Montana: Cowboys, Indians, Little Big Horn

Well, here we are on the Open Range. Open it was; every so often a cow or three would wander nonchalantly near or across the road. Our job to miss them (reminded us a bit of India). Fortunately, you can see the critters a long way off.

Cliff country near Cody, Wyoming.

And, yes, it was named for Buffalo Bill. Bill was quite a showman; he ran his Wild West Show and Congress of Rough Riders of the World for quite many years, touring the US and Europe.

Yahoo! Note the poster on the left.
An Indian. Bill was sympathetic to the Indians, more so than most people of the time. He had a bunch of Indans in his show, as well as Annie Oakley. Chief Sitting Bull toured with him for a couple of years.Old Trail Town, outside Cody
Two-headed calf. Used to be fairly common at state fairs etc.The Grant-Coors Ranch, Wyoming. Didn't serve whole meals, but did have some suitably wild-and-wooly coffee. They had quite a collection of wagons.

Statue in Billings, Montana Montana State Capitol. Statue4 of pioneers next to the flowerbed.Montana State Historical Soc Museum
Buffalo, on their best behavior, i.e. stuffed.
Buffalo in the wild. There are quite a lot of them being raised now, partly for fun and partly for meat (interesting taste, but they will not replace cows in Big Macs any time soon).There are a lot of these around...

Elk
Sheep, with a watch-llama.

These guys are really intimidating close-up. They will take on wolves or coyotes, and they get along well with the sheep.

Waiting for a Big Mac at the drive-in window, Malta, Montana

A hay-baler; not quite sure how it works. A lot of the land here is good for nothing much but Alfalfa hay, due to the short growing season. Some of has been irrigated at vast government expense; growing hay is costing the taxpayers a bundle.
Sometimes you can have accidents with hay, too. Didn't wait to see what they did about this...

Then, the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Rolling country. Custer was bent on destroying a few Indian villages, on the general theory that a dead Indian was a good Indian. He didn't quite realize that this was a powwow of practically every Indian tribe around; they had gathered together to decide what to do about all these white men taking their land. They outnumbered Custer by quite a lot; He then compounded his mistake by splitting his command into three pieces, one of which blundered right into the middle of the encampments.
This monument has the names of all the soldiers who fell. At that time, they called it the Custer Battlefield National Monument.Each of the fallen soldiers is marked by a white stone.At some point, the Indians said "Wait a minute! We were here too. A few of us even got killed." So they changed the name to Little Big Horn Battlefield, and added a bunch of stuff about the Indians.A US soldier's gravestone, white.

Fittingly, the Indians got red gravestones.They have a series of monuments listing all the tribes who fought here. One of the tribes not represented was the Crows, whose territory it was. They had decided, a few years before, that fighting the White Man was not a paying proposition in the long run.

As a reward, the National Park Service took some of their reservation land to make the Park...

And lastly, a cemetery for the horses.

Glacier & Waterton National Parks

Glacier National Park - a beautiful place, in Montana just up against the Canadian border. And a must-see, since the glaciers have been disappearing for the last several decades; theyy figure they'll be all gone by 2026 or thereabout.One of the must-dos is to see exotic wildlife. After looking all over for bears, guess where we find them?These mountain goats appeared about 100 yards along the trail gfrom the visitors' center - remarkable, since they are said to prefer cliffs that jut up at about 80 degrees. If the cliffs were only 70 degrees the wolves could climb them too.

Junior following right along.

The only other time we saw mountain goats - those two little white specks.

The most common form of wildlife that we saw - not a Kaibab or chipmunk or something western and exotic, but the plain old Gray Squirrel just like in our yard back home.

You can still see glaciers,

But the only glacier you can still get close to without a big hike is up the Hidden Lake Trail to Jackson Glacier.e Hidden Lake Trail to Jackson Glacier.
And up, and up...
And up

To the first of three hidden (from the bottom) lakes... You can see, where the sky isn't reflected off the water, that the lake is actually milky white, due to all the rock dust ground off the rock by the water.

...to the flat place where the glacier used to be. This is a natural formation, not a paved patio...

This, 30 years ago, was completely a glacier,
but now all that's left is a bit of snow on the far side, and a small lake full of ice.
One of the bonuses at National Parks is the rangers. This guy is a retired geology teacher in Seattle Public Schools, who's been spending every summer here for ab out 30 years. He knew everthing I could think of to ask him.



At one of the camgrounds, the Alphorn Trio has been playing a couple of times a week. Gorgeous place for an outdoor concert. You play an Alphorn much like a valveless French Horn; they are a bit harder to play, but nice and loud for carrying over the mountains.

Our rig, at a local campground. The bear is made of small metal plates; very lifelike. Next, we left Glacier, past this mesa ,which is sacred to the Indians,

To Canada and the Waterton Glaciers National Park. It adjoins Glacier, and collectively they are called the International Peace Park. Canada and the US have been at peace so long it hardly seems necessary to make a special deal of it; but its a nice thing anyway. For one thing, it's easier for US and Canadian park people to coordinate wildlife and conservation issues.

Note the hotel, on the headland in the lower center.

Climbing up to view the overlook, we came across this Canadian playing his bagpipes, looking over the vista above. Seemed just like out of Brigadoon.

The Prince of Wales Hotel
High tea at the Prince of Wales. Prince Albert China.
I remarked to the people at the campsite next to us that "We went over to the Prince of Wales Hotel, but the Prince wasn't there." He came back with "Good job, too! He was a right rotter. He went off and married an American woman!" This was The Duke of Windsor, of course, who abdicated the Throne when they wouldn't let him marry Wallace Warfield Simpson, who was [gasp shudder] divorced, as well as being a commoner and an American.

Fire hydrants...