Wary of Change : Montana Cherishes Its Open Spaces

If you wanted to search for the heart of the West, you should probably start in Montana. Vast, empty and remote, Montana in spirit is still of the frontier, doggedly clinging to the belief that small is good, development is risky and wide, open space is essential to one’s mental well-being.

It’s not just the abundance of Stetsons and rodeos and rifles mounted in the rear window of pickups that speak of the West here. Nor the understanding that a man who trespasses on another’s land stands a good chance of being shot. It’s more an unspoken, unseen thing, an awareness that the “unique life style” the Montanans refer to so often is a state of mind as well as being. Montana is where you drink beer out of the bottle, say “good morning” to strangers and drive half way across the universe to visit a neighbor.

Isolated Splendor

Travel down any road, from the naked, unpeopled Great Plains in the East, where individual ranches cover a million acres and more, to the rough-hewn valleys of the Rockies in the West, where children ride 70 miles to school and community life revolves around the local saloon, and you are struck by the isolated splendor and sense of space that Montanans seek to protect with single-minded fervor.

There are only 800,000 of these people, living in a state as large as Japan, and each has a fifth of a square mile to himself, 11 times more room than the average American has. Montanans have only two congressmen, one for the east and one for the west, and only nine cities with populations over 10,000. The largest, Billings, has 63,000 inhabitants. In Helena, where the temperature once plunged to 70 below zero, the main street is named Last Chance Gulch and the Legislature meets in a copper-domed capital for three months, once every other year.

Helena, tucked in the mountains overlooking the Prickly Pear Valley, is among the quietest and most isolated of state capitals, affording the two-term governor, Ted Schwinden, the luxury of shunning bodyguards and driving himself around in a 1982, four-wheel AMC Eagle.

Home Phone Listed

Schwinden, a farmer from Wolf Point, has his home phone listed in the Helena directory, and if you call, likely as not, he or his wife, Jean, will answer. Most Montanans don’t find that the least bit unusual.

“Why shouldn’t I be able to ring Ted up if I want?” one rancher said, referring to the governor, as almost everyone does, by his first name, not his title.

There are, in fact, no social strata to speak of in Montana, except that descendants of the first settlers have a leg up on “honyockers,” the transplants from out-of-state. Wealth and professional achievement don’t count for much on their own, and pretentiousness is simply not part of the Montana character. When a patron in Anaconda’s fanciest restaurant asked the elderly waitress if she could serve his shrimp cocktail with his entree, she replied with matronly firmness, “No. You gotta eat first things first.”

That’s the Montana way. Get your priorities straight. And the people’s first priority is safeguarding their life style, at whatever cost to economic growth. Despite the presence of Glacier National Park and some of the West’s most magnificent scenery, Montana’s spending on tourism promotion ranks 42nd nationally and its efforts to attract industry have been casual enough to lead some skeptics to conclude that the state has an anti-business attitude. That protectionism, combined with the state’s geographical isolation, has given Montana the mysterious quality of the Great Beyond to most Americans.

“When I told friends I was going to Montana, they just looked at me blankly,” said Nancy Rogers, a New York City executive who spent a week’s vacation here in August. “They didn’t know any questions to ask. They didn’t even ask why.” John Wilson, the state director of travel, added: “Even in the West, we’re largely undiscovered. People just aren’t familiar with what Montana has. We aren’t on the list of places they even consider going for vacation.”

But the economic recession, which has deepened in the mountain states while the nation as a whole recovered, is forcing Montanans to ask themselves if they don’t have to sacrifice something of their way of life in order to promote growth.

Average Income Dropped

Last year Montana’s per capita income growth was the lowest in the nation, and the backbone of its economy--agriculture, lumber, copper, coal, oil--shows no sign of early revival. Montanans’ income has fallen 14% below the national average and 9% below that of next-door Idaho and Wyoming; their population is growing at half the rate of their neighbors’. In Dillon, a downtown business street sold to a Missoula couple this month managed to fetch only $3,114.

