M. Mark Miller, Author

Category: Uncategorized

  • The Belgrade Bull 4: Corbett Throws All Challengers — Maybe

    Pres Johnston Sketch

    After the Johnston brothers “discovered” The Belgrade’s Bull’s bucking prowess, they bought him and launched his rodeo career. At first, Corbett took on challengers on Sunday afternoons in Belgrade giving the town a circus atmosphere. Then he took to the road performing in cities across southwest Montana.

    To read the story beginning with Part 1, click here.

    The Belgrade Bull, Part 4.


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    The Johnston brothers named the bull “Corbett” after the world heavy weight boxing champion and began taking bets on him. They took up collections from Belgrade residents to make up the $25 purse they offered and never had trouble raising the money. Of course the residents were making money by betting, selling liquor, and—as a local doctor who was a regular contributor observed—repairing broken bones.

    The first man to ride Corbett in Belgrade was Bill Sitton. Sitton rode with a double cinch that kept the bull from arching his back. That meant he couldn’t make his best jumps so the Johnstons barred such equipment.

    Next up was John “Kid” Kelly from Fort Ellis. Kelly got the bull saddled and signaled that he was ready to go. The man who was supposed to remove the bull’s blindfold botched the job so the bull couldn’t see. Corbett bucked and then ran into a nearby wagon that spectators were using as a viewing platform. When the bull crashed into the wagon, he stopped and Kelly got off. The Johnston brothers decided Kelly technically had met the rules, which said a man had to ride until the bull stopped. Although nobody considered it a fair ride, the Johnstons gave Kelly the $25 prize. Pres Johnston said it was the only time they paid.

    Men began coming from all over a hundred mile radius to ride the bull and prove their prowess, but Corbett bucked all of them off. The Bozeman Courier joked that the Johnston brothers had made so much money betting on their bull that they planned to start a bank or build a railroad

    In December 1893, the Bozeman Chronicle reported that a cowboy named “Starchy” had ridden the bull and won the purse. Apparently they were referring to George “Starkey” Teeples, a cowboy who owned a ranch in Carbon County. Pres Johnston makes no mention of Steeples in his letters. Will Everson said that Steeples used hobbled stirrups (stirrups that were tied together under the bull’s belly), an arrangement that wasn’t allowed.

    Corbett’s fame spread and by the summer of 1894 he could draw a crowd wherever he went. Perhaps his largest audience was at the July 4 celebration in Bozeman where he had a conspicuous place in the parade where he marched placidly down the crowded street. In the afternoon, 5,000 people came to watch him but it was difficult to find challengers. Finally two men, named Sam Brumfield and John Foster mounted the bull and got themselves thrown.

    In August, a union in Anaconda agreed to pay expenses so Corbett could participate in a Labor Day celebration there. The Anaconda Standard reported that when the bull was led onto the baseball ground where several thousand people waited “he appeared so good natured and easy going and wore an expression of contentedness that applications to ride were made by several persons.” The first up was Martin Johnson who the Standard called “the iceman” apparently because he was in the refrigeration business. Corbett baulked at being saddled and wouldn’t let Johnson mount. Finally the iceman decided to drop onto the bull from above. When Johnson hit Corbett’s back, a chute man released him. The bull jumped 12 feet into the air, arched his back and sent Johnson sprawling several yards away. The Standard reported that the audience laughed and yelled itself hoarse. A man named John Brass who worked at the Standard Brick Works tried next. Corbett threw him on the third jump.

    Two weeks later Corbett went to a fair in Butte where he sent a man named Jim Radford into a full somersault and threw a man called “Mormon Ben” on the second jump.

    Six days later, Corbett was in Helena where Pres Johnston said nobody was willing to give him a try. The Helena newspapers, however, reported that two men tried—and one of them succeeded. The Helena Herald said a cowboy from Fort Benton won a $200 prize for riding the bull, The Helena Independent said that after several men attempted to ride, “a local ranchman” named Joe Kirkwood stepped forward. “When all was ready, the Helena man jumped lightly into saddle and the circus began. The bull arched his back and gave a succession of jumps. He pranced around and bucked in his best style, but when he got through his performance, much to his chagrin, the man, like the stars and stripes, was ‘still there.’”

