Misfits and Why We Love Them

2-11-08

	Robert Struckman

Back in 1981, some weeks before the start of grade school, a tinker of a man walked out of the Bob Marshall Wilderness with a backpack and dirty clothes and asked me how my luck was.

That summer, like most others of my childhood, my father worked for the U.S. Forest Service. Five of us lived in a one-room, bathroom-free shack on the outskirts of the town of Seeley Lake, Montana.

My luck, as it happened, was great. I was fishing on a bit of a stream no wider than a ditch, yanking brook trout from the water with grasshoppers as bait.

The mountain man sat down beside me. Soon he set up a tent a few hundred yards from our shack, caught a few trout of his own and cooked them in a quick, flavorful stew with reconstituted carrots and powdered vegetables. We wiled away the day, eating and philosophizing. I fished with him for days until he packed up and hiked off.

I had that bearded and thoughtful mountain man in mind in 1999 when I telephoned libraries around the region for an informal survey of hermits and other self-styled castaways for a daily newspaper feature about the culture of the West.

It made my heart swell with regional pride when the doughty librarians in towns like Red Lodge and Casper responded defensively to a call from a reporter about their quirky customers. (I had called public libraries because Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, maintained an epistolary relationship from jail with a librarian in Lincoln, the small town near which he holed up in the years before his 1996 arrest.) All of them knew of soloists who, although presumably not murderous, shared superficial traits with the Unabomber.

The hermits of the West don’t all live in the wilderness on old mining claims. My uncle, who suffered from schizophrenia and died of a heart attack in 1997, lived more than 20 years in a small rental house near the railroad tracks on Missoula’s north side. A sardonic woodworker and a phenomenally patient gardener, he existed in an insular world, guarded by his family and neighbors.

One of the great strengths of the Mountain West is our propensity to attract and shelter loners. The sparsely populated crags, windswept plains and river bottoms of this region have given refuge over the years to a special brand of misfit. Those oddballs, mostly harmless, have exerted an anti-homogenizing influence on the region’s culture, which is one reason this area has retained its ethic of individualism so attractive to the rest of the nation.

This attractiveness, manifesting itself as lifestyle, has joined metals and agriculture products as one of our most valuable commodities, and fed a massive growth industry, growth itself. A commodity, though, is a uniform product – all sheets of plywood are basically identical – and that’s exactly what our cities and towns and mountains and forests are not.

For long decades, while the rest of America ordered food from coast-to-coast restaurant chains, local drive-ins in the economic eddies and backwaters of Wyoming and Idaho and Montana and Oregon continued frying fries and serving burgers, blithely unaware of their own obsolescence. Once common, they’ve become jewels you stumble onto sometimes, when driving long hours to visit relatives.

The Mountain West, in this respect at least, is now catching up with the country, and there is plenty to be said for that. Roads get upgraded. Big box stores sprout along newly broadened commercial corridors. Upscale retailers reveal themselves in formerly dilapidated downtown storefronts. Incomes are rising.

Yet the ethic of idiosyncrasy is one that’s worth preserving, even as we grow. That means maintaining privacy for those who seek it, as well as keeping open the access to our vast tracts of public land and funding our public libraries, those migration corridors and refuges of the loners.

Montana’s Cash Cowboy

Billionaire Bill Foley has bought a ski resort, a cattle ranch and a couple of restaurant chains in Montana — and the self-described “serial acquirer” may be just getting started.

5-14-08

If you didn’t know any better, you might think William Patrick (Bill) Foley II was just another retiring baby boomer looking for golf courses, open spaces and the chance to recapture an idealized childhood of summertimes on the family ranch. A frank man with an almost goofy charm, he speaks of his love for Montana, his concern for the landscape — and the joy he gets bombing around the backcountry on an ATV or a snowmobile.

But the truth is, Foley isn’t very good at leisure. He’s got the fancy log home on Whitefish Lake, five West Coast wineries, the huge cattle ranch near Deer Lodge, and the requisite private jets, but he can’t seem to help turning everything into a business.

He bought Big Mountain, the Whitefish ski hill, and is busy turning it into a more elaborate entity called Whitefish Mountain Resort. He’s transforming the 90,000-acre Rock Creek Cattle Company into a gated, luxury vacation community with 240 home sites. He bought the Glacier Jet Center at the Kalispell Airport, where he parks his planes, and has big ambitions for that, too.

He enjoyed a couple of local restaurants — Ciao Mambo and MacKenzie River Pizza Co. — and added them to his portfolio, with plans to build a substantial casual eatery chain. And then there’s Fidelity National Timber Resources, which owns extensive forests in Oregon and Washington that Foley thought had a lot of value for real estate development.

“I’m a serial acquirer,” he says. “I can’t seem to stop, whatever flaw that is. And then I can’t stand it until it is perfect. I have to keep on fooling with it. I wish I could figure that one out. My golf game would get a lot better.”

	RICH MAN’S RANCH:The Rock Creek Cattle Co. near Deer Lodge, Mont. will keep the cows — event as it adds several hundred luxury houses. Photo by Anne Medley.

Don’t be fooled though: He’s no slouch. Golf Digest named him one of the world’s top five executive golfers in 2004. And if his record at Fidelity National Financial, the Fortune 500 company he built from scratch, is any indication, he’s not done buying things in the West. Fidelity acquired more than 100 companies under Foley’s leadership and spun off a second public company, Fidelity National Information Services, about two years ago. In the past few years, Fidelity National Financial recapitalized, paying Foley a bundle, and he has been unloading big chunks of his FNIS stock (he stepped down as CEO of the two companies in mid-2007). He’s now set up as a perfectly positioned cash buyer at a time when lots of distressed assets are on the market.

Indeed, Foley appears to be in a much better spot than most of the Wall Street moguls, Silicon Valley financiers and high-rolling property developers who see the surging “amenity economy” in the Mountain West as the next great capitalist frontier. In some ways, he’s representative of the breed: a very rich man who’s become enamored with the West, and whose first instinct is to buy it.

Yet a number of high-profile developments by and for the wealthy — Promontory in Utah, Tamarack Resort in Idaho and Yellowstone Club in Montana, to name the most prominent examples — are staggering under heavy debt loads and a weakening economy. Boomtowns from Boise to Bozeman are seeing slower growth. But Foley, with an immense and highly liquid fortune, can afford to take the long view.

Foley is a West Point grad, and there is a certain military efficiency in his approach to business: Make sure you have plenty of assets, strategize carefully to find the non-obvious openings, win hearts and minds if you can — and cut your losses, unsentimentally, at the first sign of trouble.

If you’re the owner of a company that Foley wants to buy, it’s all sweetness and light and big piles of cash (hostile takeovers aren’t his thing). Steve Shuel, who sold MacKenzie River Pizza Co. to Foley’s restaurant group, describes the deal-making as “an unbelievable process in a positive way.” Contractors say he pays his bills, always and on time (which is more than you can say for a lot of moneyed developers), and public officials in Montana call him a model corporate citizen.

But if you’re driving around Whitefish Lake, or any other place where Foley owns a big spread, you can expect to see access to fishing blocked by poster-sized signs saying, “No Trespassing” and “Violators Will Be Prosecuted.” Not all the signs are his, but his are among the largest and most menacing.

