I Loved To Teach

In looking up Fort Belknap on Google, I found the following interesting information:
The Gros Ventre call themselves “AH-AH-NE-NIN” meaning the White Clay People. They believed that they were made from the White Clay that is found along the river bottoms in Gros Ventre country. Early French fur trappers and traders named this tribe “Gros Ventre” because other tribes in the area referred to them as “The Water Falls People.” The sign for water fall is the passing of the hands over the stomach and the French though the Indians were saying big belly so they called them “Gros Ventre” – meaning “big belly” in the French language.

The Assiniboine refer to themselves as “Nakota” meaning the generous ones. This tribe split with the Yanktonai Sioux in the seventeenth century and migrated westward onto the northern plains with their allies, the Plains Cree. “Assiniboine” is a Chippewa word meaning, “One who cooks with stones.” The Assiniboine are located on both the Fort Belknap and Fort Peck Indian Reservations in Montanan and on several reserves in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

While we were in the canyon, we could also see the Bear Paw Mountains, and going to and from Walter and Leona’s farm, we often took a route (there were not real roads—when one path got rough, they simply forged a new one nearby on the prairie) that took us over the top of Snake Butte.  There were cravasses in the stone (they had built a railroad to transport stone to create nearby Fort Peck Dam, which was then the largest earthen faced dam in the world, and some of the workers were housed in the basement of the home Margaret grew up in and also on the upper floor where Walter put in a toilet, small sink and a gas double-burner for cooking.  When that house was ready for their occupancy, it was completely paid for—a trait the Goldsmiths carried with them throughout life.  They never bought a car they didn’t pay cash for.  Two cars would have been unimaginable.  They rarely traveled apart.

On a very hot July day, I lay on my stomach atop a cravass and took pictures of snow still lying down there.  Those pictures couldn’t be developed—I was a poor photographer.  Also, we gathered what they called sarvis berries (or June berriies), which in Indiana and Kentucky were sometimes called service berries and some choke cherries, very bitter until sweetened.  Leona made jelly from the former and syrup for pancakes from the latter.  These berries were abundant near the natural spring at the base of the butte where we stopped to eat our lunch at a picnic table someone had placed there.  Once Margaret and I, reliving the past, got off the trail and found ourselves facing a herd of buffalo, which told us we were trespassing on Indian land, and we quickly retraced the path to the right “road.”

Incidentally, Snake Butte was not so called because of the abundance of snakes, although I have seen rattlesnakes there and near there.  It got its name from the face of the butte that, a bit like Mount Rushmore, seems to be a carving of huge snakes hung there for posterity.

I recall hearing my brother-in-law, Rev. Jack Atkinson of Elk City, Oklahoma, tell of climbing a mountain with a friend he had known in college.  Jack was graduated from that small Evangelical United Brethren college in Le Mars, Iowa, where he met Virginia Goldsmith, whom he married in that Harlem, Montana, EUB church after her freshman year.  I’ll ask him to email me about that adventure.  Margaret and I spent the summer in Harlem after our marriage in the beautiful EUB church on the campus of Indiana Central University (now the University of Indianapolis).  At the evening services that summer, they allowed us to be their guest musicians—Margaret at the organ and me at the piano.  I had played for the Indiana Central College Quartet (also sang baritone) on tours at school, and sometimes played for revivals to bring in a little extra cash.

I got pretty good at “showing off” on that old piano while Margaret kept the melodies solid for the congregational singing.  One Sunday evening after church, Leona remarked (Leona was remarkably plain spoken, and I never knew she loved me until she was dying), “They just really love that, don’t they.  I can just hardly stand it myself.”
During that summer, Margaret (I called her Margie then) and I went to church camp for a week.  We slept in a tent we set up in a small, open-at-one-end shed, placing the tent opening to face the inner wall to discourage any bear that might happen by.  We had taken about ten blankets and a sleeping bag, and because the ground was so cold, each night we put more blankets under us until finally we had only the sleeping bag (opened up) on top.  The last night we slept in the warmth of the bishop’s cabin (it was a Methodist camp in Hell’s Canyon, a terrific misnomer) with the “dignitaries” who had driven three hours from Harlem to pick us up.  There was a new bridge on the route that cut off hours of travel which still went far out of the way in order to cross a river in a deep canyon.