    The newspaper reports can’t be reconciled with Pres Johnson’s statement in that Corbett’s reputation preceded him to Helena and “no man tried to ride him.” Perhaps the most weight should be given to the newspapers contemporaneous reports. After all, Johnston’s denial appeared in a letter published in the Bozeman Courier in 1948—more than 50 years after the events in question. Also, as will be described in the section on the Jake Smith controversy below, the events in Helena are even more complicated.

    After the events in Helena, the Johnstons sold Corbett to Charles Beveridge and Donald Davenport, two Helena businessmen who were starting a wild west show. The Johnstons got $300 for the bull and $50 for ‘young Corbett,’ a calf that Corbett had sired and Pres had trained as a bucker.

    The show hired John Mardis of Bozeman and his duties included caring for Corbett. When Mardis retuned home he reported what happened to the show, and the bull.

    The Beveridge-Davenport show went to Peoria to train, then began a tour of the East and Southeast. The Bull Durham Tobacco Company presented the bull with a blanket.  On the tour, Mardis said, only two men tried to ride the bull. Both were thrown.

    The show went broke in Indiana and Corbett was sold there to a farmer who apparently planned to use him as a herd bull.

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    — To see the next Installment: “The Jake Ross Controversy.” Sixty years after the bucking stopped an old cowboy’s obituary relaunches the legend of Corbett, The Belgrade Bull, click here,

    — To see all of the stories about Corbett, The Belgrade Bull, click on “Belgrade Bull” under “Categories” in the column to the right.

    — Illustration from the Pioneer Museum of Bozeman.

  • A Tale: Cooking Fish on the Hook in a Hot Spring

    Many Yellowstone Park tourists describe places where an angler can catch a fish and cook it in a nearby hot spring without taking it off the hook, but few report actually doing it. Henry J. Winser described performing the feat in his 1883 guide for tourists.

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    It has often been said that it possible to catch trout in the Yellowstone Lake and cook them in a boiling spring close behind the angler—without taking them off the hook. The assertion seems incredible and it is generally doubted. This extraordinary feat may certainly be accomplished, not only at the Yellowstone Lake, but also on the Gardiner River below the Mammoth Hot Springs. The writer performed it at the latter place, and in the presence of nine witnesses.

    Selecting a likely pool of the ice-cold stream with a boiling spring fifteen feet distant from the bank, he stood upon a projecting rock and made a cast. His flies soon tempted a trout to his doom. The fish was small enough to be lifted out of the water without the aid of a landing net, and it was quite easy to drop him into the bubbling hot spring behind. His life must have been extinguished instantly.

    This procedure was repeated several times, and each of the spectators who had purposely assembled to test the truth of the strange assertion, partook of the fish thus caught and boiled. It required from three to five minutes to thoroughly cook the victims of the experiment, and it was the general verdict that they only needed a little salt to make them quite palatable.

    This is a “fish story,” without doubt, but a perfectly true one. A feat so extraordinary could nowhere else be practiced.

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    — For more stories about fishing in Yellowstone Park, click on “fishing” under the “Categories” button on the right.

    — Excerpt from Henry J. Winser,  The Yellowstone National Park: A Manual for tourists. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883. (Pages 39-40).

    —Frank J. Haynes Postcard, Yellowstone Slide File.

  • The Belgrade Bull 3: Sunday School Girls Meet The Threshing Crew Riders

    Pres Johnston Sketch

    The true story of how Corbett, The Belgrade Bull, got his start is told in a couple of letters written decades after his bucking career ended. In 1937, Preston Johnston, who owned the bull in his heyday in the 1890s, wrote an old friend who had asked how the legend started. That letter is in the collection of Pioneer Museum of Bozeman and outlines Johnston’s recollections. In 1951, Frank Collins, another old timer who was there at the beginning, published a letter in the Belgrade Journal trying to set the record straight after the newspaper published an obituary of  a man who claimed to have ridden Corbett. Johnston and Collins’ versions aren’t as colorful as the tale Emerson Hough told in his 1910 Saturday Evening Post article, but they still make for a great story.