	MONTANA CHIC:Foley’s home on Whitefish Lake features old barn wood (even on this three-car garage) and ranch-style architecture (emphasis on “style”). Photo by Anne Medley.

If you’re an employee at Fidelity National Financial during a period of retrenchment, you can expect that pink slip unaccompanied by any severance pay. If you’re a contractor falling behind on a job, watch out — even if, as in one case at the Rock Creek Cattle Co., your wife just committed suicide.

Foley has no time for people who don’t get it done: “If they didn’t perform, we fired them.”

All of which raises the question: why bring this approach to the Mountain West, which defines itself, at least in part, as a place with a different pace to life? Why buy property and build gates and fences in a state where the law — and the vast majority of the citizenry — zealously guard the principle of access to public lands and waterways? Why try to convince yourself, as Foley does, that your 11,000-square-foot house on Whitefish Lake, built of oak from a Kentucky tobacco barn and complete with solid copper drain spouts, is “like an old Montana ranch house.”

Partly, as always for Foley, it’s a business opportunity. But the business and the personal are tightly intertwined: “In the East, everyone wants out,” he muses. “We’ve worked hard all of our lives, and we’re hitting the age point where we want to get away. We want land and space, want to be in a cool area, maybe not all year around, but we want to be there enough to really enjoy it. We all want life to be what we had as a kid.”

Foley was born in 1944 in Austin, Texas, the only child of an Air Force officer. The family moved every few years, following his father’s transfer orders to Alaska, California (where his father was commander of Edwards Air Force Base), Virginia and Venezuela, where he attended an American-style school from the seventh to the tenth grade. Then it was a short stint in Elizabethtown, Penn., and Clinton, Md., where Foley graduated from Surrattsville High School (named after Mary Surratt, a woman conspirator hanged for her role in the assassination of President Lincoln.)

	DON’T EAT THE WOODEN ARTICHOKES: The Foley house is meticulously decorated with Western and agricultural themes. Photo by Anne Medley.

His mother was the scion of an old Texas ranching family, and she had four brothers, all of whom had first children, boys, who were the same age as young Bill. Until he was 16, his mother regularly returned with him to a family ranch near Amarillo.

“I grew up summers there, not for school years,” Foley says. “We’d go to a canyon, hang out and ride horses and shoot, do all kinds of dumb stuff.”

But it was the United States Military Academy at West Point, more than summers in Texas or schooling abroad, which seems to have shaped Foley. Tom Dyer, one of his schoolmates, recalls how he and Bill and about 800 other boys arrived at college on a July day in 1963, each an individual with his own haircut and clothing. “By five o’clock that night, we all had the same clothes on. Everybody had his head shaved.”

The academic program did not offer a lot of flexibility: a heavy dose of math, science and engineering tempered by a bit of the liberal arts.

“It served its purpose well. They strip you down, put you back together, better than what you were,” Dyer says. “You get a strong constitution.”

Or, as Foley puts it, “You don’t understand it quite then, what it does for you.”

Almost all of the 583 young men who graduated with Foley went into the Army and most went to Vietnam. At that time, West Point allowed graduates to follow their father into another service. Foley had fallen in love with airplanes as a boy and had wanted to fly, he says, but his eyesight had deteriorated during college. The Air Force offered him a spot as a navigator. “That’s really great news: fly in the back of an F4 over Vietnam,” he says. That sounded like a good way to get shot.

Instead, he got a desk assignment in Seattle as an Air Force representative at Boeing Company, overseeing military contracts. Neither Foley nor his fellow officers had any training in the engineering and manufacturing of aircraft, so Foley applied a regression analysis and figured out that certain costs should have been lower; he saved the Air Force $40 million on one of his earlier renegotiations, he says. He specialized in finding the padding inserted into the deals. By 26, he held the rank of captain and had authority to negotiate contracts worth up to $250 million.

The financial acumen started earlier.

“From the beginning, there was something about Bill and his penchant for, or knack for, capitalism. We would be talking about whatever, and Bill would be talking about what was going on in the stock market,” Dyer says. “He was just advanced in that regard.”

	GO ARMY! Foley is loyal to West Point, his alma mater: “Traveling around, as an only child, I was a bit of a wimp, self-centered,” he says. “It did a lot for me, taught me dicipline and authority. Photo by Anne Medley.

Foley says he had been a stock chartist, even at West Point. “I kept my own charts, did everything by hand. I had a broker in New York City. I’d run down and make a collect phone call. I wasn’t very scientific. I got interested in oil. I also invested in a lot of airlines. Regional airlines were getting merged — Mohawk, Bonanza, Air West, Pacific Airlines. I did really well with them. I tried to take my losses quick. I started with $2,000 dad gave me. I ended up with $25,000, which was a lot of money in 1967.”

While still in the Air Force, Foley began taking classes at Seattle University, working toward a master’s degree in business administration. He had also come to the conclusion that Seattle wasn’t a good place to meet women. He and a friend applied a bit of social analysis and concluded that flight attendants might provide fruitful fodder.

“We snooped and found an apartment building full of flight attendants: four to an apartment, three to an apartment. There were 150 units. There must have been 300 at least,” Foley says. “I met Carol there at a party. We married before I was out of the Air Force,” he says. Bill and Carol have four children.

Foley likes to mention that Carol put him through law school at the University of Washington with her job at United Airlines. Since then, he says, she’s been a freeloader.

“What? She’s a freeloader. I like to be honest,” he says.

After law school, Foley went to Arizona because it seemed to be happening, full of money from Chicago and the West Coast. He got a job at a big law firm, and, after a couple of years, founded his own firm with a few partners. He helped one client buy a small title insurance company and then, in 1984, engineered the purchase of that company for himself and his investors. He expanded the small Phoenix title company, Fidelity National Financial, mostly through acquisitions, and in 1987 took the company public and continued its growth. Some of his early deals were less than stellar, he says. He bought a troubled agency with little potential in Tucson for $1 million.

“We probably should have paid $300,000,” he says. Before long he had figured out how to buy companies often far below book value, pennies on the dollar.

“A big company would say, ‘We have to get out. We’re done.’ I’d pick up semi-bankrupt operations and survive long enough to turn them around,” he says.

All told Foley has done more than 100 corporate mergers and at least as many acquisitions. By 2003, Fidelity provided title insurance for close to one-third of all the residential real estate transactions in the United States and, in 2006, had revenues of $9.6 billion and profits of nearly $1 billion. The company streamlined its business operations with purchases of technology companies and other back-office service providers; some of those lines have been spun off into their own companies, including Fidelity National Information Services, which works with nine of the top 10 global banks. Fidelity National Financial remains so large that another spinoff, the lender services division, could well take place within a few months.

Foley is often credited with being one of the first to recognize the growth potential of the title insurance field, always something of a backwater in the real estate world. And while the company has taken a hit from the national real estate slump, it’s also finding new opportunities: managing foreclosure operations.

