Bless the Archivists

Research stories from a Montana work-in-progress

Nearly all of the men and boys have removed their hats, but the ladies’ hats remain pinned in place. The boys in the front row, closest to the fire, squint and lean back against a wave of smoke. In black and white, it’s hard to distinguish the single tongue of flame visible at the image’s lowest edge. The smoke could almost be water damage, a defect in the film, ectoplasm captured at a seance. Without the photographer’s writing scrawled across the top of the negative, we wouldn’t know what the crowd gathered to watch burn in the street.

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I’m off by a week on my weekly posting goal, so it seems like a good time to share more about my focused, everyday work. I started a low-residency creative writing MFA in the summer and so far, I’m receiving the ass-kicking that I needed to get realistic about a writing life. I’ve even stopped fighting the usefulness of the morning hours.

I made some valiant efforts at cultivating a creative practice on my own before this. I launched into a book-length project in 2020 in a burst of inspiration (conveniently coincident with a global pandemic and a move to a ridiculously cheap apartment) and found that I liked the grueling, silly, challenging work of a writer. Before that, I always worried that it was more the title, or the romantic ideal, “writer,” that I wanted. Once I had produced a solid initial draft of a whole book, I felt I’d earned the word. I assumed that I would continue on this way, productive in the laundry room, fully actualized in my writing life.

I realized quickly that I’d hit a ceiling in what I could achieve by myself. It isn’t that an MFA is the only path to becoming a “real writer” (in fact, the contrary is often true), but I found myself in need of the structure, mentorship, skill and network-building that I’m receiving now. It’s only through that structure that I’ve been able to approach the large task before me in my current book project, which expands on primary source writing from my great-great-grandfather and his daughter. Their stories from 19th and early 20th century Montana are big, like the state itself, and my challenge at this phase is to identify the scenes and moments that most intersect my own life, and which most shaped their world, one of rapid change, settlement, and Progress.

Zelma, my great grandmother, was a high school senior in Lewistown, MT when a photographer captured this book burning. She wrote about it in her diary—one of the primary sources I’m using in this project—and again for a regional history, In The Shadow Of The Twin Sisters. In the diary entry, she wrote, “World War I with Germany made an end to the German study. A mob came to the school building and demanded all those books to be burned on school lawn before our eyes.” The photo depicts the same events, but does not take place on the school lawn. Were there multiple book burnings? Such are the rabbit holes I have dug in the early phases of this research.

I was also curious about (and frustrated by) my ancestor’s casual, removed tone regarding this incident. It obviously left an impression on her, but what was the environment like before and after this event? Where did our family land politically on the issue of book burning and anti-German sentiment? Further research led me to other accounts, which documented the mob in Lewistown escalating to the point of a near-lynching of a local German-American citizen.

One of Zelma’s fellow school-girls is quoted in a contemporary Montana state history textbook, “When my sister and I came to the scene, they were calling for the ropes.” This led me to readings on the Montana Sedition Law and other broad-stroke crackdowns on free speech and expression—particularly targeted at immigrants—during World War I in Montana. The state’s harsh law, which penalized “disloyal, profane, violent, scurrilous, contemptuous, slurring or abusive” speech about the United States became the model for the federal Sedition Act of 1918 passed a few months later.

So far, my favorite character from this period of repression is Earnest V. Starr, imprisoned for 3 years of his recommended 10-20 year sentence for refusing to kiss the American flag.

He reportedly said, “What is this thing anyway? Nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it, and some other marks in the corner there. I will not kiss that thing. It might be covered with microbes.”

I’m lucky to be focusing my research on a state with such a fanatical commitment to historic preservation and myth-making. Sure, the problematic nature of this mythology is a huge focus of my work, but the documentation has nevertheless been a marvel to explore. Barely scratching the surface so far, I’ve found many treasures in the Montana State Library’s history portal, including scanned versions of the ubiquitous county and town histories lovingly bound and illustrated by small community groups. More than a few I’ve recognized from my late grandpa’s bookshelf and I’m grateful they’ve been kept digitally preserved by the librarians and history nerds of Big Sky Country.