“Montana has shown little understanding of where the modern high-tech industries of the West are going,” said Michael Malone, dean of graduate students at Montana State University in Bozeman. “On top of that, the state seems to look on higher education as just another expense.

“We’re victims of the old mind-set, that any corporation heading for Montana must be bent on rape. Montana is the last of the Old West and we’re in crisis and we’re not doing the most obvious things that have to be done. We’re trying to preserve a unique life style and trying to put our feet into the future at the same time. So far we really haven’t come to terms with the conflict this creates.”

Progress Versus Status Quo

Everywhere in Montana these days, in the cities of Great Falls and Butte and Billings, and the little towns such as Roundup, Two Dot and Wisdom, one hears similar uncertainty expressed as people grapple with the challenges of progress versus status quo, the temptations of growth or a desirable way of life, the merit of saving the old or building the new. Many feel the solution is to bring in more tourists and hope they go back home once the season ends.

Wisdom (population 100) is a mile-high ranching community on the shoulder of the Rockies, 12 miles from the battlefield in Big Hole Valley where many of the Nez Perce Indians, led by Chief Joseph (“I will fight no more forever”) were massacred by Col. John Gibbon’s forces 109 years ago. Wisdom’s name honors Thomas Jefferson for securing the Louisiana Purchase, of which Montana was a part.

The town’s saloon (open 6:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day except Christmas) is owned by Daryll and Kay Jacobson and is as much a community center as it is a drinking spot.

A few cowboys were leaning against the bar the other Sunday, watching the fuzzy TV reception of the Chicago Bears-Cleveland Browns game. At a rear table, near the wood-burning stove and a sleeping Chesapeake Bay retriever named Charlie, Jacobson and Jerry Rutledge were sipping a couple of Coors Lights and discussing Montana’s fortunes. Sooner or later, every conversation in the Antlers Saloon gets around to the old weathered schoolhouse up the road and whether to restore it or tear it down and build another.

More Tourism Needed

“All you need is some more tourism to get the economy moving,” said Rutledge, whose ancestors settled here 100 years ago and who now runs the Spokane Ranch with his father. “Spend some money and advertise our natural resources. That’s a lot better than bringing in industry and all that stuff from the East.”

“God damn right it is, Jerry. You get industry in and we start losing our life. I mean, where else can you be this free?”

“As I see it, industry’d just turn us into another Wisconsin or Minnesota, and who wants that? If you want to keep the better things for generations to come, you gotta preserve them now. Course, everyone wants to make a livin’ and it’s hard to talk rationally about these things when you can see some quick money.”

“Yeah, there’s no simple solution to this development thing. It’s just like that schoolhouse,” Jacobson said.

“Personally, I’d rather see them pick some amount of money and fix it up. Christ, Harvard University’s got buildings 200 years old and they’re still standing. It just pisses me, you get someone who hasn’t lived here but maybe 50 years, and he comes in and wants to take it down. That school was good enough for me and my father. It oughta be good enough for the kids today. I mean, those bricks were made right here in Wisdom. That place is our heritage. You don’t tear down your heritage.”

“Damn, why didn’t you get up at the meeting and say it just like that?” Jacobson asked. “That makes a lot of sense to me. I love that old school too, just like I love these mountains here.”

“Oh, hell, Daryll, you know me at those meetings. I don’t say nothing. Nobody’d listen to me anyway.”

Montanans’ protectionism has its roots, historians believe, in the era when the Anaconda Co. used to run the state like a colony. The Company, as it was called, owned all the major daily newspapers but one in the state until 1959 and was so defensive about opposition voices that letters to the editor were barred. It operated a boozy, 24-hour-a-day hospitality suite in Helena when the Legislature was in session, and no one contested an Anaconda official’s boast in the 1940s that the company had lost only one governorship since statehood.

Anaconda’s fortunes began declining in the 1960s, at the same time America’s cities were being ravaged by decay, racial riots and anti-war protests.