I always regretted the abuse to young Carol Belt, who gave up her seat in the Breitmeier’s large van so that we could continue our raucous visit with the couple who later bought the farm and became life-long friends.  How Rudy loved to hear me show off on that old upright piano!  Anyway, they told Carol that we wanted her to ride the bus back, and she readily agreed, thinking we meant that we’d like to get to know her better (as indeed we would have) and said when she saw us get into the van, “Oh, now I see why they wanted me to ride the bus.”  Carol was a lovely girl with at least some Indian blood.  I think she won a beauty contest, probably in Havre—they didn’t have such things in Harlem.

I wanted to add this about Leona’s manner.  Once when she was visiting us, I made the toast, and it had cooled before I got it buttered.  When I apologized, she said that she could hardly stand to have the butter melted.  I had carefully been sure it was melted for twenty years, and now she would tell me this?  She rarely signed her letters to us.  They often just stopped.  Or she wrote, “Us at Harlem.”  When she wrote, “You know how much we love you,”  I told Margaret, “We’d better go right away.  Your mother is dying.”  On her deathbed at the hospital, she asked me to kiss her.  The nurse had said we could go back home because she was certainly not dying.  Virginia decided to go home by way of Indiana, and I convinced her to save a few bucks and get a round-trip ticket.  Those were cheaper, maybe still are.  We had a pleasant trip on the express train to Chicago (had to go to Malta to catch it, though it sailed through Harlem), and when we got back to Greenfield, there was news that Leona had gone to her reward.

The three of us turned around, boarded another train in Indy, and slowly–painfully slowly–hurried back to Harlem.
As a drama director, I had collected costume items, and when cancer treatments caused her to lose her hair, I had mailed her a gray wig, which she wore.  But I had found a much lovelier one later, and I took it along now.  When we saw her at the funeral home in Chinook, the county seat, they had the older wig on back-to-front, and when the funeral director was called out, I turned it around.  Walter had had some brain surgery in his eighties, and began to experience what they called “sundowners”, although his death certificate said “Alzheimer’s”.

On the day of her funeral, which was at the church (United Methodist by then), we arrived early, and the funeral director walked in on me as I lifted her off the pillow and switched wigs.  He was startled when he saw me, but when I finished he remarked that the new wig was much nicer.  I had worked at the funeral home in the late fifties and sixties, and was comfortable doing this. On the way back from the cemetery, Walter asked me when we were going to have the funeral.  They died only a few months apart after sharing a room at the downtown nursing home which was right next to the Skogmos store they had been partners in and across from city hall, built during his term as mayor.  Leona walked the single block every week to Senior Citizens’ lunch day to join friends and play cards in a renovated store building next to a church that met in the building that had once been their Gambles store, built with their own hands.  We had decided she had to have assisted living when she needed another chair to get out of the chair she was sitting in.  She only protested once as we took her in, and later said, “They keep us so clean.”

Leona was an awful driver!  Once when Margaret told her she had driven right through a stop sign, she said, “It’s alright, they know it’s me.”  We could just imagine walkers diving for the side of the road because they “knew it was her.”  When someone called Virginia and said that we had to get her out of that car before she killed someone, we told the man at the home to go get the keys from her.  I think she knew this was coming, because she just handed them over to him.

When we cleaned out the house (we filled a dumpster) we found half-dissolved lemon drops on the carpet beside the bed where she had just spit them out before going to sleep, and when Margaret opened the bottom drawer of her dresser, she found where she had saved her hair as it was falling out.  As Walter was already in the nursing home, she was dying alone.  She had had chemo treatments twice before when she was younger, and so strong they hardly made her ill, and she insisted that, at the age of ninety, they do that again.  They said that, although she was full of cancer, it was the chemo that caused her death.  She had lived a remarkable life and had served as president of every woman’s club in town again and again.  At the age of eighty-nine she was the largest contributor to the county fair and took home the largest amount of prize money.  She entered about every category with quilts, rugs, woman’s garment fashioned from a man’s suit, fruit, vegetables, canned goods, pies, (she once won a new range) jams, jellies, etc.  Hardly able to get out of bed, she wondered if she should put out a garden—just couldn’t imagine life without one, I believe.