.

By the time the 70s arrived, my "every hair in place" coif had given way to naturally curly, "let it all hang down" hair and my beautiful dresses were packed away, replaced by blue jeans. The times, they had indeed changed as much on the Hi-Line as anywhere in the U.S.

Dressed 2 Kill in a Red Vogue Dress

When Mom turned 90, she chose this, her favorite dress, to wear to the big party. She had some difficulty dressing herself in those days and I assumed I would help her into this formidable construction. But while I made us breakfast that morning, she put it on by herself in her room. I was astonished. Old memories stored in her body must have magically dressed  her that day. The only concession to age she made in this outfit was her decision to forego high heels. Thank goodness! Here she is, 90, and dressed to kill.

My mother loved beautiful things and took great care of everything she owned because "money doesn't grow on trees." No wonder then that this red wool dress trimmed in white ostrich is in as good condition now as it was when Maxine Ward sewed it from a Vogue "Paris Original" pattern in Chester in the '60s.

Mom is tiny and hard-to-fit, so when she wanted a special dress, she turned to Maxine who was, and probably still is, an equisite seamstress. Only someone with Maxine's skill could have made this dress, which was more constructed than sewn.

As you can see here, the dress is zipped up the front (you have to put it on over the head). Covering the zipper is a panel with 8 buttons, 4 on each side secured with 6 snaps at the top. Whew! Just getting into it required dexterity and resolve.

Ostrich feathers were all the rage in the 60s. Mom had a blue housecoat trimmed in ostrich. I suspect that the white ostrich trim on this dress wasn't part of the Vogue pattern, but Mom's fanciful personal stamp on this confection.

Pillbox hats were fashionable in the 60s, too, thanks to Jackie Kennedy's trend-setting millinery. Mom loved hats, wore them to church and other dress up events. But I think this is her only pillbox. It's white mink. I'm sure ostrich wouldn't have withstood Montana wind, dirt, and pelting snow, so mink was of course the hardier choice.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom, on this beautiful day in May! Your little red dress awaits its next party!

Saying Goodbye 2 Mom's House

This stream-of-conscious post from September 2014 was written on the last night I spent in my mother's Chester duplex before the new owners moved in.

Tonight I am going to try to sleep on a yoga mat that my brother brought up from Bilings on his second round trip of this big move out of my mother's apartment where she lived 11 years before the nursing home became the better option. I am surrounded by objects from my past which I find hard to spend time absorbing, like scripts from the plays I acted in during 1972 in Santa Maria, California when I realized that to succeed in theatre meant immersion in theatre and sacrificing other interests. My world was too large then to commit to a laser focus on theatre. But in looking at my old scripts, I feel the joy of participating in productions where actors gave their hearts to characters and the resulting creations sent audiences into appreciative laughter, tears, and feeling a part of something beyond themselves.

It's very quiet here in Chester now between trains and with an impending snow in mid-September. Not the Indian summer I was hoping to go out on, but maybe more fitting of my mood. Quiet. Contemplative. Soft. I have loved seeing my mother every day and seeing her recognize me and call me by name. She remembers I live in Washington. That I work in an office. During today's visit, I took some pictures of her which she didn't recognize as herself. Then I showed her some of her clothes I've photographed and she recognized a few, and looking at those pictures provided the most extended conversation I've had with her. What a window into her mind. If only I can find other ways to engage her. My dear mother, tomorrow your children will leave your last house. What will you know or feel of our good-byes to a phase of your long and instructive life?

Chester, Montana: Odyssey on Highway 2

I wrote this stream-of-consciousness post nearly a month ago as my odyssey began.

I am here to clear out my mother's apartment in her duplex. After nearly three years of trying, I have sold it. In going through my mother's things, accumulated over 95 years of living, I see my life and my brother's play across landscapes and dreams of the lives our parents bred us to embrace. Part of me wants to be unsentimental and to dispense with the things left in Mom's apartment quickly and rationally. A whole other part of me wants to stop time and hold every single object and feel its familial weight before letting it go to the pile for the church rummage sale or in the box going to the neice who doesn't really want another English china tea cup. One of my friends is enthused about getting something from my mother's last effects. I bless her because she affirms my mother's life, therefore my own. Another of my nieces wants the workhorse Singer sewing machine my mother patched our clothes on and I tried to learn how to sew on and my heart cries so gladly for her wanting it.

A life's things are no less for being mere objects if they infuse memories with love and respect. I have begun an art project inspired by a full page display in The New  York Times last Mother's Day called "Mom's Genes." I am photographing my mother's iconic and oh-so-fashionable-back-then clothes on a manikin that belonged to my mother-in-law who recently died. Before I consign my mother's beautiful clothes to the Methodist Church rummage sale, I'm photographing them to remember the great taste she had and the panache with which she wore her clothes in this small Montana town where the streets were not paved until the 60s when my father briefly became mayor.

Now I'm back, contemplating a lifetime of lessons from my parents in this town that loves its young without reservation and still claims them, like me, when they're getting on in years even if they don't vote Republican. 

On this moonlit night, the trains whistle every hour or 40 minutes: wheat and some coal to west coast ports. Oil from the Bakken. Amtrak passengers get sidetracked when commodity loads thunder by. Once I stood on our wood pile in the backyard with my friend Donise and waved frantically at an eastbound train which she convinced me carried Elvis Presley. The world here is huge in imagination. Reality is, I need to clear out my mother's house and all of the treasures I hold in my hands will be but oddities in others' arms.