Not everyone thinks Foley’s leadership has been optimal. Jim Ryan, a Morningstar analyst who studies the company, gives the Fidelity companies low marks for stewardship and a lack of focus. “They act more like a Leucadia, the investment company, which buys and sells and is extremely good at it. Fidelity National Financial treats the title business as a cash cow to run an investment company,” he says, “but they don’t have the right people or the patience to pull it off.”

“I don’t like the shifting and spinning off of companies,” Ryan adds. Last quarter, for instance, Fidelity National Financial bought back one company from its own spinoff. Plus, he feels Fidelity National Financial’s board rewards Foley with big bonuses for deals that don’t necessarily add value for stockholders. Ryan cited a few recent deals, including Fidelity’s purchase of 293,000 acres of timberland for about $94 million from the wreckage of what had been Cascade Timberlands. The land extends from Bend, Ore., to the California border. Ryan says: “I’m still trying to figure that one out.”

When talking to Foley and his team, though, the artfulness of the Cascade purchase seems like part of the allure. The former assets of the bankrupt timber company had gone to auction, but, instead of bidding for the acreage, Fidelity took a back-door route, buying a controlling share of the bankrupt company’s debt. Then it stopped the auction and turned those assets to its own use. Fidelity now has two major private communities in the works on its former timberlands.

Still, in the 20 years that Fidelity National Financial has been a publicly traded company, it has averaged a 22 percent annual return to its shareholders — and Foley is proud of that figure. It’s the kind of number that keeps skeptical analysts at bay.

People who work with Foley — from his contractors to his secretaries to his business partners and associates — describe him as a genius and one of the hardest workers they’ve ever met. (The publisher of this magazine ran into him working the lift line at Whitefish Mountain Resort.) He retains even miniscule details about his many business ventures and seems to have an intuitive feel for whether something will make money or not.

	SPEED IT UP! Contractors say Foley pays his bills promptly, but he sometimes cycles through workers at a dizzying rate. Photo by Anne Medley.

Foley maintains an easy-going air. By contrast, Greg Lane, his point man in Montana, often looks stressed out. A mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who joined Foley’s team in 1997, Lane is jokingly referred to as “Bill’s better half.” Lane worries about Foley, and says he can’t go on vacation because he has to keep an eye on Foley’s businesses. He also heads up the political side of Foley’s work — talking to county commissioners, planning boards, citizen groups, city councils, tribal leaders, governors and others. Often, locals react strongly when a billionaire buys into the neighborhood and airs ambitious development plans.

In Whitefish, for instance, there has been a backlash against Foley, who in a trademark piece of deal-making acquired a controlling interest in the stock of Big Mountain, a ski area that was built and owned by local residents. Foley’s first effort to buy the company failed, but then Richard Dasen, a local businessman and major shareholder in Big Mountain, was arrested and charged with luring girls and meth-addicted young women into prostitution. (Dasen was found guilty of five felonies, including sexual abuse of children, and recently finished serving a two-year prison sentence.) Dasen had to sell his assets in a hurry. Foley bought his Big Mountain stock, which gave him enough leverage to push through a series of reverse stock splits until he had a controlling interest. (Foley has since invested heavily in the resort, putting in new lifts and a day lodge, among other amenities.)

When Foley invests in something, he hates to go halfway. When he wanted to give to his alma mater two years ago, for instance, he gave $25 million, the single largest gift in West Point’s history, to build a new athletic center.

Politically, Foley jokingly calls himself a “cross-dresser.” He’s socially liberal, he says, and fiscally conservative. He likes California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (Republican) and Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (Democrat). He says he’ll probably vote for presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain in November. His record of campaign contributions over the past 15 years would lead you to believe his politics are driven by his business. Foley gives generously across the board to Republicans and, generally speaking, to sure-thing Democrats. Since the 2000 election cycle, Foley has given $152,000 in direct campaign contributions in Florida and California, and more recently in Montana, well over half of it to Republicans, according to records kept by OpenSecrets.Org.

As for interpersonal politics, Foley has Lane, who has a talent for smoothing ruffled feathers. He is good at explaining what the billionaire is up to, which always helps. He’s also good at making alliances and strategic concessions. In Bend, Lane has helped pave the way for a private development of Fidelity Timber Resources by setting up a 33,000-acre community forest for the town. Lane has also been working with the Klamath Tribes and the federal government and others with the goal of adding to a land base for the tribes — and another development for Fidelity.

In Deer Lodge, Lane talks about the wealth of knowledge held by the longtime manager of the ranch and of how much he has enjoyed working with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and the local government in Powell County (population about 7,000). Powell County Commissioner Dwight O’Hara likes Lane. He says Lane drops by just to talk. “He’s an old shoe,” O’Hara says. When the construction of the private club was going full bore, it maxed out Powell County’s labor force and filled the cafes, hotels and rental apartments in Deer Lodge. O’Hara says Lane and Foley have been “excellent corporate citizens, straight-forward, very easy to work with.”

Lane insisted that Foley loves the West, loves Montana the way it is, and is going to great lengths to keep things the way they are — for instance, by putting easements on areas of the ranch so the views from nearby Deer Lodge will not change. (As of mid-April, 43 of the Rock Creek Cattle Co. home sites had been sold, Lane says.)

Love for Montana doesn’t mean the regular rules of capitalism go slack. For the ranch and the golf course, designed by Tom Doak, Foley laid out an aggressive construction schedule, and he got it, mostly. His contractors say working for him is fantastic in some respects, but his management style, which some call one-strike-and-you’re-out, has made for some hard feelings. He cycled through engineers and contractors, sometimes at a dizzying rate.

It’s not as if Foley is simply mean. The first engineers hired to rehabilitate the fisheries on the ranch didn’t get the proper permits. “It was bullshit,” Foley says. The first general contractor fell behind. Foley brought on a new general who has kept up with the schedule, and the new fisheries guy works hard. Foley appreciates that.

Commissioner O’Hara says, “He gave locals a fair shot at it.”

It’s about 50 minutes door-to-door from Rock Creek Cattle Co. to Foley’s house on Whitefish Lake, if you’re flying in Foley’s six-seat black BELL407 helicopter with custom leather upholstery. (Otherwise the 220-mile drive takes about four hours in good weather.) Foley’s pilot is West Point alum and 10-year U.S. Army veteran Mike Talbot. The helicopter sports the West Point logo on its side.

	KEEP OUT: Barbed wire fences, like this one at the Rocky Creek Cattle Co. keep cows and calves in. But Foley goes further with security gates and other measures to keep people out. Photo by Anne Medley.

Foley also owns two jets. One is a modest Beechjet 400. The other is a huge GulfstreamV — the trophy jet of the ultra-rich (its title is held by Fidelity National Financial, which often leases it to a charter service).

Foley allowed that the culture of the Mountain West has been altered, and will continue to be, as billionaires and business executives like him seek out the quiet corners, the places where people are genuine and open. Yet he doesn’t think his own presence and his investments (which total about $125 million in Montana) inject into his new environment those characteristics of the East Coast, of California and of Florida that he would like to leave behind.

“It’s not such a bad thing that people like me are coming here,” Foley says. “Most of us are pretty concerned about things like land use. There are 300 million Americans and counting. Montana, like Wyoming and Idaho, you’re going to attract people.”

