The Think Tank

The plan was for Mom, myself, Maure and Grandpa Rich to leave town as early on Saturday as possible. The overall agenda was to drive to Helena, where wewould meet up with our family and have Grandpa fill us in on a lot of family history along the way.

Our target was to leave by noon, a goal we knew was not truly attainable and was merely a rough estimate, as Maure had to work until at least that latein order to finish payroll for the week we would be gone. The original draft called for us to have everything ready to leave by the time Mo was done withwork, but as usual that is not how it worked out, even though Mo wasn’t done with her work until nearly three O’clock.

We left Portland before sundown which is a record for us, and at first we felt it might be a harbinger of bad news. However, upon closer examination werealized the only real difference was that we had aimed to leave six hours earlier than usual, so we were right on our normal schedule.

As usual we had left town on empty stomachs and an equally empty gas tank, so after filling we up we stopped to eat pasties that Mom, Mo and Grandpa hadmade prior to our trip. Mom chose our location, Starvation Creek State Park, located just a little ways past Bonneville Dam. To all outward appearancesit is little more than a rest area adjacent to the trailhead for the Starvation Creek Trail, but as we found out it holds quite a dandy little surprise. Perhaps two hundred feet up the trail that curls around behind the restrooms, we found a plaque explaining the story behind the park’s unusual name. Justprior to Christmas of (1887) a passenger train bound for Portland plowed headlong into a snowdrift twenty-five feet high, leaving the train in a bad stateand more than a hundred souls stranded in the snow. When the train didn’t show up in Portland, an alert went out and people were mobilized to find andbring aid to the train and its passengers. Local people were told of the missing locomotive, and they joined in the search, but it was still a couple ofdays before anyone found the train.

The passengers and crew raided the cargo and found a great deal of food bound for Christmas dinner, which they cooked over coal liberated from the engine. Eventually they ran out of coal and had to burn wood, which was harder to come by and didn’t last as long. After the rescuers arrived and news spread ofthe disaster, local families cooked food and brought it to the stranded and the workers laboring to right the train, and anyone who wanted to help dig thetrain out was paid a wage $3.00 a day. The train was eventually freed and the track uncovered, allowing all 100 plus people to roll into Portland onJanuary 7th, late and cold, but alive nonetheless. Despite the rumors, no one actually starved to death, though the epitaph stuck and the area was namedStarvation Creek.
   Past the historical marker, according to Mom, there was a waterfall. I wandered up the trail a bit, and sure enough, she was right. Hidden behind a treeuntil you reach the last quarter of the trail, sits a rather significant waterfall. Nestled between the bank of the creek on our left, and the majesty ofthe falls on our right, we felt we could hardly find a better spot to eat our pastie dinner.

With our bellies full, our gas tank topped off and the sun well on its way to meeting the horizon, we hit the road once again bound for Missoula. We drovethrough the night, talking and laughing as we often do on roadtrips, telling stories, sharing jokes and hardly noticing the dark miles slipping past ourwindows.

By the time the sun rose again on Sunday morning, we were in Missoula. We called our cousin Christy so she and her family could meet us forbreakfast. Christy, her husband Dean and their three girls, Ariel, Emily and Abby did, and as is always the case it was as if no time had passed since thelast we had all been together. Breakfast came and went, but the visiting continued until after eleven O’clock, when we all reluctantly agreed that it wastime to head out. They had planned on meeting us in Helena at Don and Shirley’s house and go with us to the Gates of the Mountain, but their boat developedproblems, so they weren’t able to come along. We made plans to meet up with them again on our way back, and said our goodbyes.
   Our next stop was 2320 Wylie Street. That’s the house that Grandpa Rich lived in with his grandparents, from 1945-1946. That was pretty neat. Hetold us several stories about his stay there, including the times (note the plural) that he drove through the garage and into the irrigation ditch at theback.

Mom and Maure remembered visiting there when they were little girls, though the house bore little resemblance to
how it had been when Grandpa was a boy. Back then, there were only a handful of houses on the street, and the property encompassed what is now four separate lots. We found the current owner ofthe home, a fellow named Joe, around back, and after explaining our connection to the property he very graciously allowed us to come into his home and lookaround. He had done a significant amount of remodeling, from updating the kitchen and bathrooms to installing a new heating system and hiring a thermostatic mixing valve servicing. According to Grandpa the interior was very much different, and very much improved from what ithad been when he lived there. Grandpa and Joe spoke for about half an hour, discussing the house and the upgrades and renovations that each of them hadmade to the home over the years. They both seemed to enjoy the experience quite a bit, and I know that Mom, Maure and myself found it very neat to able togo back to that house with Grandpa.