    To read the story beginning with Part 1, click here.

    “The Belgrade Bull,” Part 3.”

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    When Corbett was a calf, according to Pres Johnston, children would come to the Miller farm after Sunday School at the Dry Creek Missionary Baptist Church and try to ride him. Such contests between a half-grown bull and half-grown humans must have been even matches and glorious fun.

    The first person to take on Corbett as a mature bull was Frank Collins, who recalled his adventure decades later. Collins and two of Annie Miller’s sons, Sam and Zach, decided to give the bull a try on Easter Sunday, 1892, when they were all in their late teens. The boys drew straws to see who would try first and Collins pulled the short straw. Collins recalled:

    “I stayed on him longer than anyone I ever saw try him. But of course I was not down a straddle of him all the time. I was just riding the air up over him and clawing at every thing I could get a hold of, but finally I missed making good connections. I stood on my head out in front of him.”

    Collins and the Miller boys must have talked up the bull’s prowess because experienced riders became interested in him. In the Fall when Preston Johnston and his friend, Lou Kennedy, finished setting up a threshing machine at Annie Miller’s place they were surprised to discover that their crew hadn’t arrived. Threshing was a big job back then and there should have been a crew of a dozen or more men there. Johnston asked around and found out that everybody was waiting to watch a local man, Herbert Brady, ride the bull.

    By the time Herbert came riding up on his bronco, quite a crowd had assembled including the men of the threshing crew and the women who came to prepare the huge meals needed to fuel the hard-working crew.

    Herbert took his saddle off of his horse and went to the corral where the bull stood. Collins put a halter on the bull and used a sack to blindfold him. After the young cowboy climbed aboard, Collins pulled off the blindfold. Then Corbett let out a snort, and Herbert sailed into the air with one of his stirrups clinging to his foot. Brady landed on the bull with the stirrup between him and the saddle. Collins reported, “Herbert walked in wide order for a few days until he got healed up in places where the stirrup pealed him.”

    Brady was just an average rider. He knew that Lou Kennedy was better, so he wanted the more experienced man to take a turn on the bull. But Kennedy took riding seriously and said he wouldn’t do it unless there was something in it for him. Since nobody on the crew had money to bet, the men went to work. After the crew finished at Miller’s, they moved the threshing machine to the Howard Brady place.

    The next day when Lou Kennedy and his father, Jim, went to make some repairs on the threshing machine, they discovered a man who was willing to bet $10 on the bull. Jim Kennedy had complete confidence that his son was up to the task and said he was willing to bet a hundred dollars.

    When Herbert found out Kennedys had money to bet, he cooked up a scheme to get some of it. He knew Jack Flynn, another neighbor, who was excellent rider. Herbert figured if Jack couldn’t ride the bull, then Lou couldn’t either. Herbert convinced Jack to try the bull so they would know if they should place a bet. This plan resulted in the first time that the bull was “borrowed” in the middle of night and taken away for a practice ride.

    Herbert and Jack and some friends went out to the Miller place one bright, moonlit night. They found the bull running loose on the range, but he was so tame that they had no trouble catching and saddling him. Jack looked at his watch and said, “Eleven o’clock, boys, just the right time to ride a bull.” Then he climbed into the saddle. Jack rode for two jumps, but on the third he went high into the air.

    Pres Johnston said that before Jack hit the ground he yelled, “By God boys, he done it.

    Everybody figured that if Jack couldn’t ride the bull, then Lou Kennedy would not be able to either, so they sent word to the Kennedy’s that they were ready to bet. They didn’t mention their little experiment.

    On Sunday morning Lou rode up to the Brady place. Sunday School had just let out and a crowd gathered to watch the ride. Lou had to blindfold the bull to saddle him. After he mounted, he told his father to pull off the blind. The bull gave a snort and sent Lou flying. Lou caught his pants on the saddled horn and they were badly torn so Lou had to make for the tall grass to keep out of sight of the Sunday School crowd. Howard Brady went to the house to retrieve a needle and thread to repair the pants.

