Distinctly Montana Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.distinctlymontana.com/i/1533286
54 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S P R I N G 2 0 2 5 A month later, Cromwell Dixon sat at the controls of his plane at the Interstate Fair in Spokane, Washington. He took off and flew. No one present could have been unaware of his histo- ry-making flight a couple of states over. They wondered what else he was capable of. They wondered what they would see him do today. He flew for two minutes, and he exalted, as he always did, at the feeling of flying. He trembled and thrilled, as any of his con- temporaneous pilots did, at the perversity of being a being out of its element, a large land mammal zipping through the air like a gull. He must have known, too, that one wrong move and it could all be over. But it wasn't his move that did it. It was a gust of wind. Suddenly, he lost control. He pitched into a rocky ravine. His last words, according to those present (although who could have been able to hear it over the sound of his propellors, the wind, the gasps of the crowd?), were "Here I go!" Flight ceased; Dixon came back to earth. Dixon was buried in Columbus, Ohio. The next month in Macon, Georgia, Dixon's contemporary Eugene Ely, his own place in history secure and after eight consecutive days of exhibition flights, promised those present a demonstration of a highly dangerous move called the "spiral dip." He failed to complete it and the plane fell into a dive. He jumped at the last second, but it wasn't enough to save him. Amelia Earhart, herself a tragic victim of a love of flying, once said, "You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky." Today, thousands of people sail right over Montana in jumbo jets, much too high to be able to discern anything so small as the shadow of a tree. By Earhart's metric, most folks haven't really seen any of Mon- tana's trees. But Dixon, Ely, and their ilk did. They saw Montana's trees cresting her mountains, straddling her Divide, casting long shadows on places on which no foot had ever landed. Each of them had their shining moment when, Icarus-like, they had hung in the sky.