After that we set out again for Helena, detouring along the way to visit Phillipsburg. Once upon a time Phillipsburg was a booming mining town, though nowthe mine is empty and the town’s primary source of interest is as a historical tourist attraction. Most of the buildings are original, dating to the mid-and late-1880’s. One of the sweeter attractions is the Sweet Shop, a very sizable store packed to the gunnels with every kind of confection imaginable. Grandpa had never been there before, and owning a pretty healthy sweet tooth, he was a little overwhelmed by the selection. We bought about a ton of sugar,
spent several hours roaming around the town, then we were
 
 off again for Helena. We stopped for gas in Drummund, and I found something I never knewexisted: a used cow lot. Apparently they sell cattle. I thought that was pretty funny.

When we arrived in Helena, Uncle Don told us that Dirk, his son, had called to see if Grandpa and I would like to go see the local baseball team play. Weboth agreed readily. The game was due to start in less than five minutes, so we quickly changed into fresher clothes (we’d been traveling for nearlytwentyfour hours now), and the three of us headed out to meet Dirk at the baseball field. Mom and Maure opted to stay behind and help Aunt Shirley withthe dinner preparations.

The game was lively and tight-paced for the first four or five innings, but then the Helena Brewers came unglued and the Orem Owls walked off with a13-8 victory. Spending the day with Uncle Don, Dirk, and Grandpa was a very fun and I’m glad that I got that opportunity.

We got back to find that Don’s other son, Devin, had arrived at the house, as well as his two youngest children, Mariah and Ryan, whom I have never had thepleasure of meeting before. Mariah informed me very quickly that she was almost seven and that her birthday was on September 2nd. Ryan was a little lesstalkative and hid behind his dad. Shortly thereafter I was surprised to see Christy, Dean and the girls drive by hauling their boat! Apparently, after weleft them in Missoula this morning, Dean had worked on the boat and believed he had the problem fixed, so they called while Grandpa, Don, Dirk and I wereat the ballgame to say they were coming down afterall. That was a very nice surprise indeed.

Dinner was lovely, consisting of hamburgers and all the appropriate trimmings for the main course, followed up by homemade blueberry pie, which we got toeat nice and warm right out of the oven. Aunt Shirley was apologetic for the pie not having quite setup entirely, but Christy and I pointed that if ithad setup entirely, it wouldn’t have been warm! I’ll take a nice, fresh, warm berry pie any day of the week.

The night moved on as you might expect, everyone laughing and sharing stories and catching up on all the news since our last visit. Eventually thewitching hour was upon us, and it was time for bed. We had to get rested up, if our plan to go to the Gates of the Mountain tomorrow was going to come tofruition.
 
   Day three started late for me. Apparently I was more tired than I had thought I was, because getting out of bed proved to be moredifficult than I had figured it would be. I chalked it up to being a Monday. By the time I got up and going, Uncle Don was hard at work preparing the boatfor it’s first trip of the season. The morning was spent alternating between embattled political conversations and the preparations for our trip to theGates of the Mountain. I also spent a long while with the girls working out all the details of the family relations: how Grandpa Rich could be both theiruncle and my grandfather, and how the heck everyone could be a cousin of some various rank. We finally got all the relations squared andshortly thereafter got under way ourselves, about three in the afternoon. Soon enough we were out on the water and thankfully, both boats were intip-top condition, which was a real spirit lifting experience for Christy and Dean as they had spent many months and lots of money trying to fix apersistent lack-of-power problem on their boat. We were a little worried about it when they moved away from the dock very slowly, but quickly they enough
they poured on the gas and roared away up the river like a scalded cat.

The Gates of the Mountain are a series of steep, jagged cliffs lining the Missouri river and are located smack dab in the middleof the Gates of the Mountain Wilderness area perhaps forty minutes outside Helena. They were named by Lewis and Clark on their trip west because, as youapproach them from the east it appears that the river is blocked by an impenetrable wall. As you continue up the river and around a gentle bend the canyon
 walls appear to open up like a gigantic gate, thus earning them their moniker. The area was also made famous in 1949 when the Man Gulch fire rippedthrough the area, the most savage and deadly fire of its time. Thirteen smokejumpers were overrun by the fire and were killed as a result. The story ischronicled in a wonderful book entitled Young Men and Fire by Norm McLean. Grandpa Rich and Uncle Don both lived in or around Helena at the time,and they said the fires could clearly be seen dancing their way across the hills, some twenty miles away as the crow flies.