Suddenly all that Montanans had considered a curse--fierce winters, great distances to their commercial markets, geographical isolation--seemed to become a blessing. They sensed that things were changing forever and they reached out to save what was special to them. A new populist constitution, emphasizing environmental and consumer-protection values, was passed in 1972 (the only copy of the first proposed constitution had been lost en route to the printer in St. Louis in 1866), and an anti-business mood flourished.

The Anaconda Co. was sold in 1977 to the Atlantic Richfield Co. With copper prices sagging, ARCO announced in 1980, after a four-month strike, that it was closing the smelter, claiming that modernizing the plant to meet federal and state pollution and safety standards would cost $400 million. The mine at Butte--”the richest hill on earth”--became a dormant wound on the Montana landscape. Other energy companies rushed to exploit the state’s riches, including the nation’s largest coal reserves, but Montana refused to relax its environmental standards in favor of quick cash.

Reliance on Minerals

“True, Montana relies heavily on agriculture and minerals and when these resources are in trouble, the whole state’s in trouble,” said James Murry, executive secretary of the Montana AFL-CIO. “And Main Street, Montana, is in more trouble today than at any time since the Depression.

“But this talk about Montana having a bad climate for business is hogwash. Sure, we’re in favor of economic development; sure, we’re in favor of industry. We’re not trying to build a wall around the state. All we’re saying to industries that come is, don’t treat us like a Third World nation. Don’t treat us like South Africa does its blacks. We’re just saying, if you come in, you have to be responsible, you have to be willing to contribute the way the rest of us have.”

Montanans pay a price for this expression of independence and for protecting the open spaces they cherish so dearly. The state’s six four-year universities turn out more graduates than there are jobs, and the young drift away.

In Livingston, where Burlington Northern has closed the rail repair shop, once the largest between Minneapolis and Seattle, the downtown commercial district feels old and weary and seems bereft of youthful faces. In Billings, a sign on the door of the Trailways terminal says that the southbound bus leaves daily at 8 a.m. for Cody, Shoshoni, Casper, Denver “and connections to all the major U.S. cities,” as though implying that those cities were in a different nation.

Professional Sacrifices

Novelist Tom McGuane, who moved here 19 years ago from California, has pondered often what he has had to sacrifice professionally by living in Montana, but the balance sheet always comes up in favor of staying. His Raw Deal Ranch is 17 miles from the nearest store, 500 miles from the closest major-league baseball team. From his living-room window, he and his wife, Laurie, can see their youngest child, Annie, at play each noon outside the little white-stucco school across the dirt road.

McGuane’s rancher-neighbors note with pleasure that he wrote the screenplay for “Missouri Breaks,” a Western starring Marlon Brando, though they find it a bit incomprehensible that he writes books (“92 in the Shade,” “Nobody’s Angel”) for a living. “But what do you do ?” they’ll ask. McGuane, who also raises cutting horses and has tried rodeoing, actually felt a sense of relief sometime back when he broke his thumb in a roping contest. His hands then at least looked like those of a working man, not of a writer.

“I’ll tell you what I miss the most,” McGuane said. “It’s to walk down a crowded street or sit on a park bench and just watch all the stuff that goes on. Rubbing elbows, I miss that. I get back to New York for a book party or whatever and it’s exciting to catch up on the literary world, but after an hour or two, that’s all you need. You’ve heard it all. You realize so many people back there have created their own little empires around ‘the me’ and they have to work hard to protect them. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen out here.

“So familially, I haven’t sacrificed much. If you think about it, how many friends can you really attend to--two or three at a time? Sure, we don’t have films, theaters or all the things of the city. But people who have those things don’t have the time to read 30 books a month, which Laurie and I both do. That seems a pretty close call to me.”

Ardent Fisherman

There’s a saying in these parts that God doesn’t detract from a man’s life the hours spent fishing, and if that’s the case, McGuane will live well into old age. Every afternoon, after a morning of writing, he slips into rubber hip boots and walks the 50 yards from his door to the West Boulder River to match wits with the wily trout.