On the expansive back patio of the Whitefish house, Foley calls for Snowball, an airy puff of a Samoyed, and the dog wags his tail but doesn’t come.

Snowball eventually wanders over. Foley scratches him behind the ears. “He’s not loyal,” Foley says with feigned annoyance. “An alpha Samoyed can be squirrelly, kind of mean and bitey.” Snowball sat down on the flagstones, a big grin on his face. “Not Snowball. He’s just dumb.”

Foley gestures toward the rear of the Whitefish house. Like a lot of rich people across the Mountain West, he idealizes “authentic” relics and materials. Real weathered barn wood, for instance, is big with this crowd, creating the sense of house-as-extended-mood-piece. Foley may have a twinkle in his eye and a genuine smile, he might foster a few of his Montana employees in an almost fatherly way, but he remains a sharp-edged executive isolated by security gates and thousands of acres. The barn wood seems to offset the exclusivity, rendering it less uncomfortable.

“The idea is that it’s like an old Montana ranch house, and then you add onto it,” he says, describing the theory behind the rambling architecture. Foley points out the lack of uniformity in the size of the weathered Kentucky oak logs and the chinking between them.

“You just put up the logs, and then you chink it to fit. The idea is for it to be a little understated, to look like it’s old,” he says.

Artwork, from a gallery south of Missoula, had been hung on the walls that day. Provenance papers listing the artists and the prices lie on a table. Foley walks around the ground floor with his wife and takes in the original paintings. Four of them in a stairwell reflect too much light from a big window on the landing. Those will be sent back. Another one in the entryway Foley deems too colorful. He and Carol both really like a large painting in the living room by Ace Cooper entitled “End of a Perfect Day.”

The two admire it for a moment and say they find it relaxing.

In the painting, two cowboys in the foreground pick their way across a dry landscape of sage and rocks toward a distant homestead at the base of a high ridge. The entire scene, which has hints of autumnal reds and oranges, is bathed in early evening shadow, except for a distant ridge, which glows with late sunlight. There’s not a fence in sight.

A New Political Day in Montana: Can The State Matter?

5-12-08

The annual Truman Dinner, organized by the Yellowstone County Democratic Party in Billings, has long been a homegrown affair held in a low-ceilinged conference room in a downtown hotel. Local candidates would mutter for a few moments and then sit to scattered applause. Later, the small, overdressed crowd would browse tables of donated items in a silent auction. A staple of the event was a goofy performance by a retired high school teacher named Jack Johnson, who would dress like Harry Truman and deliver one of the former president’s famous speeches.

It was a great forum, in a kitschy sort of way, for Montana’s citizen-legislature-in-the-making, but not this year.

This dinner was held in the gussied-up cafeteria of the University of Montana-Billings. There was neither a silent auction nor speeches by local candidates. After the meal, everyone trooped over to the college athletic center, where Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota gave a polished pitch for a Democratic surge across the High Plains and the West. A parade of major speakers followed, and clips of rock music blared in the interludes. The speakers’ images appeared superhuman on massive screens alongside the stage. Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal leaned on the podium and delivered a subtle and folksy endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic nominee. The crowd rose to its feet, campaign signs waving. A wall of Obama fans in the bleachers cheered and stomped. Then former President Bill Clinton took the stage like a superstar.

“This is the darnedest election I’ve ever been in in my life,” Clinton said.

A few months ago, Craig Wilson, one of Montana’s most prominent nonpartisan students of politics, predicted that Montana’s Democratic primary would garner little if any national attention and few ad dollars. Montana’s never really in play, he argued. The real story of a close primary would be the super-delegates, he said.

“We’re in the wrong hinterlands,” Wilson added. Small states like New Hampshire staked out important primary territory long ago. Montana has more of a lame duck status, he said, holding its primary long after other contests have decided the winner. “We’ll be lucky if somebody is flying over from Chicago to Seattle and parachutes into Missoula or Billings for an hour campaign appearance.”

Wilson’s primary notions can be forgiven. The days of cross-country speeches from campaign trains were long gone. It seems the only political insiders who dreamed Montana might be worth wooing—and that the state’s 24 Democratic delegates might make a difference—worked for Obama, who envisioned a true 50-state campaign while it still seemed a bit lunatic. He courted Democrats in Idaho, Utah and Washington, for instance, and handily chalked up wins.

“I’ve met people here who’ve never been involved before,” said Montana Attorney General Mike McGrath, who is running for the state supreme court. McGrath credited the grassroots Obama campaign for making the entire primary process more relevant.

Some people evidently still think a 50-state campaign is a little strange. In a conference call with reporters last week, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist repeatedly emphasized that his candidate had won the “key states.” It’s true, too. Clinton won California, Texas and Pennsylvania, to name a few of the perennial battlegrounds.

But this time it seems the key states won’t deliver the win. States like Wyoming, which broke for Obama, have made California less important. It’s about time.

Back in the summer and fall of 2000 if Al Gore had diverted to Montana just a small portion of the money his campaign had poured into Florida, he might have prevailed that November. After all, Gore didn’t need all of Florida’s electoral votes. In the election-night cliffhanger, he was only one vote short. Any of the write-off states could have put him over the top.

Politicians in the West have welcomed Obama’s attention. It feels pretty good. One of Gov. Freudenthal’s lines about Obama was that he “was country before country was cool.”

But Obama’s campaign didn’t blindly pick the strategy. Democratic candidates have been making headway across the Mountain West in recent years. In 2006, Montana became the focus of national political attention—and a huge pile of Democratic money—in the final days of the campaign as Sen. Jon Tester unseated his embattled rival Conrad Burns.

Clinton has made an effort to jump on the 50-state bandwagon. Her campaign opened an office earlier this month in Missoula and Billings. This morning, her campaign announced another campaign appearance by Bill Clinton tomorrow in Kalispell. With both Democratic candidates campaigning and spending in the Big Sky, country has become pretty cool.

It sure seemed like it at the Truman Dinner, where the major television news stations even had cameramen and reporters and where retired schoolteacher Jack Johnson (and his Truman act) was nowhere to be seen.

Tracks Across A Landscape

It’s a seductive idea, that yours are the first sentient eyes to see this landscape, that your story will be its first, and that your imprint will be the one to endure.

5-19-08

Even 200 years into the modern American West, it’s easy, especially for newcomers to this landscape, to feel as if the grand open spaces are a blank canvas. It can seem, standing on a hillside of sagebrush and grass, as if nothing has ever existed but the ceaseless wind and sky.

In other parts of the country, and the world, the past is present, in ancient stone structures and centuries-old communities. By comparison, vast tracts of the West seem untrammeled, especially in the springtime when the snow has melted, leaving its particularly soggy mark on the grasses and naked soil. You can watch the imprint of your own shoe fill slowly with the shallowest film of water and, when you do, it seems no shoe can ever have stepped there before.

It’s a seductive idea, that yours are the first sentient eyes to see this landscape, that your story will be its first, and that your imprint will be the one to endure.

The fact that this myth, which I sometimes find myself cherishing, isn’t true is what makes the West so intriguing. So much of the context to our modern lives is subtle, easy to miss. Yet the obscurity of the past does offer a special kind of freedom and solitude in which you can immerse yourself. You can add your own footsteps to ancient trails.