There were no forest fires while were there, thankfully, though it was plenty hot enough. The sky was dotted here and there with fluffy whiteclouds, the temperatures were in the mid-to-high nineties and the river and canyon was gorgeous – literally. We cruised up the Missouri and landed at themain picnic area, where he had a delicious feast that Aunt Shirley had made that morning. After that, Grandpa was feeling a little tired and took a shortbreather on one of the benches, but pretty soon he was up and rarin’ to go again. We all hustled back to the boats and settled in for an afternoon of funon the river. Mom and I spent a lot of time scanning the cliff faces for mountain goats, but there were none to be found. We did find a few deer andquite a number pelicans, giving me my closest look at the large avatars in the wild. The girls spent most of the afternoon inner tubing, though judging bythe look on Abby’s face in a few of the pictures, she seemed to think her dad was going a little too fast. I’m sure he was just making up for lost time.
   Grandpa, who served in the Navy during World War II, said he hadn’t been on a boat for many years and was very happy to get achance to exercise his sea legs again.

We all spent the afternoon revealing in the natural, rugged beauty of the landscape before us, ranging from desolate rockoutcroppings, to lush swatches of forest, then into gentle, rolling prairie land – all of it dissected by the quiet splendor of the Missouri.
   As is always the case, the day went by too quickly and eventually it was time to head back for home. The moon snuck up on usfrom behind a hill and oversaw our efforts to trailer the boats and get everything cinched down and ready for the trip home. Christy, Dean and the girlshad to head back to Missoula since Dean had to report for work the next morning, so we all said our goodbyes and made plans to link up with them again onour way back to Portland.

We got back to the house shortly before sunset and enjoyed a nice evening in the back yard, savoring some good beers, wines andcheeses, then it was off to bed. Tomorrow we would be on the road to Butte, another town where Grandpa Rich lived as a young man.
    The morning came without much fanfare and as usual, we got moving later than we planned. We ate breakfast and then I went aboutsetting up Don’s new computer, which I had built for him and brought along with us. That took a couple of hours. When Uncle Don and I came upstairs, wefound that his oldest son, Dan, had arrived back from a business trip to Santa Cruz, California. We spent several hours visiting with him and gettingcaught up on how life as treating he and his daughter, Jodie. Both seemed to be doing very well.

Eventually the time came to say our goodbyes. We had hoped that they would be able to accompany us to Butte and the Little BigHorn valley, but Uncle Don felt he had too many things to do at home.

Butte is about a hours drive down I-15 which put us there around 3:00PM. Our first stop was at an overlook just outside of town,which afforded us a view of both Our Lady of the Rockies, and Butte proper. Our Lady of the Rockies is a ninety foot statue of the Virgin Mary that sitsatop the Continental Divide, at an elevation of 8,000 feet. She was built as a tribute ” to all women of every creed and nationality that expressesthanksgiving for the loving memories and actions of women ” .

From the viewpoint we were also afforded a good view of the mines on the north end of town, which gave birth to the city and the”Copper Kings” that lived there. According to Grandpa, the hill the mines sit on was about two thousand feet higher when he lived here as a boy. He saidthey were reported to be a mile high and a mile deep.
   After taking our pictures and getting our fill of the scenery, we moved on down the hill and into the city, where Grandpa directedus to the house he lived in with his Grandmother when he was just a wee lad of one and a half years old. Later on, when he was about ten, they moved acrossthe street and he lived there until he joined the Navy, during his senior year of highschool.

He also took us to many of the houses of his friends, which gave us the chance to see where he andhis pals spent most of their growing up years. Most of the houses were still standing, though a few of them were either missing or had been replaced bynewer homes. That was awfully neat for us, and Grandpa seemed to be pleased to be back in the old neighborhood.

Our next stop was Longfellow Elementary School, where Grandpa attended classes until fifth grade, when the school suffered a fireand was out of commission for a number of years. Today the school is more than twice it’s previous size. We could see the line of demarcation on thebricks where the new construction butted up against the old, allowing us to gain a very good idea of what it looked like when Grandpa Rich was a schoolboy.
He regaled us with many stories from his younger years, all of which was captured on video thanks to the camcorder a friend loaned us for this trip.
    After Longfellow School we decided it was time to find a place to stay for the night. We eventually landed at the Capri Motel inUptown, one of the oldest sections of town located right at the base of the Berkley Pit and the “richest hill in the world.” Some years ago the entire city of Butte was declared a national historic area, so there are an amazing number of buildings still
standing that date back to the very early days of city’s history. Our motel was smack dab in the middle of the oldest part, butted up against the base ofthe mines and affording us easy access to the old downtown area.

After we got ourselves settled in our room and cooled down a little, we decided to get something to eat. A friend of ours toldus that if we ever made it to Butte again, we needed to eat a porkchop sandwich from John’s Porkchop House. Her advise was well worthwhile. All four ofus ordered the porkchop sandwich, and I’m here to say that was a fine bit of dinner.