    Lou’s ride convinced Pres Johnston that he could “have plenty of sport” betting on the bull so he talked his brother, Al, into buying the animal. The next day while Al was on the way to Mrs. Miller’s he met the Kennedys who asked where he was going. When Al said he was going to buy the bull, the Kennedys reported that the animal had thrown Lou. Al told them the bull had thrown Jack Flynn the night before. And that’s how the Kennedys learned they had been set up.

    Anna Miller sold the bull to the Johnstons for $15. She was a widow with several daughters, so she probably was glad to be rid of an animal that caused young men to sneak around her place in the dead of night.

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    — To see the next Installment: “Corbett Throws All Challengers—Maybe,” click here.

    — To see all of the stories about Corbett, The Belgrade Bull, click on “Belgrade Bull” under “Categories” in the column to the right.

    —Illustration from the Pioneer Museum of Bozeman.

  • A Tale: Gilmann Sawtell, First Yellowstone Park Guide

    Inside Sawtell's Cabin, Sawtell far left.

    Most of the tales I post here come from my collection on early travel to Yellowstone Park that I assembled for my Humanities Montana presentations.  I focus on first-person accounts and let people tell about their adventures in their own words.  But often there very interesting people who never wrote their own story, so I write one for them.  Gilman Sawtell is such a person.

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    Most of the earliest Park tourists came from Montana because that’s where the access rivers ran. The north entrance via the Yellowstone River was 60 miles from the farm town of Bozeman, and the west entrance via the Madison was 90 miles from the gold rush town of Virginia City. Both rivers flow through rugged canyons that made travel difficult. In fact, the Madison Canyon was so bad that early travelers chose to cross the continental divide twice to avoid it. But that was a small sacrifice. Passage over the Raynolds and Targhee Passes was relatively easy. Besides, traveling this route provided the reward of a stop at Henry’s Lake.

    Many travelers left glowing descriptions of Henry’s Lake. The four-mile long lake is surrounded by stately mountains and fed by snowmelt streams and cold springs. Travelers praised the spot as a paradise for game, waterfowl. It was a haven for birds, and filled with magnificent trout. Travelers usually spent several days there hunting and fishing and lolling in the sturdy log structures built by Gilman Sawtell.

    Sawtell was a blue-eyed blond who came west with his wife and son after serving as a Union soldier in the Civil War. He prospected for gold near for a while and in 1867 he began homesteading at Henry’s lake. Sawtell left his mark in many ways. His main business was harvesting and selling fish—as many as 40,000 pounds a year. To make his commercial fish business work, Sawtell had to keep his product fresh and haul it to distant markets.

    Sawtell sawed blocks of ice from the lake in winter and stored them packed in sawdust in an sturdy thick-walled icehouse he built of logs. He speared fish and stored them in the icehouse until he had enough to fill his wagon. In the 1860s Sawtell sold his fish for top prices in the gold rush town of Virginia City 90 miles away. He had to build his own road to get there. As late as 1896, Sawtell was still hauling fish to Monida where they were loaded into railroad cars for sale in Butte and Ogden.

    While launching his fish business, Sawtell built a veritable village. By 1871 he had six well-built log buildings: a residence, a blacksmith shop, a stable, a storage shed for skins and game, and his icehouse. In addition he farmed crops of hay, grain, and vegetables.

    It’s not known when Sawtell began visiting Yellowstone, but he was telling stories about geysers by the mid 1860s. In 1873 he contracted with Virginia businessmen to build a road from his ranch over Targhee Pass to the lower geyser basin. This was called “The Yellowstone Free Road” to distinguish it from the toll road Bozeman businessmen were building along the Yellowstone River to Mammoth Hot Springs. The race for tourist dollars was on.

    In 1871 Sawtell guided a group of businessmen from Deer Lodge and Virginia City on a tour that covered the geyser basins, Yellowstone Lake, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. This trip made Sawtell the first commercial guide to Yellowstone. Several of these travelers described the trip in newspapers articles. These articles appeared in Virginia City, Helena and Deer Lodge. They fueled Montanan’s interest in visiting the upper Yellowstone and encouraged the U.S. congress to establish the national park. The most extensive account of this trip was written by Calvin C. Clawson, a reporter for The New Northwest, a Deer Lodge newspaper.

