Distinctly Montana Magazine

4 5 Y E A R S O F H A U N T E D W A T E R S 1 6 fundamentally because people with money have come in, sometimes year-round. The winter has turned into a recreational season with snowmobiles and cross-coun- try skiing. So, you have a different culture coming in. YOUR FATHER REFERRED TO THE BLACKFOOT RIVER AS "OUR FAMILY RIVER." DO YOU FEEL EQUALLY PROPRIETARY ABOUT IT? It has changed for the better and the worse. When A River Runs Through It was published, the Blackfoot River was so impoverished as a fishery that state authorities didn't even bother to do a fish count there. But the attention to the river especially from the movie of A River has resulted in so much use and overuse that it isn't the river of my youth. It's come back as a fishery, however, thanks to contributions mostly generated by the movie and an enormous amount of work by local groups and individuals. LET'S SWITCH GEARS. DID YOU CONSCIOUSLY START OUT TO FOLLOW IN YOUR UNCLE PAUL'S FOOTSTEPS BY BECOMING A NEWSPAPER REPORTER? No. I did so unconsciously. Paul is a shadow person in my life. He has shaped my life with- out me being fully conscious of it. When I got into the news business, I discovered that it was exactly where I should be. I'm sure that was partly due to Paul's example. But he was a negative example, too. He had a wonderful job in Helena covering the state capital for the Helena Indepen- dent-Record. His unfortunate personal behavior resulted in him leaving the IR and moving to Chicago to take a job that his brother had arranged for him. WHY DID YOU REVEAL SO MANY DETAILS ABOUT PAUL'S MURDER? There's so much nonsense around about his murder that it's almost a conspiracy cult. The facts are not pretty, but they are facts. I've collect- ed documents about it for decades and talked to people who knew him. There were all these bizarre theories about his death, one being that Paul had been working undercover as an intelligence agent for the University of Chicago reporting on immorality and crime in the university neighborhood. He was an investigative reporter and it all caught up with him one night and he was murdered for his incisive investiga- tion. That's hogwash. First of all, Paul wasn't an investigative reporter, no more than any journalist. Anybody who reports news conducts investigations. Investigative journalism is a specialization. Secondly, he was a first-year employee in the U of C public relations department. He wasn't some- body with deep knowledge of Chicago and the complex workings of vice and crime in the city. It seemed to me that setting out honest-to-God facts about his death from witness reports, official proceed- ings, statements made at the time, remembrances by those who knew him, the final conclusion of the police—was an important exercise. JOHN MACLEAN stories run through it. " IN THE EPILOGUE TO HIS NEW BOOK, MACLEAN WRITES, "I DO NOT FISH ALONE ON THE BLACKFOOT RIVER, EVER, EVEN THOUGH NOW I MOSTLY FISH IT ALONE. WHEN I'M ON THE WATER, AND ESPECIALLY WHEN NO ONE ELSE IS AROUND, I FEEL THE PRESENCE OF THE GENERATIONS OF MY FAMILY WHOSE

• Cover