Distinctly Montana Magazine

58 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 4 - 2 5 it was released, the poster proclaimed it "The Most Important Motion Picture Ever Produced." Box office receipts are, disappointingly, apparently unavailable. The studios, chastened, did not make Westerns of that size and grandeur again for decades. An easier path was chosen. Rather than long, difficult location shoots, Cal- ifornia or a sound stage sufficed. When Indians were called for in the Westerns that followed, they were largely played by Mexicans, Jews, or face-painted whites until the 1970s. The Western, in general, was relegated to a B-movie genre, at least for a while. Even so, there were plenty who saw it in Montana. Cy Young, the cowboy lucky enough to be asked to ride with Miss Churchill, said, "I remember that everyone in the whole Flathead Reservation went to Missoula to see it. Stayed there for three weeks." Another one of the range hands who worked on the National Bison Range remem- bered another aspect of the production a little differently than Walsh did in Every Man In His Time. Contrary to Walsh's assertion that there were no missing and no injuries, "Ike" Melton told an interviewer: "They dug a root-cellar there, just a little low one about this deep. They covered it over with heavy plank, then they made a little slit about this wide in the front there. A fellow sat down in there and laid in there with his camera shooting right at them. They'd run them right straight over him, and some of them jumped right over, you see. One calf run his leg in there, and when he went on over, he broke it. They killed him, or he died of something." Someone, Melton said, had called Washington, D.C., and told them about the stam- pede and its bison calf victim. Frank Rose was the warden of the National Bison Range at the time, a rough-and-tumble cowboy who played dumb about the injury. He was, according to man with whom he worked at the time, not well-liked by all. Per Melton: "Frank said, 'Oh no, we didn't have no loss,' he says. 'Everything went off quiet, and everything was nice.'" The agent gave him enough rope to hang himself, saying, "'Frank, you says you didn't stampede the buffalo, or nothing [got] hurt?'" "'No, everything's fine. Never hurt a thing.' So then they up and told him what hap- pened, and told him, by god, 'You just gather your stuff and get out of here in 24 hours. Take your personal stuff and get gone,'" Melton told interviewer Ernest Kraft. Kraft, in turn, said that "[Frank Rose's] getting so now he can talk about it a little bit, but for years, he couldn't even talk about it, I guess, without just going plumb ape—scream- ing, and hollering." Eventually, Frank Rose agreed to an interview in which he told Kraft he couldn't remember exactly why or when he vacated that job. Perhaps, if we're searching around for a moral, it's that everyone, it seems, from Walsh to Morrison/Wayne to the poor SOB Frank Rose, gets to reinvent their history now and then. * * * Today, The Big Trail is rightly regarded as a landmark epic, somehow both ahead of and behind its time, and the making of the film is now farther behind us than most of the passages on the Oregon Trail were from the film's original release. In so many ways, the film is as resonant today as it ever was, if not more so. It is also, as with all historical documents, a bit melancholy. Melancholy came to define the late career of The Big Trail's star. Like so many of the still-living actors of his generation, he had transitioned from big-budget Hollywood films to 30-second television commercials. Marion would have to be reinvented once more, this time as a brand's pitch man. The client, suitably enough, was the Great Western Bank of California. To celebrate their centennial, they had settled on an ad Openings subject to change. For a comprehensive list of our current openings, please visit NMHcare.org Flanked by golden wheat fields, tree-lined streets, and the vibrant outdoors, the Northern Montana Health Care campus sits as a testament to the importance of health care in rural communities. Northern Montana Hospital is a not-for-profit, 25-bed Critical Access Hospital at the center of a comprehensive system of medical and health care professionals who are dedicated to meeting the needs of patients from across Montana's Hi-Line and beyond. Physical Therapist $20,000 Sign-On Bonus Radiologic Technologist $20,000 Sign-On Bonus Respiratory Therapist $20,000 Sign-On Bonus RN - ER/CCU $25,000 Sign-On Bonus RN - LDRP $25,000 Sign-On Bonus Equal Opportunity Employer/Veterans/Disabled

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