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    — For more information about my Humanities Montana Presentation, click the button at the top of the page.

    — Read a story by Calvin Clawson about the 1871 trip. “First Blood.”

    — William Henry Jackson photo from the Yellowstone Digital Archive.

    — For more stories about fishing in Yellowstone Park, click on “fishing” under the “Categories” button on the right.

  • The Belgrade Bull 2: A Local Legend Goes National

    When writer Emerson Hough visited Montana in 1910, he must have heard tales of Corbett, The Belgrade Bull, in cowboy bars everywhere. The facts don’t matter much in such places, but that didn’t bother Hough.  He knew a good story when he heard one.  And so did the editors of the Saturday Evening Post. “The Belgrade Bull,” Part 2.

    To read the story beginning with Part 1, click here.

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    Corbett’s reputation as a bucker went national in 1910 when he became the subject of a feature article in the Saturday Evening Post.

    The article was written by then prominent novelist Emerson Hough, who attributed the story to a worn-out cowboy named “Curley.” Here some of Curley’s story:

    “You’ve heard of the Belgrade Bull, haven’t you?” Curly asked suddenly. I nodded. What western man hasn’t heard of that historic brute, whose history is one long record of dismantled cowpunchers who thought they could ride anything with hair? …

    “There was maybe one or two fakes of that same name,” added Curley reminiscently. …. “But the real old Simon-pure, North American, eighteen-carat, gold-filed Belgrade Bull was owned by a man named Kid Johnson. He didn’t have no mine nor ranch nor nothin’. That one little, ornery, undersized black-and-white bull—a cross between a Jersey and a Galloway—furnished him with all the income he needed, and all the sport besides. He just run the saloon and gamblin’ place a sort of a incidental amusement.

    “His real means of livelihood was that same critter that he kept out in the corral. The duty of the saloon porter was to git up every mornin’ about four or five and chase that bull around the corral a couple hours or so. That way he was hard as nails, all the same time, playful as a kitten—though he didn’t look it—and able to jump a ten-foot fence any time he wanted to. Buck! Pitch? No, he didn’t buck. He wouldn’t do anything as low down and commonplace as that there. They ain’t no real name for what he done.

    “This here Kid Johnson goes into this little town of Belgrade, up here in Montana, north of here, aleadin’ this cow critter on a string. After he got his red eye joint started up and his corral fixed, he hangs out a notice sayin’ that cowpunchers and others is plumb welcome and can git any kind of game they like. When the word got out that there was a new game, and that this here speckled bull was the king card in Kid Johnson’s layout, the cowpunchers from both sides of the place and five hundred miles up and down the range—why they broke their necks to git in first to take money away Kid Johnson. Now it wasn’t so much money they was after, though the Kid didn’t turn down any sized bets that come, as it was a matter of professional pride; because right soon the news got out on the range that this here Belgrade bull had throwed an average of two to ten cowpunchers every day of the week, not barrin’ Sundays, and some of them was the best riders that ever throwed a rope.

    “Businesses all over the upper-range country just come to a stop. There wasn’t no self-respectin’ cow camp that wouldn’t head right for Belgrade as soon as they got their beef cuts done. Ranch owners, foremen, punchers, everybody—they come, I say, five or six hundred miles to go against the game just for sake of the cause. It slow’ded up the cattle business some, but it was fine for Belgrade while it lasted. Every day in Belgrade was circus day.”

    Apparently Curley was prone to exaggeration and was not overly concerned with factual detail. The bull was owned by Alva and Preston Johnston (Johnston, with a “T”), and neither one of them was called “Kid.” Judging from his black-and-white markings, the bull almost certainly was Holstein. Doubtless the Johnston brothers made a lot of money betting on Corbett, but he was hardly their sole source of support; they owned a livery stable in Belgrade and ran a lucrative threshing business. They did not own a saloon.

    But Curley did capture the mood of the times when Corbett dominated attention in Belgrade. While the Johnston brothers didn’t have Corbett to buck every day, they did schedule rides every time a challenger stepped up, usually on Sunday afternoons. Belgrade did take on a circus atmosphere on those afternoons, and the brothers did make a bundle of money betting.