A few years ago, I found myself asking Al Wiseman, a Choteau-area Chippewa and a local historian, about the route used by a band of Indians a century ago who had come back south on foot after the U.S. Army rounded them up and shipped them by rail to Canada. (Another story involves an old Chippewa guy who told me about how he jogged the same route to get to a dance some 60 years ago, where he met his wife.) Wiseman told me details of that old path along the edge of the mountains. He knew its nearby stretches and even marked sections of it with small boulders.

In the pre-dawn hours one early July day, my brother Todd and I jogged away from his small car, parked on a wind-battered slope on the Sun River Wildlife Management Area. We intended to test the trail from there to the South Fork of the Teton River, some 30 miles or so to the north.

We jumped an irrigation ditch and continued down a hill and over a fence. We stumbled across the knee-deep Sun River, numbingly cold and fast. To our left the mountains rose abruptly, almost like a wall. To our right, the land was rough, with long, pine-covered ridges. At times, we followed a pair of wagon ruts. Other times it was a single broad track. We passed the scattered logs of disintegrated cabins and clumps of still-thriving irises. My map indicated a burial ground, which I couldn’t find. We reached a canyon called Deep Creek (the water itself was ankle deep). We paused to fill our bottles with water, filtered through a small hand-pumped purifier.

Later, the going was easy, and it seemed we had the trail nailed. Then, for the better part of an hour, we forced our way through a dense forest of jack pines. In the middle, Todd hollered about all the houses. “What houses?” I asked. Then I realized we had run into a former settlement with remnants of about seven homes. I was standing in the middle of one. It was mid-afternoon, and we had covered more than 20 miles as the crow flies.

The final 10 miles to the Teton River took us across miserable, flood-irrigated fields and a network of broad ditches separated by short, painful hills. Dirt ruts materialized at our feet, leading us to the river and the second car. I collapsed and went into younger brother mode. Todd cooked pasta with pesto and tuna fish over a tiny camp stove. I ate.

A few days later a funny thing happened. I saw distant lumps of mountains on the horizon and, surprising myself, said aloud, “I could run there.” I was alone in the car driving home. It made me laugh—my own silly bravado.

At home, sometimes, I think of those weather-beaten boards I had stepped over without noticing, and about the other places, old homesteads maybe, where irises, those tough and resourceful flowers, were all that remained.

Those homesteads couldn’t have been much more than 100 years old. The shallow wagon ruts and foot paths date much further back. With such small signals of the past, it’s no wonder we retain our blunt sense of illimitable openness. The light touch on the land amounts to a gift, an easy chance for us to hold for ourselves a persistent illusion about the possibility here of new beginnings.

Yet our mountainous and rugged landscape isn’t empty, it just feels that way. As the homogenizing forces of mass-market culture sweep across our broad and empty spaces, let’s do what we can to maintain that sense of openness.

Clay Felker, Master of the Magazine

Legendary magazine editor Clay Felker, who died Tuesday at 82, taught this writer more than a few enduring truths about journalism.

7-01-08

Eleven years ago, long after the journalistic style he championed in the 1960s had become mainstream, even old-school, my teacher, the legendary magazine editor Clay Felker, asked me to prepare some photocopies of an old Tom Wolfe story about William Shawn and the New Yorker. I was a second-year graduate student in journalism at UC Berkeley; my student job, a plum, was as Clay’s research assistant. That meant, aside from the occasional stint at the school’s copier, that Clay and his wife, the writer Gail Sheehy, generously and often treated me to dinner at their beautiful home in the Oakland Hills and at many a jazz bar and sushi restaurant in the Bay Area.

Back then, Clay often wore beige or yellow suits made of light cloth – what I thought of as rich-man’s New York City lunch attire – and baseball caps to shelter his head. Sometimes he seemed a bit wobbly. Now and then, he would proclaim things that seemed, to my untested ears, a bit too simplistic, or just plain bad. What I saw as his celebrity fetish seemed boring. Once, he insisted I write, as my master’s thesis, a long story on Internet gambling, which he predicted would become a huge business. To my mind, the idea lacked the human scope I yearned to write about. Plus, I doubted his business acumen. Internet gambling? How lame. Years later, it’s obvious that I was wrong.

Even then, though, I had inklings of his genius to spot trends and spark careers. All year long, his classroom hosted a steady stream of talented and accomplished magazine editors and writers. Later the visiting luminary would repair to his home. As the evening darkened, the sparkling lights of Oakland glittering below, there would be stories about ambitious writers taking on legendary themes. The stories reeked of success. This is how they all seemed to end: Properly endowed with the right cover story, the magazine issue had leapt off the rack, and the lead story – perhaps a feature by Aaron Latham or Wolfe – had gone on to sell scads of books or was made into a blockbuster film. And in the process defined an era.

His students sometimes laughed privately about those almost-formulaic stories, but Clay remained on the fresh edge of journalism. He was often unsparing in his criticism. Smart, funny, arrogant, cynical or irreverent point-of-view journalism, Clay insisted, had its roots in painstakingly thorough reporting. The end product could dismiss a sacred cow with a rude quip, but only if its foundation involved heavy-duty reporting. It’s a humbling idea for a young journalist, that the real work involves introducing yourself on some doorstep, far from any newsroom, and haltingly asking questions and writing down the answers. It’s not rocket science, but it’s far from easy. It’s labor-intensive. If you’re going to write about a place, you need to go there. It’s the fundamentals of all good journalism, almost boring in its simplicity.

By the time I became his student, Clay had already been fighting throat cancer for years. One day, a blood vessel in his throat began to bleed, and it wouldn’t stop. He was rushed to a hospital in San Francisco. Later, I helped take him home. As we rode down the elevator, he asked about the status of a story on the animated feature “A Bug’s Life,” which was then in production at the Pixar campus.

I didn’t have much, though not for lack of trying. The place was buttoned down tight, its secrets closely kept, although I had talked to a few of the animators at a coffee shop there and looked at some drawings of the circus scene involving an old umbrella. I had nothing close to a fully reported story, but I didn’t want to admit as much to Clay, so I exaggerated what I had and told him the story would be great. Later, he asked for a draft. But I had been unable to get the reporting that I had told him I had, even though I had spent another day skulking around the shrubbery outside the Pixar buildings. I admitted to him that I didn’t have the story. He was irritated, disappointed, but, to my relief, not overly so. I understand now, I think, that he had seen his share of blowhard writers, and also that he understood that the maturation process isn’t always pretty, or easy. He moved past it, and in doing so helped teach me that in journalism you take your lumps and go on.

Frankly, it’s my experience that few journalists speak honestly about, much less take ownership of, the mistakes they’ve made. Clay did. He talked about bad edits he had made. That’s not to say that he didn’t defend himself or others from what he thought were unwarranted criticisms. And I’m not alluding to any grand errors on Clay’s part. It’s just that even minor errors seem significant to the journalist who commits them, but far less monumental to those who hear about them later. And it’s important that we deal with them with candor, even when the lessons are hard to define, more emotional than professional.

