Distinctly Montana Magazine

ROBERT RATH At Custer we made a side trip south to pay our respects to General Custer and Sitting Bull on the battlefield of Little Big Horn. I don't suppose there is an American who doesn't carry Remington's painting of the last defense of the center column of the 7th Cavalry in his head. I removed my hat in memory of brave men, and Charley sa- luted in his own manner but I thought with great respect. The whole of eastern Montana and the western Dakotas is memory-marked as Injun country, and the memories are not very old either. Some years ago my neighbor was Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who wrote Heavenly Discourse. He was a very old man when I knew him, but as a young lieutenant just out of military academy he had been as- signed to General Miles and he served in the Chief Joseph campaign. His memory of it was very clear and very sad. He said it was one of the most gallant retreats in all his- tory. Chief Joseph and the Nez Percés with squaws and children, dogs, and all their possessions, retreated under heavy fire for over a thousand miles, trying to escape to Canada. Wood said they fought every step of the way against odds until finally they were surrounded by the cavalry under General Miles and the large part of them wiped out. It was the saddest duty he had ever performed, Wood said, and he had never lost his respect for the fight- ing qualities of the Nez Percés. "If they hadn't had their families with them we could never have caught them," he said. "And if we had been evenly matched in men and weapons, we couldn't have beaten them. They were men," he said, "Real men." John Steinbeck's , which had been published in 1939, won I found I did not rush through the towns to get them over with. I even found things I had to buy to make myself linger. In Billings I bought a hat, in Livingston a jacket, in Butte a rifle I didn't particularly need, a Remington bolt- action .22, secondhand but in beautiful condition. Then I found a telescope sight I had to have, and waited while it was mounted on the rifle, and in the process got to know everyone in the shop and any customers who entered. With the gun in a vise and the bolt out, we zeroed the new sight on a chimney three blocks away, and later when I got to shooting the little gun I found no reason to change it. I spent a good part of a morning at this, mostly because I wanted to stay. But I see that, as usual, love is inarticulate. Montana has a spell on me. It is grandeur and warmth. If Montana had a seacoast, or if I could live away from the sea, I would instantly move there and petition for admis- sion. Of all the states it is my favorite and my love. 42 the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Just prior in 1960, a depressed and ailing Steinbeck decided he was out of touch with America and took his French poodle on a drive cross-country in a pickup truck. The resulting book became one of readers' favorites and is reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Copyright © 1962 by John Steinbeck; renewed 1990 by Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV. by John Steinbeck. Confident and robust, is a comprehensive biography of late novelist and poet Richard Brautigan, author of and among many others. Brautigan was shrouded in enigma, erratic and unpredict- able in his habits and presentation. But his career was formidable, an inspiration to young writers like William Hjortsberg trying to get their start. Hjortsberg is now the au- thor of nine books and four completed films. DISTINCTLY MONTANA • SPRING 2012 Grapes of Wrath T ravels with Charlie, In Search of America, Jubilee Hitchhiker A Confederate General from T routfishing in America Big Sur , O I I F ALL THE ST A TAND MY LO S MY F VOVE. ATE R TES I

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