To the west of McGuane’s 1,000-acre ranch, beyond the Absaroka and Madison ranges and past the Missouri River, which Meriwether Lewis and William Clark followed in 1805 in their expedition to the Pacific Ocean, lie the remnants of Montana’s Golden Age. They are ghost towns now, their boardwalks crumbling, their miners long since departed, and only in the stirrings of the imagination does one hear a piano’s tune drift out from behind the doors of boarded-up saloons.

Bannack, the first territorial capital, seems to have been abandoned only yesterday, its empty, upright buildings somehow conveying an impression that surely old people must still be living out their days in second-floor bedrooms.

After a year in Bannack, the seat of government was moved in 1865 to Virginia City, but that, too, is a town of the past, kept alive primarily by tourists. In Nevada City three wooden passenger cars from the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific stand idle on a siding, but the town has no residents and the rail line ceased operations years ago.

Butte’s population has dropped from 100,000 at the turn of the century to 36,000 today, and what John Gunther called “the toughest, bawdiest town in America” is, by local standards, a tame and civilized place. In a piece published posthumously by Esquire magazine in 1970, Jack Kerouac wrote of this one-time boom town: “I walked the sloping streets in super below-zero weather . . . and saw that everybody in Butte was drunk. . . . What characters there were: old prospectors, gamblers, whores, miners, Indians, cowboys, tobacco-chewing businessmen!”

1,750 Jobs Lost

Before the Butte mine closed, the copper was shipped the 30 miles to Anaconda for processing. “When the hill went down here in ‘80, we lost 1,750 jobs,” said Jerry Hansen, the last smelter to work in Anaconda, whose population has dwindled to 8,000. All that remains of the smelter now is the stack, towering 581 feet high over Anaconda, a monument the townspeople fought to keep as a reminder that if booms can die, they can also be reborn. Hansen talks of reviving the town with renewed mining or tourism, but the thought has occurred to him that perhaps he is living in the Bannack of tomorrow.

Gov. Schwinden is the first to admit there is no quick fix for the “convulsive period” Montana is passing through, brought on in large part because the state is a captive of high freight costs to distant markets and of slow-growth industries that failed to modernize. He opposes the imposition of a sales tax, supports retention of a hefty severance tax on coal (currently at 30%) and shudders at the implications of a proposition on the November ballot that would abolish all property taxes. That grass-roots anti-tax drive was started by four elderly women in the Bitterroot Valley who said they were tired of paying to educate others’ children.

Optimistic About Economy

Given Montana’s natural wealth, Schwinden says he is confident that the state eventually will recover economically, just as the Northeast states did for other reasons earlier this decade, and thinks Montana’s open spaces will have increasing appeal as the Sun Belt fills up and coastal cities become more unlivable. “Of course, that would be a mixed blessing for us,” he noted. Among the things that trouble him is the lack of understanding he finds in the nation’s power centers for the depth of the mountain states’ problems.

“If we don’t act to recognize the implications of what is happening in Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas and other rural states, it is going to have urban implications that I think could be pretty serious from our society’s point of view,” said Schwinden, a conservative Democrat.

“Not only doesn’t Washington and urban America realize what is happening, I believe they really think it doesn’t make any difference. I remember when Gov. (Terry) Branstad (of Iowa) and I met with a bunch of people from the Administration back in Washington, in the winter of ‘85, and I asked the undersecretary of Treasury or whoever it was, ‘We lost about 200 banks last year. How many do you think will close this year?’ He shrugged and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe 300 or so.’ ”

‘Very Frustrating’

“It was a very frustrating meeting. Branstad got angry and he finally stomped out and threw a chair. I’ve done a lot of editorial board meetings--not trying to argue price supports--just telling editors that there is a world out there that is part of America and it’s undergoing very severe stress. Quite frankly, though, the feeling I get in the editorial towers of New York is that if things are OK with Citibank and Morgan Guaranty, then things are OK with the financial structure of America. I don’t believe that for a minute.”

But whatever the problems, Montanans are not about to surrender to conformity and city slickers with schemes and development at any cost. They still have their big, clear sky and their land is still wide and handsome. They figure their Western heritage gives them the right to live as they please, even to create myths that must be lived up to, for in every true Montanan, there is something that says: “I am a last holdout.”