- A Chinook at the Kitchen Table
The wind came down off the Front that January night the way it always does near Choteau, warm and loud and in no particular hurry. It rattled the stovepipe and set the yard light swinging, and it drove Josie Hallett in through the mudroom door with her hat in her hand and an argument on her face.
Her grandfather, Walt, did not look up from the crossword. He had been reading faces across that oilcloth table for seventy-one years, and he knew the look of somebody who had been told something at a meeting and had not quite decided whether to believe it.
“Coffee’s on,” he said. “Go ahead and say it.”
Josie poured a cup and sat down hard. “Fella at the meeting tonight says we ought not use ‘Big Sky’ on anything. Says we’re the Treasure State. Says Brian Schweitzer changed it to Big Sky so the state would run on tourists instead of mines.”
Walt set his pencil down. He took off his reading glasses, folded them, and laid them on the newspaper the way a man lays down a good hand of cards.
“Well,” he said. “Half of that’s true and the other half’s about forty years late. Pull your chair in. This one goes back a ways.”
- Shining Mountains and Gold and Silver
“Before anybody called this place a state,” Walt said, “before it was a territory, before there was a Helena or a Butte or a Choteau, it already had a name. Go look out that window in the morning when the sun hits the Front.”
“Snow on the peaks,” Josie said.
“Snow on the peaks. Lights ’em up like a row of lanterns. The tribes who lived here spoke of the mountains in words that came across in English as the shining ones. Then in the 1700s the French came feeling their way west out of Canada, the La Verendrye family and their men, and the story goes they saw that same white wall on the horizon and called it the Shining Mountains. So the oldest name on this country is ‘Land of Shining Mountains.’ Nobody sold it. It was just what you saw.”
He got up, fed a split of larch into the stove, and sat back down.
“Then the gold showed up. Grasshopper Creek in ’62. Alder Gulch in ’63. Last Chance Gulch in ’64, and that’s where Helena came from. Men poured in here with picks and pans and not a lick of sense, and by the time the first Territorial Legislature sat down in Bannack in the winter of 1864, everybody knew what Montana was going to be about.”
“Mining.”
“Mining and the land under it. Those lawmakers made a seal for the new territory. Put a plow on it, and a pick and a shovel, and the sun coming up over the mountains and the falls of the Missouri. And across the bottom they wrote ‘Oro y Plata.’ Spanish for gold and silver. The resolution approving it was signed February 9,1865. That’s still our motto today. Still on the Great Seal, right there in state law.”
Josie turned her cup. “So before ‘Treasure State’ even existed-“
“Before ‘Treasure State’ existed, we’d already stamped gold and silver on our own seal. Remember that part. It matters later.”
III. The Treasure State, and One Nobody Wanted
“By the 1890s,” Walt went on, “Butte was the richest hill on earth. Copper coming out of that ground by the trainload, wiring up every city in America. Gold and silver all over the western half of the state. Coal, timber, cattle, wheat. Montana had been a state for six years, and the folks in Helena wanted the rest of the country to know it.”
“So they made a slogan.”
“In1895 the state’s Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry put out a booklet to bring people and money in. Printed big across it: ‘The Treasure State.’ And it stuck, because it was true. Wasn’t just salesmanship. We really were one of the biggest producers of gold, silver, and copper in the nation.”
He tapped the table with one thick finger.
“Here’s the part your fella at the meeting probably doesn’t know. That same 1895 booklet also called Montana the ‘Land of Shining Mountains.’ So right there at the start, in one pamphlet, the state was selling its treasure and its scenery both. Nobody back then thought you had to pick.”
Josie grinned. “Were there any bad ones?”
Walt laughed, a short dry sound like a gate hinge. “There was one. The 1922 World Almanac listed Montana as the ‘Stubbed-Toe State.”‘
“No.”