With our bellies full again, we loaded up into the van again and set out for more sightseeing. Grandpa took us to EmersonElementary School, which is where Grandpa when after the fire at Longfellow. This school has been completely replaced, leaving no indication orconstruction of its predecessor, though it was built in the same place. Since it wasn’t the actual building Grandpa had gone to school in, it wasn’t quiteand neat as Longfellow, but it was still awfully impressive to be there. Again, he filled us in on all kinds of stories from his youth, and again wemanaged to get them all on video, safely preserved for posterity.
   After that, we moved up the education ladder and found ourselves standing outside Butte Highschool. Again, there had been asignificant amount of additions to the school, but fortunately most of the original building was still there. The old part of the school

was at the backof what is now the highschool, but the old entrance was still there and Grandpa said it hadn’t changed a bit since his days there, save the addition of thefootball field. Since school was not in session, the whole place was locked behind a chainlink fence, and that fence presented me with an unsatisfactoryphoto opportunity. I looked up and down the street and was gratified to see a complete lack of police officers, so I quickly scaled the barrier and got acouple of good shots of the old entrance. My incursion went completely unnoticed, and quickly enough I was back on the right side of things.

The sun was now low on the horizon and lighting the sky up in a dazzling display of reds and oranges. We decided we needed toget up on the big hill by the mines and get some photos. We piled back into the van and aimed for the high ground, eventually finding our way to the top.Unfortunately we’d missed most of the sunset, but what was left was still gorgeous, and while we were wandering around up on the hill, we saw a signadvertising the Speculator Fire Memorial. We had never heard of any such thing, but Grandpa said he had a vague memory of a horrible fire in one of themines when he was small boy. Intrigued, we followed the signs and sooner or later wound up at the advertised memorial. According to the plaques andhistorical markers, a fire was set while a damage control team was inspecting a broken cable. The fire quickly raged out of the control, burning timbers,collapsing mines and trapping more than 200 men below the surface. Over the course of the next fifty hours, people labored around the clock to bring outsurvivors, though they were few and far between. But, as with most disasters, small pockets of people below the 2400 hundred foot mark managed to holethemselves up and eventually were found and pulled back up to the surface. Sadly though, most of the people trapped in the mine died, 168 souls.
It was the worst metal mining disaster ever, according to the markers.

By now the sun was long gone and the night had firmly established itself. We headed back for our motel room and some much neededrest.
Along the way we came across a small tavern called the “Pisser’s Palace”! We thought the name was so funny that we had to take a picture of it.
The next day we stopped briefly to see to the house where Grandpa Rich’s grandparents were living when he got out of the Navy. He said it waspretty much as he remembered it, but there wasn’t much of a photo opportunity here: the owners had grown a very high hedge that obscured most of the house. Still, we got to see it and Grandpa filled us in on a few more stories.

After that, we went up the street to Mount Moriah Cemetery, where Grandpa’s great grandmother and his great uncle were buried. Hedidn’t remember exactly where they were in the cemetery, so we stopped at the office to ask. The lady inside said she could not help us because she wasgoing to lunch. We explained that we were there from Portland, Oregon, and that Grandpa was looking for some family, but she held firm that she couldn’tlook the information up before lunch. We prowled around on our own for a little while, guiding ourselves by Grandpa’s memory, but we didn’t find the graves. So we decided to go see a few other things and come back.
   Our next stop was the “Copper King Mansion”. The Copper Kings were the first and wealthiest of the folks to start miningoperations on Butte Hill, and William Anderson Clark was one of the wealthiest “kings” of them all. In fact, the tour guide said that his monthly incomewas roughly seventeen million dollars a month! And remember, this was all prior to 1925. Our tour guide told us that Clark was listed as one of the “100men who owned the world”. Aside from mining, he owned many of the state’s railroads, power companies, newspapers and of course mining operations, and thatwas just his domestic holdings.
   His mansion in Butte is reportedly one of his smaller estates, and it was used more or less as a vacation home. Still, it had ninefireplaces, four bedrooms, three bathrooms (one of which was bigger than my room at home), a billiards room, dining room, living room, servants quarters, afull size ballroom and a private chapel on the third floor. All the woodwork was handcrafted by a master carpenter from San Francisco and took four yearsto complete, mostly utilizing white oak and mahogany. The entryway staircase leading to the upstairs was made from white oak and had square inserts in thebalustrades depicting various birds, one from each of the nations recognized in 1888. A section of this staircase was reported to have been removed and puton display at the World’s Fair in New York. On the landing of the same staircase, there are a pair of 13 foot high stained glass windows which were alsohandcrafted and are said to have taken the whole four years the house was under construction to complete. Records do not exist as to who made the windows,though the technique if very reminiscent to Tiffany, although that company did not come into existence until 1915. Much of the trim work throughout thehouse was handcrafted from specially made plaster molds, which were burned when the home was completed to ensure that the pattern would be unique. Theceilings of each room were hand painted fresco’s.

