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 Day 13 Great Falls, Montana
In the
morning we drive down to the river and try to see it through
Lewis and Clark's eyes. It's not easy, as all the falls and rapids are
now dammed, so the several falls which Lewis estimated were second in
grandeur and beauty only to those of Niagara are now either bone-dry or
completely submerged. Nonetheless, we follow River Drive along the
south bank to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, where one could
spend the better part of a day learning more about the intrepid
explorers.
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Toward
noon we head east across the vast open prairie and descend into
the cool green river town of Fort Benton. Founded in 1846 as a trading
post and collection point for furs and buffalo skins, Fort Benton was
at that time the only white settlement in the region, and has since
been called the "Birthplace of Montana." We park
the Westy on the levee, right on the bank of the Missouri, and stroll
the old downtown.
Back in the day, the rough-and-tumble town of
Fort Benton was little more than a frontier camp of trappers, miners,
traders, bull-whackers, and
mule-skinners, with a few hurdy-gurdy girls just to keep things
interesting. The odd assortment of saloons, gambling halls, and
brothels was often a scene of whiskey-fueled brawls and gunfights,
leading some to call this section of Front Street the "bloodiest block
in the West".
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Sometime between then and now the streets got paved and the
citizenry settled down, but not much else has changed. The old Grand
Union Hotel, which once boasted: "Finest accommodations between
Minneapolis and
Seattle," is still the centerpiece of the levee, and Front Street is
still lined by saloons, diners, and hardware stores.
We drift into Bob's Riverfront Restaurant, a
place where local ranchers mingle comfortably with septuagenarians
tourists
disgorged from
tour busses and RVs, and where the salads are comprised entirely of
iceberg
lettuce. Lewis and Clark paddled up through what would later become
Fort Benton in 1805, and several of the expedition's members are
honored on the menu here. Hungry history buffs can choose from such
commemorative entrees as "John Ordway Orange Roughy", "Charbonneau's
Chicken Teriyaki", or the tempting "William Clark Corn Dog and Fries".
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After
lunch we cross the river and drive southwest across a prairie of
interminably infinite proportions. I'm not generally agoraphobic, but
on some of these long drives across beautiful, endless wheat fields,
with fuel stops one hundred fifty miles apart, where the crest of every
small hill only reveals twenty more miles of flat land in all
directions, I kind of get the heebie-jeebies.
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Today
we see a farmer walking in the middle of a field, his jacket flung over
his shoulder, headed away from the road into a golden landscape that
never ends. The
only house or farm is miles away in the hazy distance, and there is no
broken-down tractor or pickup nearby. He doesn't wave frantically or
even acknowledge us. I have no idea where he has come from nor where he
is going. He is like a man walking on the surface of the moon, with no
ride home. I still get a little sweaty just thinking about it …
Jutting over two thousand feet above the
surrounding plains, we can see the flat-topped Square Butte for many
miles before we finally arrive at its
tiny namesake town. We follow the single gravel road through the sleepy
hamlet and nearly to the base of the butte, its flying buttresses and
carved sides an evocative sight in the afternoon light.
As we head back out to the highway, we are
waved over by a woman mowing the parched lawn of her old schoolhouse,
and we stop to chat for a
while. In the span of twenty minutes we get a colorful slice of life on
the Montana prairie. The woman says she's lived in the area all her
life, used to earn her livelihood flying cropdusters, and will rent
rooms in the schoolhouse for the night. When Lorie admires her
chickens, she complains that she must now keep them penned up to
protect them from neighbors' dogs. "This whole presidential election
thing
comin' up is mostly irrelevant to me," she says, waving it away.
"Around here, all the politics are about my chickens, and other
people's dogs runnin' loose." We move on, and agree to take her up on
her offer of rustic lodging the next time we pass through Square Butte.
| Driving
through a dramatic landscape of increasingly rolling hills, valleys,
and weather-carved mesas, we make a sidetrip to look for yet another
ghost town, but find little more than a small decommissioned Air Force
installation dating from the 1960s. Numerous barracks and bunkers,
underground control stations, and abandoned missile silos are scattered
throughout the region, leftovers from the Cold War. |
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According
to a declassified Strategic Air Command report, in the early morning
hours of March 16, 1967, several Minuteman missile installations in the
area reported seeing UFOs hovering outside the base fences or directly
above the launch silos. Entire crews of maintenance and security
personnel at two of the sites saw glowing red, saucer-shaped craft,
hovering silently immediately outside the front gates.
"Sorry,
we have no complimentary coffee or continental breakfast here, but be
sure and grab a handful of .45-caliber, hollow-point, flesh-rippin'
bullets from the big bowl at the front desk."
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Controllers
watched their monitors in horror as, one by one, over two dozen nuclear
ICBM missiles were mysteriously
deactivated and removed from strategic alert, making them unlaunchable.
At least one security
officer was so affected by his close encounter that he never again
returned to missile security duty.
We
see no
such flying saucers on our brief visit to the Judith Mountains but are
taking no chances, so before darkness falls we drive
down to Lewistown and get a room. After dinner we take an evening
stroll down a charming Rockwellian Main Street, taking in the vintage
neon signs and trying to stay out of the way of the two drunks
stumbling from the Eagles Club to the VFW Hall.
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