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| 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.
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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!
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| Photo by Kit Muller |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Nancy, Caro and the American Lutheran Church |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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Hogeland's Old Great Northern Depot
Photo by Kit Muller |
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| 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.
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| Photo by Kit Muller |
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| Photo by Kit Muller |
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| Photo by Kit Muller |
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| Photo by Kit Muller |
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