In addition to the Butte mansion, Clark also had homes in New York, Paris, Washington, D.C, California and several others, all ofwhich were supposed to have been far grander than the one we saw. I guess at 17 million a month, he could afford it.
    After Clark’s death in 1925, the mansion fell into disarray and went through several different owners, including the Catholicchurch, who used the building as a convent. After the nun’s were given new living quarters, the only thing the new owners found in the house was a lot ofdust and two giant picture frames in the basement. Since then, a great deal of the furnishings have been purchased and returned to the mansion, but a fairamount of what is now on display are pieces from the same time and geographic area, but not authentic to the mansion. In reading the brochure we pickedup, Maure learned that one of the bedrooms upstairs contained a bed that had once belonged to Club Foot George, who’s gravesite we all saw in 2002 outsideVirginia City, on our way to Yellowstone. He was hung by Vigilantes in 1864, along with five other “road agents”, or highway robbers.

   The tour guide gave us a lot of history lessons, not only on the house and the various people who had lived it in and restored it,but also on Clark himself. Most of the stories our guide told us about Clark made him seem like a decent kind of guy, but according to most of the books wehave read, Clark – and the rest of the Copper Kings for that matter – were rather despicable people who spent a lot more time ensuring that their mines andother businesses made money than they did ensuring the safety of their workers or even the lively hood of the city. The whole city of Meaderville forexample, which at one time was a suburb of Butte and home to many, was destroyed when the decision was made to expand the Berkley Pit.

After the tour of the mansion, we stopped briefly at the courthouse to see a capstan from the USS Main, which was sunk in at thebeginning of the Spanish American War. Then we were off for the World Museum of Mining, adjacent to the Montana School of Mining. Along the way we ranacross the church that Grandpa attended as a boy, so of course I had to stop and take a picture.
   The Mining Museum was pretty neat. Over the years, as original buildings from Butte’s past became to unsafe to live in or werescheduled to be destroyed, the Museum or some of it contributors would buy the buildings and transport them to the Mining Museum, where they were arrangedinto a
reasonable reproduction of what a town of the period might look like. Likewise, most of the tools and furnishings in them were also vintage and fromButte. I spent most of my time here and unfortunately did not get into the mining equipment that they had on display before we had to leave. Mom did get anumber of good photo’s from this area though.

After that, we ate lunch at some picnic benches out in front of the Museum. Appropriately enough we ate more of the pasties thatwe had made for the trip. For those of you who might not know the history of the pastie, they came to this country with English and Cornish miners andquickly gained popularity among the locals, since they could so easily be transported down into the mines and eaten like a sandwich. With the heartystew-like filling folded up inside a pastry pocket, the pasties proved a very good meal for men hard at work a mile below the surface, or in our case,sitting outside a monument dedicated to them.

We felt we had seen everything we wanted to see in Butte except for the graves of Grandpa’s great-grandmother and -uncle.
 Weloaded ourselves back into the van and started down Butte Hill for the last time of this trip, bound for the Mount Moriah Cemetery once again. Along theway, we detoured briefly to check out the Dumas Brothel Museum, but it was closed. We were able to take pictures of the outside, which was decorated withstatues of the “Ladies of the Night” being pursued by and cavorting with townsmen.

When we got back to the cemetery, we went back to office only to find that the lady who works there had left for the day. We werea little peeved at the whole situation, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it, so we set back to looking for the gravestones ourselves. Grandpabelieved they were on or near to a corner created by two of the roads in the graveyard. We started a grid search and had only been looking for aboutfifteen minutes when
we found them, right on the corner as Grandpa had remembered. We wrote down the location and I took a GPS reading just to be sure wecould find them again.

With all of our tasks completed, we were ready to hit the highway again, this time aimed for Billings and Custer’s battlefield.

The next morning we packed all of our stuff back into the van and hopped on I-90 headed east. Several years ago we had planned tostop and see Pompey’s Pillar, but had run out of time, so this year we decided to deviate slightly from our plan to head straight for the Little Big HornValley and make a quick stop at Pompey’s Pillar.
   The rock formation was named by William Clark in 1806 when his expedition passed through the area, on the trek back east afterhaving successfully traveled to Astoria and the Pacific Ocean. He chose the name in honor of Sacagawea’s son, Pompey.