One story Clay told involved the Wolfe essay I had prepared for class, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead,” which ran in 1965 in the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald-Tribune (the predecessor to New York magazine, which Felker made famous). Clay had a pained look on his face as he told about those who still wouldn’t speak to him – who refused to shake his hand – even more than 30 years after he published that story, which skewered the New Yorker as a museum of mummified journalism and Shawn, its editor, as the museum’s dreary curator.

I’m as guilty as anyone of holding the New Yorker on a ridiculously high pedestal (even after my internship there as an undergraduate.) And, actually, the “Tiny Mummies” essay still seems trite to me today. And funny. Yet Clay’s recollections of the reactions to the essay – and the venomous writings of the magazine’s defenders – underscored the myths that journalists create about themselves, that we’re somehow untouchable in our seriousness, that some of us have reached a plane of infallibility. Bullshit. The truth is, as soon as we lose our humility, we begin to mummify ourselves.

In Clay’s class I began working on a story, which I’ve never sold, about a young Mexican man who worked as a dispatcher at a day-labor agency for janitors in San Francisco. He more or less lived in the agency’s offices, where he kept a sharp black suit and dance shoes. At nightclubs, he shed his slouching, grungy demeanor and danced salsa, beautifully, with his gorgeous and tall Chinese-American girlfriend from Berkeley. Other times, he performed as the lead singer in a raging, punk-ish metal band at tiny clubs in obscure San Francisco neighborhoods. Clay encouraged me to spend as much time as possible with both of them for a feature on youth culture. He was incredibly engaged in what young people cared about, possessing an almost impossibly youthful mind.

Sadly, Clay’s condition deteriorated during spring semester in 1998. Each time I heard his voice, made gravelly by the cancer and chemotherapy, I had a feeling it was the last time I would see him alive. He didn’t have much strength for editing or teaching. Left to my own devices, I lost the handle of that complicated story of salsa movements and incendiary rock lyrics. Later, Clay got his feet beneath him again and continued to teach for years.

Over the past decade, I exchanged a few brief emails with Clay. Then, about a year ago, as I began planning and editing a new regional magazine called The New West, I began to recall bits of his advice, and I realized he had always tried to prepare us, his students, for our shot at a magazine of our own.

Mine is an outgrowth of NewWest.Net, a 3-year-old online news site based in Missoula, Mont., founded by Courtney Lowery and Jonathan Weber. Jonathan always thought of Clay’s short-lived, California-based general interest magazine, New West, as a kind of great-uncle figure to our new incarnation, and sought him out a few years ago to ask his blessing. He gave it, along with some gruff but pertinent advice. It feels good to have that presence preceding this.

The last time I talked to Clay, it was about NewWest.Net. He was enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by online journalism. It’s been said, especially about his heyday as editor of New York and Esquire magazines, that Clay was obsessed with power, which seems to me a bit misleading. He seemed to be obsessed with what was going on, who was making it happen and what it all meant. He was fearless, although he didn’t shrink from acknowledging the attendant pain. As the news of his death in New York City at 82 sinks in, I sit at my desk in our alleyway office in Missoula. It seems almost too simple to mention: I wish I could be so fearless, so obsessed with the same thing.

In the Aftermath, One Mother Picks Up the Pieces

A morning shooting put one family in the headlines. Here’s the story of what happened after the ambulances left and the detectives passed the file on to the Missoula County Attorney’s office.

8-05-08

On a warm summer afternoon at home, Gayle Hafner and her three daughters, Brittney, 11; Zarah, 7; and Torissa, 5, gather for a photograph. Brittney wants to be a fashion designer, Zarah does not want to wear a helmet when she rides the neighbor’s 4-wheeler and everyone agrees that Torissa is the princess of the household. Photo by Alexia Beckerling

Behind the veneer of Montana’s amenity economy—where home-building and carpet installation have largely replaced blue-collar careers like logging and millwork—lie the same human conditions, landscapes of tough times.

Here’s the story of one family—living a short drive down the Bitterroot Valley from Charles Schwab’s moneyed Stock Farm—the mess they got into and a life that isn’t always simple or easy.

The family was catapulted into the evening news a little over two weeks ago with a breakfast-time 9-1-1 call about a man who had been shot. Bruce Hafner, a 49-year-old carpet-installer and owner of Hafner Installation, had allegedly pulled the trigger of a handgun, putting a bullet through the chest of his 51-year-old brother Dennis. Worse, one of Bruce’s young daughters, who police say was almost in the path of the bullet, witnessed the whole thing.

Bruce is in Missoula County Jail on charges of attempted murder and criminal endangerment. The attempted murder charge likely won’t hold a lot of water. For one thing, self-defense may be a factor, and, anyway, Dennis said he doesn’t intend to press charges. He’s also gone. He checked himself out of St. Patrick Hospital about a week after the shooting and—despite a punctured lung—bought a ticket and boarded a bus back to his home in Oregon. There, says his probation officer, he faces a year in jail for violating probation on an unrelated misdemeanor.

Bruce, the alleged shooter, is a likeable and hardworking man. From a poor background, he has struggled all his life for respectability. Several times over the past few years, he has invited his older brother to his well-kept Lolo home with its immaculate lawns and flourishing tomato plants when his carpet business got too hectic. Family members said the two had a close, although sometimes screwed-up, relationship. Basically, they got drunk and fought each other. (Aside from the charges relating to the shooting, Bruce has an ongoing felony DUI case.)

But sorting through all that will be a job for attorneys and, maybe, a jury. More pertinent to this column were the goings-on the week after detectives and paramedics swarmed the family’s home just up U.S. Highway 12 from Lolo.

That Wednesday, a handful of balloons marked the entrance to the Hafner driveway. A long-scheduled estate sale was in progress. Easy chairs sat in a row on the lawn in front of a modest house and a significant lilac hedge. There were tools and kitchenware and lots of books—mostly Western fiction and history and Readers Digest condensed classics.

Gayle Hafner—Bruce’s wife—managed the sale with the help of family members from her side. The life’s goods on the lawn had been Gayle’s mother’s, LaGean Walker, who died in June after a long struggle with COPD—chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. All afternoon, Gayle’s three daughters ran in and out of the house and to a neighbor’s.

It’s a comfortable home, removed from Highway 12 by a long driveway. Gayle and Bruce bought the place from Gayle’s parents about 10 years ago, but while her parents lived, she and Bruce stayed in a comfortable mobile home on the other side of the lilac hedge.

Gayle slept in the house with her mother in the final months of her life to better care for her and to make sure she didn’t have problems with her oxygen tank.

Gayle still seems dazed by her mother’s death. She says she’s lucky to have been able to be by her mother’s side at the end. “I knew how she was being cared for,” she said.

As for her husband’s legal troubles, she has to be pragmatic. After all, hers has suddenly become a one-parent family of four. She answers questions from clients of her husband’s installation business and does the billing and other clerical work. During the school year she also works part-time at Lolo School, which allows her to be close to her daughters.

Still, she worries about the girls and the rumors. The little humiliations hurt, too, like the other day when she sat at her kitchen table and over the telephone explained, painfully, her situation to a social services caseworker who knew full well what’s what but wanted to force her to come out and say it.

