How Can You Tell?

Willis, the city of Silver Star, an hour plus west of Bozeman, has a one man museum of mining equipment (and a lot of other interesting junk like a dredge from the Panama Canal) that will interest anyone with an appreciation of machinery. LLoyd owns and runs the place, in his 80’s.
There is something special about that part of the country and the people who call it home.

Grew up on a cattle ranch,huh? Maybe you know why the women are always the ones that want to put the bands on the bull calves?

I was doing some research on Farmall F-12 tractors, (my brother is restoring a 1938 steel wheel) i found a video of 85’yr old James Gall of Reserve, KS. who owns the oldest known F-12 one of 25 pre-production test models. He has 117 antique rare tractors, also a large collection of plows and manure spreaders, that one is definitely an oldie.

Missoula is also the home of Mountain Press Publishing Company, publisher of the Roadside Geology series including R. G. of the Yellowstone Country. These highly recommended booklets are great if you want to understand the geological history of common roads through various states and a few specific areas. I made sure to visit all the less common geothermal areas mentioned in the book when I went to Yellowstone a few years back.
I grew up a few miles from the Burlingame Gulch (near where the Walla Walla river empties into the Columbia) which shows the many mud layers of the Missoula ice age floods. We called it the “Little Grand Canyon” and I even hiked into it once with a friend, but didn’t understand what caused it until many years later. I find it amazing they never did a field trip in school or even talked about such things in science class.
The man who discovered the ice age floods, J. Harlen Bretz, was trained in Geology with a PhD but was teaching high school in Seattle when he started to study Eastern Washington and the areas beyond. He came to the conclusion that about 14,000 years ago, a glacial dam would back up water 950 feet deep over the present town of Missoula and then break lose sending a wall of water across Washington and into the Columbia. When it hit Portland it was restricted and would flood all the way up the Willamette Valley to Eugene where I live now. It did this over and over about every 55 years for about 2000 years.
When he first proposed this at The Geological Society of Washington D. C. meeting in 1927, the Eastern geologists laughed at him and told him it could never have happened. There was a bias in geology then that all processes that formed landscapes had to be slow, gradually wearing the mountains into sand on the beach. For a cataclysm of biblical proportions to present itself was considered a great heresy at the time. Only time was on Bretz’s side and he finally won the argument, although it took 50 years and Bretz was 90 when his ideas were finally accepted.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Willis, hope you have a few cold ones at the Bulldog in Whitefish. I spent some time there while installing robots at Columbia Falls near by.

If you are interested in the history of Montana’s “Richest Hill on Earth” (also touted as “A mile high and a mile deep”), there is a wonderful book first published in 1935, when many of those who knew what happened were still living. Check out _The War of the Copper Kings_, by C.B. Glasscock. It reads like a novel, but it’s all real. It’s still in print and available from Amazon and other fine booksellers.

Oops, there = them

Missoula feels like a port city like Duluth, at the edge of a great lake…. Which it once was, in fact, before ancient Lake Missoula scoured out the Columbia scablands of eastern Washington, after the last ice age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_Lake_Missoula
Willis, all of the signposts you write about the West are true, valid and authentic. Like Ric Werme, I also hiked up the “M” to the East of the University of Montana campus, but this month in 1997, auditioning the history department for my prospective application for the master’s there.
What you’ve perhaps missed are the clankity-clank-clank of all the one-armed bandits of Montana in public places like bars – small stakes gambling is a revenue stream for Montana state government. (Or has this changed since I last visited.) And the unfinished floors of the bars.
Back in the 1990s, the ‘over 21 only’ drinking age was only casually enforced. I recall giving rides home for a few falling down drunk coeds, and when the police noticed our antics, they never asked to see our IDs.
If you go to Glacier NP, do spend time at on the shores of Lake McDonald – the atmosphere of the Northern Rockies definitely starts around there. It reminds me of the Great North Woods around the Great Lakes – Lake McDonald is the only place in the Rockies where I’ve experienced the feel that Eastern forest land.