“Swear on your grandmother’s pie tin. The idea was that the western half was so rough and rocky a body couldn’t walk across it without barking his shins. It died a quiet death, and nobody’s mourned it since. But it tells you the name wasn’t settled. Montana was still trying on hats.”
- High, Wide and Handsome
“Then came the hard years,” Walt said, and the wind leaned on the house as if to agree. “Drought. Homesteaders blown out in the twenties. The Depression on top of it. My own dad lost a half-section east of here to the bank in ’34. Copper prices went to nothing. A slogan about treasure sounded a little thin when folks were eating jackrabbit.”
“So what’d they call it then?”
“A newspaperman named C. B. Glasscock wrote a book in 1935 about the Copper Kings, the Butte barons and their wars. He described life in Butte as high, wide, and occasionally handsome. Somebody liked the ring of it and dropped the ‘occasionally.’ By 1940 the state highway department was putting ‘Montana: High, Wide and Handsome’ on its travel brochures. Then Joseph Kinsey Howard of Great Falls took it for the title of his history of the state, and that book’s still about the best thing ever written on Montana’s hard times.”
He let that sit a moment.
“Notice what happened there, Josie. ‘Treasure State’ tells you what’s in the ground. ‘High, Wide and Handsome’ tells you what it’s like to stand on top of it. That’s the first turn of the wheel. Montana starts describing how it looks and how it feels, not Just what it’s worth.”
- Bud Guthrie’s Sky
Walt nodded toward the window, toward the dark where the town lights of Choteau lay a few miles off.
“Bud Guthrie grew up right there. A. B. Guthrie Junior. His father was the school principal in Choteau. In 1947 Bud finished a novel about the mountain men, the fur trappers who came up the Missouri before there was any Montana at all. Sent it off to his editor in New York without a title.”
“Without a title?”
“Without a title. His editor, a man named Bill Sloane, went digging through some notes Bud had sent about his own life. In there was a memory of Bud’s father. The old man had come west from Indiana, and the first time he stood out on this prairie under all that sky, he said it made him feel free. Sloane read that and put three words on the cover. The Big Sky.”
Josie looked up at the ceiling, as if she could see through it. “So it was a book first.”
“A book first. And a good one. Then in the summer of 1961, a fella named Jack Hallowell, who was running the state’s advertising, was squiring around a writer from Holiday magazine named John Weaver. Weaver wanted to meet Guthrie, so Hallowell took him to see Bud. And while they were visiting, Hallowell asked whether Bud would mind if the state used ‘Big Sky’ to promote Montana to travelers.”
“And he said yes.”
“He said yes. That year, 1961, ‘Big Sky Country’ became a Montana nickname. Six years later, in 1967, the state took ‘Treasure State’ off the license plates, where it had been since 1950, and put ‘Big Sky Country’ on instead.”
He leaned back and folded his arms. “Now. Who was governor in 1967?” Josie thought. “Not Schweitzer.”
“Not Schweitzer. Brian Schweitzer didn’t take office until 2005. That’s forty-four years after the state adopted ‘Big Sky Country’ and thirty-eight years after it went on the plates. Whatever you think of the man, and folks in this county think plenty, he didn’t do this. He was in grade school.”
- The Slogans That Didn’t Take, and the One That Did
“‘Big Sky’ worked almost too well,” Walt said. “Chet Huntley, the television newsman, came home and built a ski resort down south of Bozeman and named it Big Sky. Opened in the early seventies. By the eighties the tourism people were fretting that folks back East thought ‘Big Sky Country’ meant one ski hill in the Gallatin.” “So they changed it?”
“They tried. In 1985 it was ‘Montana, Naturally Inviting.’ In1988 the state tourism council went with ‘Montana, Unspoiled, Unforgettable.’ You remember either one?”
“Never heard of ’em.”
“Nobody has. That’s the lesson. The state can print a slogan, but it can’t make people say it. The names that last are the ones people pick up on their own.”