The most notable feature of the large rock upthrust is that he left his name and the date he was there carved in the massivesandstone formation, along with droves of others just like it. According to local legend, in 1882 a railroad supervisor found the inscription in the rockand installed bars over Clark’s signature, preserving its integrity until 1952 when it was encased in the protective glass where it now resides.

It didn’t take long, but it was an awfully memorable moment, to know that we were standing in the very same spot as William Clark,gazing at the same piece of rock as he had 199 years ago, nearly to the day.

After the trek down the stairs and a potty break, we ponied up once again and got back on the road. We backtracked the 25 milesor so to I-90 and were once again bound for Custer’s Battlefield.
   We arrived around one O’clock in the afternoon, ready and rarin’ to go. Mom, Mo and myself had seen part of the battlefield in2002, but we had arrived late and did not get to explore much more than the Reno-Benteen hilltop hold-out. Grandpa had never been to the monument before.

Once we got our maps and our plans in order, we set out along the self-guided tour. A great deal of care has been exercised inhow the museum is laid out, allowing visitors to follow walking paths and read placards that show them in quite exquisite detail where all of the variousbattles and most memorable moments took place. We took pictures of all the important features and I have made my own virtual tour for those of you notfortunate enough to have visited the battlefield yourselves.

Prior to the melee that ended with Custer’s famous Last Stand, a huge group of Cheyenne, Lakota (Sioux) and Arapaho left thereservation that President Grant had established for them and required that they stay upon, setting out across the plains following their ages old nomadictraditions. Two Moons, a Lakota chief, is quoted as saying “We went over the divide and camped in the valley of the Little Big Horn. Everybody thought:now we are out of the white man’s country. He can live there, and we can live here.” This sentiment was echoed by many of the powerful chiefs, includingLame White Man and Crazy Horse. When the tribes were not on the reservation at the appointed time, the Army was sent out to find them and force them toreturn.

On the morning of June 25th, 1876, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s advance scouts crested the Wolf Mountains to the east ofthe Little Big Horn Valley, where they spotted a heard of ponies belonging to the Cheyenne, Lakota and Arapaho village. At this point they knew the villagewas large, but had no idea how large. They were still operating under the assumption that it held less than six hundred braves and perhaps two thousandindividuals. In fact, the village held nearly 8,000 people and 1,500-2,000 warriors.
   Certain that he and his men had been spotted, Custer decided to abandon the reconnaissance mission originally planned and engagethat day, without the help of the other two regiments en route. He split his regiment into three groups hoping to attack the village before the Indianscould organize and escape, sending three Company’s (roughly 175 men) with Major Marcus Reno to advance south and attack from the woods on the east of theof the village, while Custer and roughly 225 men swung north in an attempt to flank the village and come up on the backside. Captain Frederick Benteentook the final three Company’s, plus the pack train and its 130 guards, to push through the center. Had this battle plan worked as intended, it would havecaught the Indians in a three pronged pincer.
   As we all learned in our history classes, that is not how the battle panned out. Reno and his men were first to attack, andquickly realized they were tremendously outnumbered and were forced to retreat up the steep cliffs, losing a fair share men in the process. Benteen nevermade it to his appointed location, as he was forced to help Reno defend the hilltop. The Reno-Benteen defenders took heavy casualties, fighting fiercelyall through the day of the 25th, all through the night and most of the 26th, until the Indians learned that General Terry and Colonel Gibbon wereapproaching with reinforcements. Unsure of whether or not the Indians were going to return, Reno and Benteen’s men spent a sleepless night until the otherregiments arrived on June 27th.
   Meanwhile, Custer continued his push around the northern flank. He became aware that Reno and Benteen were tied down in a vicious
battle, and made the decision to split his group again. He took approximately forty men and continued to push north, moving through Deep Ravine andskirmishing near what is now the National Cemetery, while ordering the remainder of the men to split up and follow Captain Miles Keogh and Lieutenant JamesCalhoun in an attempt to form a second three pronged attack. Calhoun and Keogh were routed quickly, leaving Custer and his men surrounded at Last StandHill, where they shot their horses to use as barriers and fought until the last man was killed.

The rolling plains are littered with memorial markers, indicating where bodies were found on the battlefields: white marble for
US soldiers, maroon for Indian chiefs and promonent commanders. At times the gravestones are practically on top of each other, most notibly at Calhoun Hill
and Last Stand Hill, while other parts of the battlefield are peppered as far as the eye can see with fallen warriors. 