“Bruce isn’t working. No. Obviously, Bruce isn’t working, and he doesn’t live with us. His address is the Missoula County Jail now,” Gayle told her. A few minutes later, Gayle, dismayed at the exchange, said to me, “She knows me personally.”

Now, Gayle finds herself with insight into other situations, ones she never expected she would identify with. She watches the news differently. Recently she saw a report about a fatal shooting. She noticed the reporter talked about how the victim had been putting his life back together.

“You have to be dead before they say something nice about you,” Gayle said. “People can do bad things, but there can still be something good there, too.”

Particularly painful was the shorthand terminology used to sum up her family’s life: A shooting in a trailer, her husband’s DUI. While those hard facts may be true, they don’t come close to describing him in full, she said.

It can be tempting to view the world in black-and-white, to assign moral value to superficial details, such as whether a home counts its square feet by the thousand or whether it’s mobile. It seems this has become truer as Montana’s income gap has widened.

But it’s a mistake to allow the crappy incident at the Hafner house—and the two minute snippets on the news—to define the family and eclipse the all-too-human struggles of Gayle and her girls as they pull together the pieces of a decent life.

Amateur Historian Produces History of Old West All-Indian Battle

8-17-08

	Elias Goes Ahead at Crow Fair

A amateur Crow historian has completed a history of a pivotal—and mystical—all-Indian battle in which his tribe defended its homeland.

The historian is Elias Goes Ahead, a storyteller and lifelong historian.

“I was brought up among natural historians,” Goes Ahead told me at a table amidst teepees and cottonwoods at an encampment at Crow Fair, his tribe’s annual powwow near Crow Agency on the sprawling reservation of the same name south of Billings. “Ever since I was a little boy, they told me stories, passed on their knowledge to me because I was the one who listened.”

Goes Ahead has had an assortment of jobs, none until recently related to his passion. About 10 years ago, he started leading private tours around the reservation and at the Little Big Horn Battlefield, the famous site of Custer’s Last Stand. He never incorporated as a business, or advertised. Visitors learned of him by word of mouth, tracked him down and paid him to drive around and talk about what he knows.

All that makes his 358-page historical manuscript on “Ashkoota Binnaxchikua (Where the Camp was Fortified)” all the more impressive. Author credit was shared with David Eckroth, Howard Boggess and Mike Penfold of the Frontier Heritage Alliance (a regional nonprofit organization without a Web site) which began to offer financial support to the project in 2004.

All through his life, Goes Ahead heard stories of a decisive battle near the present-day town of Pryor between the Crows and a combined army of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe.

The stories were specific. The battle was in 1863 or 1864 along Arrow Creek about 10 miles north of Pryor. The attacking force was there to push the Crows further westward, off the tribe’s rich ancestral homeland. The Crow families and fighters set their teepees tightly together in a defensive line, and dug trenches underneath the lodges. Old buffalo hides were used to fortify the bulwarks. Sometimes, Goes Ahead’s father or uncles would show him specific spots where Crow warriors fell or were rescued or where supernatural forces had intervened, such as where a herd of elk had stampeded, raising dust and distracting the attacking fighters, who feared that Crow reinforcements raced toward the fight.

Goes Ahead read all the accounts of Crow history and about Indian battles and also got help from a historian at Little Big Horn College, the two-year tribal community college in Crow Agency. Goes Ahead found plenty of oblique references to the battle, as well as to what he knew must have been the factors that led to it.

Yet nothing tapped the rich oral history Goes Ahead knew. Nothing told the whole story or conveyed what Goes Ahead thought was the importance of the battle or its intricacies and mysteries.

“The Crows made a stand, a statement, that we couldn’t be pushed further west, and because of that battle, that grand battle, there wouldn’t be any other intertribal warfare of that size between these tribes,” Goes Ahead said.

So Goes Ahead bought a tape recorder and started interviewing family members who had had bits and pieces of the overall story passed onto them. He combed the papers of Crow anthropologist Joseph Medicine Crow as well as lots of other archived papers and manuscripts.

“I was fortunate that the recordings I made, some of my sources, passed away not long after. It was just in time,” Goes Ahead said. “I kept just a piece of history on tape and on paper.”

Typically, he would make an appointment and then visit his source—Pius Crooked Arm in Crow Agency, for instance—with his tape recorder and notebook in hand. They would sit at the kitchen table and drink sweet black coffee and talk, in Crow.

“I’d ask them to tell me personal recollections. Once they started rolling, I wouldn’t interrupt,” he said.

Oral histories, often rich in detail and colorful flourishes, also tend to be difficult to accumulate into a narrative.

“Each participant, each version, is what they see as an individual and doesn’t cover the whole field,” Goes Ahead said.

It was a trick to piece together the narrative of the battle. He listened to his old tapes, redid interviews when he could, and slowly knitted together the stories. The manuscript was completed this summer, dated June 25.

A history like Goes Ahead’s can be controversial in Indian Country, where culture is a commodity, Indian and non-Indian fakers abound, and where printed histories are sometimes used to justify federal policy and draconian legal decisions.

For this piece of work, Goes Ahead interviewed dozens of tribal elders. He let his references guide him. One source would recommend another. Yet he didn’t get the blessing of a committee of the Crow Tribe’s official historians. In the end, he got help from a non-Indian group, the Frontier Heritage Alliance.

Like most academic works, this is ponderous and cumbersome at times with its abstract and extensive notations. Yet the story of the battle is gripping. And the context is fascinating, describing a landscape where Manifest Destiny and the advance of the American frontier provide the backdrop to these life-and-death intertribal dramas.

So how do you get a copy of this cool manuscript? I’ll post one when it comes available. Otherwise, visit the Plenty Coups State Park at Pryor, the Yellowstone Western Heritage Center in Billings or the Little Big Horn Tribal College in Crow Agency.

Beyond the Photos, the Real Magic of Crow Fair

Even viewed in the most favorable light, impersonal images from a powwow such as Crow Fair miss the most important aspects of the event itself, and the people and cultures on display.

8-21-08

Grand Entry gets the cameras clicking. Photo by Adam Sings In the Timber

This year during one of the daily parades at Crow Fair, the annual powwow and rodeo held along the Little Big Horn River on the Crow Reservation in southern Montana, one of my mothers-in-law yelled combatively at a professional photographer who planted himself between her and one of her grandchildren on parade.

“Hey, get out of the way,” she hollered. “We’re taking pictures, too.”

The guy knelt down and kept shooting film.

Okay. You’re probably wondering about the multiple mothers-in-law. Not to sound like an anthropologist, but there are certain things you need to know if you intend to spend your life with a Crow woman. Crow is a matrilineal culture with strong extended family ties. This means not only your wife’s mother but her aunts, too, are your mothers-in-law. And that same term often applies across the family tree, at many removes. For me, this adds up to scores of women. It’s one of those things you live with when your family, like ours, straddles cultural lines on a daily basis.

It’s difficult to write about my experiences with my family, because Indians are so routinely objectified by America’s mainstream culture. That’s what was happening when the photographer stepped between grandmother and grandson.