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    — To see the next installment, “Sunday School Girls Meet the Threshing Crew Riders,”  The true story of  how Corbett the Belgrade Bull got his start, click here.

    — To see all of the stories about Corbett, The Belgrade Bull, click on “Belgrade Bull” under “Categories” in the column to the right.

    —Illustration from the Saturday Evening Post, September 10, 1910.

  • News and Views: Tom McGuane and a Mind Adrift

    My friend, Billings author Craig Lancaster posted a comment about Tom McGuane on his website, A Mind Adrift in the West. A New York Times article about McGuane said, “There’s a view of Montana writing that seems stage-managed by the Chamber of Commerce — it’s all about writers like A. B. Guthrie and Ivan Doig,” he said, referring to two authors of historical novels about a rugged, frontier Montana. “It used to bother me that nobody had a scene where somebody was delivering a pizza.”

    Lancaster responded: I don’t want to toot my own horn (yeah, okay, just go with me on this one), but allow me to direct your attention to the bottom of Page 257 of 600 Hours of Edward:

    “I’m watching Dragnet almost three hours early and might even watch another episode, if I feel like it. I’m also munching on thin-crust pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut. I didn’t go to the grocery store today. I decided I didn’t have to. Maybe I’ll go tomorrow. Or maybe not.

    I’ll do whatever I feel like doing. You live only once.”

    I commented: “I admire Tom McGuane’s mastery of craft, but his writing always strikes me as something written by a guy who moved to Montana 30 years ago and never bothered to learn the history of the place. He apparently hasn’t read the work of fine writers like you [Craig Lancaster], Kevin Canty, and Mary Clearman Blew. He’s right when he says the New York literary establishment slights western writers—and he does too. And, I recommend “Riding on the Rim.” [correction: Make that “Driving on the Rim.”]  It’s a fine novel about how a guy who moved to Montana 30 years ago thinks of the place.

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  • News and Views: Meeting Ivan Doig Was Great!

    I got a few minutes to chat with Ivan Doig last night at the Friends of MSU Libraries dinner. I told him about my mother’s evaluation of his novel, English Creek. Mom was unimpressed with his description of life in rural Montana during the Great Depression. “He just wrote about things the way they were,” she said.

    Ivan chuckled politely and his wife, Carol, quickly added, “but he worked so hard to get it right.” So the joke didn’t get the hearty laugh I expected.

    Of course, I know how hard it is to bring the past to life accurately. I’ve tried it myself a few times. Besides, anybody who has read the acknowledgement sections in Doig’s books knows how hard he works to get the details right. If you haven’t read his acknowledgments, you should. That would give you a greater appreciation of Doig’s work.

    In his speech, Doig talked about his work in libraries “listening for voices in the quiet of the past” and looking for “crystallizing details” in places where “Google doesn’t go.”  Classic Doig: precise colorful phrases that stick in the skull and move the narrative.

    Doig focused on his “Montana Trilogy,” books that span the state’s first century by chronicling three generations of the fictional McCaskill family.  Much of the authentic detail for English Creek, the Depression era novel, came from the WPA Writer’s Project documents held and the Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections of the MSU Libraries.

    Doig praised the New Deal project, which sent unemployed writers to gather and write the history of every state, as “an almost miraculous effort.” He also told the story of how Dr. Burlingame, who was a MSU History Professor, made a “heroic rescue” of the papers of the Montana writer’s project when he found they were going to be thrown in the Silver Bow County dump.

    (I’ve worked with the WPA papers several times myself, so I know what a tragedy that would have been. If you’d like to see a sample of the work that might have been lost, get a copy of An Onery Bunch: Tales and Anecdotes Collected by the WPA Montana Writer’s Project 1935-1942.)

    Doig told other tales about such incidents as putting on his coat to search for documents in the icy basement of Saint Andrew’s University Library in Scotland for another book in the Montana Trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair. The main characters of this novel migrated to Montana from Scotland at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. Doig was delighted to find letters from a Scots emigrant describing a trans-Atlantic crossing and if you’ve read Dancing, you know why.