Walking where these men walked, seeing the depressions where they fought and died, feeling the same sun on our backs as they didwas an experience I have been fortunate enough to endure twice now, and I am grateful for every second of it. As Grandpa said, the air was alive with thespirits of the men who died here, both American and Indian. It was an honor that none of us will soon forget.

One thing that we saw this time that I did not remember from our last visit was the Indian Memorial. That was pretty interesting,although we didn’t spend a whole lot of time there since by then we were all getting pretty sunburned and starting to think that it was time to get undercover. We strolled through the Visitor Center and Museum, but I at least didn’t find it anywhere near as interesting or informative as the battlegroundsthemselves.

All told we were in the park about six hours. We left and started our trek south, ending up in Sheridan where we ate dinner andbunked down for the night. This was the most expensive hotel of our trip so far, but it was also one of the neatest. The room itself was not so special,but there was a great courtyard area in the middle with a tri-layered fountain and some very impressive flower gardens, adorned by several glass-toppedtables with umbrellas and patio chairs. We made our prerequisite trip to Wal-Mart to restock our supply of water and breakfast materials, then it was offto bed.

Tomorrow we would be traveling Highway 14 to Cody, Wyoming, and onto Helena via Yellowstone National Park.

We got an early start the next day and quickly found ourselves cruising down Highway 14 towards Cody and the park. Three years ago
we had been through the Big Horn Valley basin in the middle of the night on our return trip from South Dakota, and even in the dark we knew it would bespectacular in the daylight. This year we finally got to see it, and it was well worth the wait.

The Big Horn Valley is lined with steep, colorful rock upheavals, shot through with fissures and layers, testament to millions ofyears of volcanic violence. It’s impossible to describe the incredible array of colors and shapes, ranging from small, spear-like thrusts to building sizedboulders balanced on top of smaller rocks. In some places the rocks and dirt were as red as a fire engine, others a deep orange, others still ranged fromyellow to bright, bleached white – and most everything in between. I will have to let the pictures speak for themselves.
    Along the way we found a sign advertising the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracks Site, five miles off highway 14. I have always held afascination with dinosaurs, so I was eager to see what the place was all about. Everyone agreed, and we set off up the rough, washboard track. What wefound was a nice little clearing with two well covered picnic areas, a bathroom and a sizable parking lot. A school bus was parked at the far end of thelot, waiting to retrieve a load full of youngsters down looking at the tracks.

Before we took the little detour, we had been wanting to find a place to stop and eat lunch, so this worked out perfectly. We allhopped out of the van in to the 100+ degree afternoon and set out across the desolate plains of Wyoming, following a wooden walkway to see where dinosaurshad walked 166 million years before us.
   According to the information we read along the way, 170 million years ago most of Wyoming and the surrounding area was under whatwas called the Sundance Sea. Until the discovery of these fossilized footprints, scientists did not know that the waters had receded for a period of time,only to return again later. The cause is not known, but the evidence is plain. The track site was once the muddy, algae covered swampland on the fringesof the depleted Sundance Sea. Here the dinosaurs walked across the mud probably searching the marshes, or maybe even the sea, for food. All of the tracksbelonged to bipedal, three toed animals. The footprints ranged in size from roughly three inches wide to eight inches wide. Scientists are unsure of theexact species as there are very few fossil records of western US bipedal dinosaurs to compare the footprints too.
   At first we didn’t see anything in the rippled, sand colored flats, but then Grandpa saw one and we all hurried over to look. Sure enough, there in the rock beneath our feet, was a three-toed imprint akin to something you might find in the movie Jurassic Park. We looked aroundfor several minutes, spotting a half dozen or so among the pits and ripples and fissures. After a while the sun bouncing off the rock flats began to takesits toll, so we moved back toward the shade of the picnic area. Just as we were arriving, the busload of kids got up and took all of their belongings backto their bus, leaving the picnic benches all to us. We got out some of our pasties and thawed them in the sun, which only took a few minutes, and had anice lunch out in the middle of the Wyoming desert. Grandpa didn’t feel like braving the heat any more, but Mom and I wanted a few more minutes down atthe tracks site, so the two of us headed back. When we got down there again we met a couple from Washington State who happened to be geologists, and theyhelped us find not only several more footprints, but also the actual trails the animals had made. According to the signs there were around 125 individualtrails in the exposed part of the site. We only found two our three, but it was still very exciting. As was mentioned earlier, no one knows exactly whitekind of dinosaurs these were, but whatever made the larger (8 inch) tracks had a stride just a little longer than mine, which means it was a pretty healthysized beastie.

What a fantastic experience that was. We could have spent all day there, but time was slipping away and Grandpa and Maure weremelting, so all of us reluctantly said goodbye to the dinosaurs and got back on the road to Cody.

