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