Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • F A L L 2 0 2 1 70 HOW MANY OF YOU ARE FORTU- NATE ENOUGH TO HAVE A YOUNGER BROTHER? I have endured that good fortune for most of my life, and though I will readily admit that as a grown man (only slightly young- er than me, an even older old man), he has some redeeming traits. He makes a fair canoe camping buddy, for one, and is passable to pleasant company on the road. But as a teenag- er, he was a real SOB. Loathe as I am to incriminate my own brother, I'll tell you why. All through the 1950's and 1960's, our family used to make an excursion out of searching for Yogo Sapphires. We would take Dad's old GMC pickup and light out for the sapphire digs in the Little Belt Mountains. We would camp on Yogo Creek, or, when most of the snows had melted later in the summer, on the middle fork of the Judith River, where there was still plenty of water for washing the digs. By the 1960's we even took a motorcycle, then we could explore the mountain trails far and wide around the camp. The whole family would dig into the mountain along the Yogo dyke, digging in the sand and rocks that had eroded out of the dyke over millions of years previous. Then we would pack our pay dirt back to the creek to be screened and washed. In the pro- cess, we would look for sapphires. It was hard work for kids, but mostly it was an excuse to get away for all of us. In the process of washing the gravel, I got good at spot- ting the little blue stones. I would pick the glistening stones out of the wet gravel and sand with tweezers. A day's worth of digging, washing, sifting, and screening could net a cup full of the tiny stones. Very rarely, one would be big enough to attract the attention of Dad. Over the almost 20 years of summers digging, we probably only found a half dozen or so that were large enough to send to a gemologist or stone cutter to be made into jewelry, but I did pick up a whole lot of little stones, watch-jewel quality, enough to fill a whole coffee can. I hid that can behind the fine silverware we nev- er used, beside another six coffee cans full of silver dimes that I got from my newspaper route. OLD BROKE RANCHER BY GARY SHELTON $ $ $ $ M Y F O R T U N E , D E N I E D M Y F O R T U N E , D E N I E D

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