Shortly there after, the van began to vibrate just slightly. The longer we drove, the worse the vibration felt. Prior to leavingPortland, we had to replace a bad U-joint which was causing a similar shimmy, but this problem felt more like a cylinder wasn’t firing. We continued on tothe original Cody Lodge and stopped for a while to let it cool down in preparation of some diagnostic work. Meanwhile, we snooped around the lodge andlooked at the giftshop.

When I got the engine cover off and started looking around, I didn’t notice anything immediately out of place. I checked all thesparkplug wires to make sure that hadn’t come loose, which they hadn’t. Then I popped the distributor cap off and found a great deal of corrosion on thecontacts and rotor. It didn’t seem likely that would be the cause of our problem, but I set about cleaning them up anyway. While I was doing that, Momstarted poking around and noticed that one of the sparkplug wires on the back cylinder was touching the exhaust manifold. She asked if that was how it wasit was supposed to be, and I said no, but that it probably wouldn’t have caused our problem. I was wrong.

Upon closer examination, I found that that a small plastic clip and broken and allowed that sparkplug wire to hang down next tothe manifold, where it would swing over and touch it while we were driving. Eventually the insulation surrounding the wire melted and allowed the spark toground to the manifold, thus killing that cylinder and creating our problem. Chalk one up for Sue. I covered the affected area with electrical tape, thentaped the wire up so it could not fall back down against the manifold, and buttoned everything back up, confident that our car troubles were now behind us,which did indeed prove to be the case.
    Now that everything was back in order, we were once again off toward Yellowstone National Park. Our original plan had been tozip through the park, hopefully catch sight of a moose or bear, since neither of those animals had cooperated in years previous, and continue on toRobber’s Roost, something we had seen in 2002 and thought Grandpa would enjoy. But it was becoming apparent that because of the slow traffic weencountered on highway 14, the detour for the dinosaur tracks and the car trouble, we wouldn’t get out of Yellowstone until after dark. We stopped nearthe Fishing Bridge for some dinner, then quickly stopped again for a pretty spectacular lighting storm. Right in the middle of the storm, a double rainbowpopped into view, surrounded by huge bolts of lightning. Unfortunately, by the time I got the camera ready, the lightning bolts had both disappeared, so I wascheated out of my picture.

The sun was long since below the horizon and only the last vestiges of light remained. We continued on down the road toward thenorthern entrance near Gardner, bound once again for Helena. We had been keeping a keen eye for moose, since after two trips to Yellowstone and one toGlacier, we still did not have a picture of a big, bullwinkle moose to hang on the wall. We commented that it was along this road that we had seen ouronly moose of our previous trip to Yellowstone, a young female in a small pond. No sooner had we said that, then we came upon the same pond and damned ifthere wasn’t a female moose grazing on the grasses! So far as we could tell, it may have been the same moose. I tried to take a picture of her, but itwas so dark that she wouldn’t hold still long enough for the exposure time I needed.
   Three years and still no bullwinkle for me. Oh well, maybe next time.

We drove through the night and arrived in Helena about 3:30 in the morning. We slept hard and got started late Saturday morning.
After breakfast, Don and I started working on the van. We all felt that it would be better to set out on a thousand mile journey with spark plug wiresthat weren’t compromised, so I installed the new wires and a new distributor cap. Don and I also installed a condensator, which is a device that issupposed to increase the cars fuel efficiency 10-15 percent. I would explain how it operates, but I’m not entirely sure myself. All I know is that UncleDon put one on his van and was so impressed he bought them for his other cars also. All said, the repairs and upgrade took a couple of hours.

The afternoon was waning and the road was calling, but the four of us were hesitant to leave, as we always are when it’s time tosay goodbye to family. We visited and drank some beers in the back yard for a while instead. Devin, his son Justin and Dirk all came to see us off. Finally, about 4:30 in the afternoon we relented to the inevitable and loaded up the van. We said our goodbye’s and I love you’s, and hit the road. Looking at the clock, it was only one hour shy of exactly one week since we set out.

We’d fit so much into those hours that it was hard to believe it had only been seven days: We’d shopped at the biggest candystore we ever saw, explored the houses Grandpa had lived in as a boy, taken a boat ride up the Missouri, visited the World Museum of Mining, toured a 200hundred year old mansion, paid homage to my great-great-great-grandmother and –uncle, witnessed William Clark’s signature at Pompey’s Pillar, roamed amongthe spirits of slain Indians and Cavalrymen at Custer’s Battlefield, followed in a dinosaur’s footsteps, briefly toured Yellowstone National Park, and
we got to catch up with our family as well – all one week.

We didn’t think that was too bad.