    Doig also talked about Work Song, his new novel set in Butte in 1919. In this book, he said, a library becomes a character. Doig said a photograph of the grand library building that Butte citizens built to show the world there was culture in the rugged mining city inspired him. Doig didn’t talk about his head librarian character that obviously is based on Granville Stuart, whose diaries are one of the best descriptions of frontier Montana. I’d love to hear him talk about that.

    After the speech, I chatted with a library friend who said he was amazed at what a good speaker Doig was. While I agreed that Doig’s style and finesse as a speaker is superlative, I said I wasn’t surprised. He is a master wordsmith who works hard to reach his audiences. Of course, that shows in his speaking as well as his writing.

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  • News and Views: I’m Eager To Meet Ivan Doig

    I’m looking forward to seeing Ivan Doig tonight at the annual Friends of MSU Libraries dinner. I’ve been a fan of Doig’s since the 1980s when I read his marvelous memoir, This House of Sky. Like Ivan, I grew up in Montana ranch country, so I find much to identify with in his work.  He got the people, times, and the setting I grew up with right.

    I’m sure that Ivan gets other times and settings right.  I was so impressed with his novel, English Creek, that I gave it to my mother.  Mom came of age during the Great Depression in rural Montana, just like the protagonist of English Creek, Jick McCaskill.

    The next time I visited, I asked, “Mom, what did you think of that book I gave you?”

    “It was okay,” she said.

    “But did he get the times right?” I persisted.

    She agreed that he had, but she was still unimpressed.

    “He just wrote about things the way they were,” she said.

    If I get a chance to talk with Ivan tonight, I’ll tell him that story.  I think he’d be amused.  At least, I hope so.

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  • The Belgrade Bull 1: That Bucking Son of a Milk Cow

    I became interested in the Belgrade Bull when Ann Butterfield showed me a letter she found in the research collections of the Pioneer Museum in Bozeman.  Ann, who is associate director of the museum, thought maybe I could write an article based on it.  I love piecing together stories out of the detritus of the past, so I decided to give it a try.

    The bull has been legendary in the southwest Montana town of Belgrade for more than a hundred years and soon I was buried under a treasure trove of newspaper clippings, letters and reminiscences. From them, I assembled an article that was published in the Spring 2009 issue of  The Pioneer Museum Quarterly.

    Ann gave me permission to share it on my blog, but it’s too long for a single post so I’ll present it in installments.  The Belgrade Bull, Part 1.

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    Mention of the famous Belgrade Bull can still prompt passionate debate among fans of rodeo history—and it’s been more than a century since that son of a milk cow dumped dozens of cowboys in the dirt. In addition to his alliterative name, he had several characteristics that make him the stuff of legend. He had a gentle disposition and could be led down a crowded parade route on a thin rope. But the moment a cowboy climbed on his back, he became a bucking machine that no man could ride. Or did a few men succeed? Should Starkey Teeples’ ride with a rigged saddle count? How about Bill Sitton’s ride with a double-chinch?  Or John “Kid” Kelly’s ride when the bull was blindfolded? Were newspaper reports that Joe Kirkwood rode him to a standstill true? Most important, where did Jake Ross get his medal that said he rode the Belgrade Bull?

    The bull was born in 1889 on the Jim Ballard ranch on Dry Creek north of town. His pedigree is unknown but his mother was a milk cow and he bore the black-and-white markings of the Holstein dairy breed. A dairy cow gives more milk than a calf needs, so the bull probably was taken from his mother at birth and raised by hand. Bucket fed calves naturally bond with their human caretakers. In fact, the Belgrade Bull was noted for his genteel disposition.

    When the bull was weaned, Jim Ballard’s neighbor, Annie Miller, bought him. She apparently planned to use him to sire a whole herd of black and white dairy cows. She called him “Jim Ballard” or more likely, “that Ballard Bull.” When the Johnston brothers, Pres and Al, bought the bull they named him “Corbett” after the heavyweight boxer, “Gentleman Jim” Corbett who won the national championship with his “scientific” style of boxing. That was appropriate—people said Corbett, the Belgrade Bull, used the scientific method to throw his riders. Will Everson, a Montana newspaperman described Corbett’s bucking style:

    “Corbett is a ‘curve pitcher’ all right—and with a hump in his back that makes the saddle look undecided, and a bound skyward that makes the rider think of heaven, home, and mother—he rolls his hide until saddle and rider take a position at right angles to the original one.