He got quiet then, and when he spoke again his voice had gone softer.
“Which brings us to the last one. Bill Kittredge, a rancher’s kid from Oregon who taught writing over at the university in Missoula, and Annick Smith, who’d been homesteading up the Blackfoot, put together a big fat anthology of everything good ever written about this state. Tribal stories, trappers’ journals, cowboy yarns, the whole works. Around 1988 they called it The Last Best Place.”
“I’ve heard that one.”
“Everybody’s heard that one. To be fair to the record, a naturalist named Doug Chadwick may have used something close to it a little earlier, writing about the Bob Marshall country. Kittredge always said he came to it on his own. Either way, it was the anthology that made it Montana’s.”·
“What’s different about it?” Walt thought about that a while.
“‘Treasure State’ says what we’ve got. ‘Big Sky’ says what it looks like. ‘The Last Best Place’ says what it means to us. It’s got a warning in it. There aren’t many places like this left, so mind how you treat it.”
“And somebody tried to buy it,” Josie said. “I remember Mom talking about that.”
“Outfit from Nevada, early 2000s. Filed to trademark ‘The Last Best Place’ for beef and hotels and such. Montanans came unglued. It went all the way to Congress, and in 2005 Congress barred the Patent Office from registering or enforcing a trademark on those words. A federal appeals court upheld it. Four words, and the people of this state treated them like a public road. Nobody gets to put a gate across it.”
VII. What’s on the Pickup
Walt stood, a little stiff in the hips, and took his coat off the peg by the door. “Come on. Bring your cup.”
They went out into the wind. The Chinook had pushed the temperature up near forty, and the snow in the yard had gone soft and gray. Walt walked her around to the back of his Ford and tipped his flashlight down at the license plate.
Blue plate. Old-timey lettering. And along the bottom, plain as day: Treasure State,
“That plate came out in January of 2010,” Walt said. “Montana brought ‘Treasure State’ back to the standard plate after forty-some years. You know who was governor in January 2010?”
Josie started to laugh. “Schweitzer.”
“Brian Schweitzer. So if your fella’s right and the man spent his whole time in office trying to bury ‘Treasure State,’ he did a mighty poor job of it. The truth is he never had a hand in it either direction that I’ve ever read. The state took up ‘Big Sky’ in 1961, put it on the plates in 1967, and put ‘Treasure State’ back in 2010. And ‘Oro y Plata’ has been on the seal the whole time, since 1865.”
They stood a minute in the warm wind. Up north, the Front was a black wall against the stars, and somewhere under it was all the copper and coal and gold that built the state. Overhead, the sky went on forever in every direction, the same sky that had made a schoolteacher from Indiana feel free.
“So which one’s right?” Josie asked. “For the dinner. Treasure State or Big Sky?”
“Depends what you’re trying to say. If you want to talk about the mines and the ranches and the jobs, the folks who pulled a living out of this ground, ‘Treasure State’ is older and it’s got roots back to the seal. That’s a fair choice and an honest one. If you want to talk about room to breathe, and nobody standing over you, and a man looking up and feeling free, well. That’s what ‘Big Sky’ has meant for sixty-some years. ‘Liberty Under the Big Sky’ isn’t borrowing from any Democrat. It’s borrowing from Bud Guthrie’s daddy.”
He clicked off the flashlight.
“Just don’t let anybody tell you you have to throw one away to keep the other. One of those names looks down into the ground and sees what it’s worth. The other looks up at the horizon and sees how far it goes. Both of ’em are Montana. Always have been.”
They went back inside. The coffee was still hot. And the wind kept coming down off the mountains, the way it has since before anybody thought to give this place a name at all.
Author’s note: Walt and Josie Hallett are fictional. The history they discuss is drawn from the Montana Historical Society, the Montana Secretary of State, the Montana Motor Vehicle Division’s license-plate history, and the federal court record on “The Last Best Place” trademark dispute.