Grandpa’s grandpa (whose writings are the main source I’m working with) was a careful documentarian who wrote toward a hypothetical future audience. In his tale of his arrival from Iowa to meet his uncle in the Judith Basin, he describes the rough-looking characters who shuttled him across the prairie on their freight outfit from Billings to U-Bet. The older man, Dan Winters, had a long beard and a grizzled appearance.

My ancestor helpfully cites, “Should any of you who read this about Dan Winters just go to the public library and call for a bib book called “Progressive Men of Montana”…you will find an interesting story of [him] and his wife, including their pictures just as he looked when he brought me from Billings to the Gregory place on Buffalo Creek.”

My twice-great-grandpa probably couldn’t imagine how easy it would be for his descendant/reader to find this book long distance, for free, on the Internet Archive. To his credit, and to celebrate libraries (on this, my favorite librarian’s birthday, no less!), I’ll say that I also accessed a hardbound copy of the same book to follow up on a different reference while visiting the beautiful public library in Butte last September. In both forms, there was Dan Winters, looking “just as he looked” when he hauled a young tenderfoot out to his pioneer uncle’s homestead 130 years ago.

Of course then, it got me wondering if this (left) was Dan Winters in a group photo of men outside U-Bet House, the saloon in U-Bet, and down a whole new hole I went. Do you think this is him or did all the bearded, grizzled men look the same then?

All this to say, I’d love to connect with other research-oriented writers to talk about process. I want to follow every thread at this point and I also long to keep those threads disentangled and easy to find. There are so many tools, and I want something streamlined, logical, clean, and easy to add to on the fly and revisit later. I want it to be cloud-based (not tied to any individual device or needing to sync), but also free. I know, I know. This week, I started experimenting with creating a space to house research on Notion and have high hopes. My gracefully aging Macbook Air cannot support the desktop version, but browser is fine. Reviews, suggestions, warnings are all welcome and appreciated!

Despite the stunning availability of historical material online, the best research has still been relational and in-person. I’ve (virtually) met new relatives who I found by stalking them, and we have kept up with emails about the project. Early on in the process, I cold-called a museum in the area where my family lived and began a correspondence with one of its main volunteers. She is also, conveniently, a recently retired librarian who put me on to further resources. She met me in the parking lot when I came to town and opened the museum for me during the off season. When some other folks wandered by, she let them browse too. By starting the day with her, the rest of my initial research trip fell into place. I had plat maps, driving directions, leads to follow, and reference photos to take with me.

On that too-short fall research trip, I drove 12 hours in a single day seeking out these sites, visiting truly wild Western museums run by volunteers and crammed with taxidermy, and questioning the narrative logic of roadside attraction signs rooted deeply on the settler-side of “Cowboys and Indians” lore. Being physically in these places made this work more real, particularly because in many parts of the American West (including the place I live, about 500 miles further west), not much has aesthetically changed since the late 19th century.

William Gordon’s grave marker reads “PIONEER, Crossed Plains in 1860, Located in Mont. 1863, Last Chance Gulch 1864, First White Man to Locate in Musselshell Valley 1871, Judith Basin 1890”

It’s unlikely you’ll read any fully cooked work on this project for a while yet. I want to get it right. Anyone who knows the region and particularly Montana’s literary heritage knows that’s a heavy lift. I only hope that I’ll be able to make meaning of all the ways American myths intersect in the places I love in a way that others can appreciate. As I wrote in an earlier post, I’m obviously thinking about settler-colonialism even more than usual as of late. I think about its legacy in my own family when I come back across the photos I took of my first Western ancestor’s grave, “the first white man on the Musselshell,” and when I sift through the endless archives of material on timber, mining, railroads, dams, and reservations. I hope we can evaluate the past with enough honesty to avoid its further repetition.

Keep the research advice flowing,