    “Then the bull throws his head around and gives the rider that sort of where-have-I-met-you-look. And while the victim yet gazes and guesses, Corbett gets in his ‘beautiful curve.’ With a swish of this tail, he straightens his body and gives his height prodigious roll. This sends the saddle and rider spinning over to the other side with a momentum that carries them nearly under his belly. Anon he strikes the earth with a sharp, sudden shock, and for a moment seems to stand on the point of his nose, with his tail straight in the air.

    “If the rider is not ‘sent to the grass’ by the first buck, the bull continues, constantly adding new and different variations while in mid-air. Three, four, or five jumps usually does away with the most experienced bronco riders, and six is the most that he has ever done with a ‘clean saddle.’”

    Pres Johnston, who managed Corbett during his bucking exhibitions, said that as soon as the rider was off his back, Corbett resumed his friendly disposition

    “After he threw his rider, he would stop and come up to me, as I would have a piece of bread or some biscuits for him. He liked them very much. When he was out running loose in town, some women would go out to their gate and call him to feed him some bread. He would come on the run when they would hello, “Come Corbett.” He knew his name.”

    ∞§∞

    — To see the next installment, “A Local Legend Goes National” In 1910 a worn-out cowboy named “Curley” told Corbett’s story in a feature article in the Saturday Evening Post.  Curly was prone to exaggeration and not obsessed with accuracy, click here.

    — To see all of the stories about Corbett, The Belgrade Bull, click on “Belgrade Bull” under “Categories” in the column to the right.

    —Illustration from the Saturday Evening Post, September 10, 1910.

  • When Versions Collide

    George F. Cowan

    I’ve been researching the ordeal of George Cowan, who regained consciousness in Yellowstone Park on August 24, 1877, with bullet wounds in his head and thigh. Nez Perce Indians had left George for dead after chasing his companions into the forest and hauling off his wife and her 13-year-old sister.

    It would be easy to reduce things to a few general statements that everybody agrees on, but that would be boring. I want to dig up enough specific details to bring the story to life.

    George’s own account has to be the primary document, but it needs to be approached with some skepticism. We’re always the heroes of our own stories, so George may have presented himself as smarter and stronger than he really was. Also, his version is the recollection of a starving man who had a lead slug embedded in his skull.

    Of course, George’s version must take precedence during those times when he was alone. One writer says George fell asleep by a campfire one night and awoke to find it had spread through mold on ground and burned him. It’s a dramatic and plausible incident, but I doubt that it happened. George doesn’t mention it and the people who rescued him don’t count burns among his injuries. Besides, it sounds exactly like what happened to Truman Everts, who was separated from the Washburn Expedition to Yellowstone in 1870 and spent 37 days alone in the wilderness. I think the writer conflated the two stories, so I’ll omit this incident from my book.

    Things get trickier when versions offer conflicting interpretations of the facts. Contemporary newspaper accounts of George’s adventure portray him as a courageous victim of “the Red Devils,” but later writers who were sympathetic to the plight of the Nez Perce make him out to be an arrogant ass who provoked the attack on himself and his companions. I think there is truth to both versions.

    I’ll take sides sometimes. Army officers said George was an ingrate who did nothing but complain about the care they provided him. But, George says army surgeons left him with open wounds and a lead slug in his head for five hours while they went “geyser gazing” with other officers. I’ll go with George’s version here. One of his travel companions corroborates George. Besides, it’s well documented that military men of the era were fascinated by Yellowstone’s wonders. In fact, General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was the Army’s top officer in 1877, visited the geysers just days before Cowan and his friends arrived there.

    It’s hard work to compare multiple versions of events that happened more than 130 years ago, but the effort is giving me a deeper appreciation of them. My book will be better because of that.

    ∞§∞

    — Image from Progressive Men of Montana.