It’s easy to understand why the photographer came to the parade. It provides an excellent opportunity to view and appreciate traditional Crow beadwork and regalia. As powwows go, Crow Fair is also quite large, plus thousands of Crows camp out for the week in teepees, which makes a picturesque backdrop. It’s normal to see whole crews from the Smithsonian, National Geographic or the BBC pitch temporary camps along the parade route.

You’ve seen the end products on television, in calendars and on postcards as well as in art galleries and other public spaces. As I write this, a series of Crow Fair portraits hang on the walls at the Community Food Co-op in Bozeman. As is usually the case, the images are anonymous: “Crow Fair Portrait #7.”

With the click of the shutter, the individual gets transformed from a kid, say, into an impersonal commodity (Indian at a powwow). The photograph, and not the person in the photo, is the work of art.

I’m picking on photography, and not news or media in general, because most news stories and television programs on powwows, loaded as they are with empty platitudes about tradition, are little more than vehicles for the colorful images: a gentle-faced brown-eyed child in a fearsome war bonnet, an aging veteran with a stately visage and a craggy nose.

It’s hard to know quite what to think about this. It would be easy to lay a blanket of disdain on the photographers, but that ignores the broader cultural issues.

To start with, you could argue, from an economic development standpoint, that photography of non-religious Native ceremonies attracts tourists and puts money in Indian pockets. You’d be right. Likewise, you might suggest that those photographs celebrate one of the most beautiful aspects of Native American culture. Hard to argue with that.

Yet the idealized images also contribute to a binary view of Indian culture. One hand holds the noble Indian. The other—reinforced by the flat, two-dimensional quality of the first—has the usual unflattering stereotypes.

And even viewed in the most favorable light, those impersonal images of brown faces and colorful outfits miss the most important aspects of the daily parade and of Crow Fair itself.

In the mornings from Thursday to Sunday in our camp, my mothers-in-law lead the preparation of whoever is going to be in the parade. It’s a painstaking ritual. (It’s common to see people doing beadwork the day before and continuing by kerosene lamplight late into the night, desperately completing a beaded belt or pair of arm bands.) The outfits are specific, each piece assembled just so. The horse gets rigged up. Then horse and rider head for the start of the route.

At 10 a.m., a cannon booms. As at all the camps, we haul folding chairs from beneath the shady arbor at our eating area. (The temporary city of thousands of teepees and wall tents is organized in family clusters, each around a central cooking and eating area.) The parade is one of the few moments when the entire community joins together in one casual, relaxing event.

The togetherness makes it a perfect time to take photographs of the spectators, which is what I like to do. Ironically, it’s actually difficult, when doing so, to avoid collecting images of the non-Indian photographers, who seem to suddenly appear in the shots, most often at the edges but sometimes in the center of the frame.

This isn’t a lamentation. After all, the vast majority of the cameras (especially if you include camera phones) at Crow Fair, as any casual survey of the parade route will show, are in the hands of family members taking pictures of each other.

But I would like to point out what’s missing, aside from the names and identities of the subjects, in those photos in the gift shops and the anonymous tourist albums:

It’s the expertise and labor—usually undertaken as a gift to the wearer—that went into the beadwork and blankets and other parts of the outfits. It’s the tightly knit social fabric that keeps this powwow, rodeo and parade continuing, year after year, for no reason other than the joy and momentum of a long and specific cultural tradition. And it’s the real, complex human identity of people like my mother-in-law’s grandson, which can never be captured in a “Crow Fair Portrait.”

The Indelible Search for Buzzworthy Buttons

8-25-08

	“Get your buttons,” said Qiana Holmes, who hasn’t stopped to think about the collectibility of her wares. Too busy keeping up with demand.

Mike Ziri’s first political buttons in Denver?

“I’ll get an Illinois and an Indiana,” Ziri said.

Ziri stood outside the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Qiana Holmes pulled his buttons from a board, which then blew over in a strong gust. He’s not a collector, yet. Today he’s just looking for cool buttons.

That’s the first rule offered by the American Political Items Collectors, which holds conventions of its own: collect what you like.

Ziri’s a delegate from Illinois to the Democratic National Convention, and he’s meeting up with a friend from Indiana. He craned his neck, looking around. That seemed to be what everyone was doing.

“Business is good, except for the wind,” Holmes said. Her Arizona-based business makes buttons and T-shirts and follows Barack Obama’s campaign. Delegates and tourists love buttons that reference their home state, she said. That lets her know the geographic origin of the crowds that move past her.

“Texas went fast, so they’re here,” Holmes said.

Another popular button features Rosy the Riveter, rolling up her sleeves.

“I have that. It went fast,” Holmes said.

Buttons are getting a lot of attention this year. There’s even a pilgrimage to Denver by a crew who are chronicling themselves on youtube.

Near the convention Kerry Tucker plied his original designs. He’s new to buttons, an opportunist. His are less conventional. He’s trying to stand out from the crowd of lapel messagery. One says, “I heart black people.”

Two years ago, guitar-toting peace activist Hans Vermeersch thought of a great button for an Oregon race he briefly worked for: “Folk the Vote.”

“They were, ‘It sounds too much like….’ Yeah! That’s the whole point! It’s buzzworthy,” Vermeersch said.

For Natives, It Feels Good to be Change-Makers

In Denver, some 134 delegates from across Indian Country are convening, hoping to showcase the power of the Indian vote this presidential season and grab the attention of the nation’s leaders.

8-25-08

	The Indian vote is making the difference in Montana, said Jason Smith and Ryan Rusche, right.

Wolf Point is a long way from anywhere, but the small Montana town on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation far on the windy flats of eastern Montana has a field office for Barack Obama.

When the Obama campaign telephoned Ryan Rusche, an Obama delegate and the county attorney there, asking how long it would take him to find office space, he replied, “About 15 minutes.”

At noon Monday, Rusche and Jason Smith, of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes from the Flathead Indian Reservation, gathered with most of the rest of the 134 delegates from across Indian Country in a room in the Colorado Convention Center in Denver on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.

While some in the room extolled the record number of delegates, Rusche and Smith talked about the decade-long swell of the Indian vote’s importance in Montana.

“You could argue that Indians tipped the balance in the Senate,” Smith said, referring to the high turnout on Montana reservations in 2006 that gave an edge to challenger Jon Tester, a Democrat, in his white-knuckle-tight race against Republican Sen. Conrad Burns. Tester helped give the Democrats a slim majority in the Senate.

The same could happen this year in the presidential race, he said.

This year primaries in some Montana districts had Indians running against Indians, added Rusche. Then the two talked about the importance of Indian candidates and the reservation vote in Montana.

Not everyone in the room felt buoyed by their state. The Washington tribes had only three delegates this year, compared to five in 2004. Washington did have several representatives of its Native get-out-the-vote campaign.

“I’m a Lummi,” said Julie Johnson of Clollam County, “and I’m a delegate from Washington state.”

Johnson said she had been telling young people to get involved.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I’d better get involved,’” she said with a laugh. She was sitting next to her friend and the former chairwoman of the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecelia Fire Thunder.

“Obama had better mention Indian people Thursday night in his speech,” Fire Thunder said, “Or I’m not going to campaign for him.”

Johnson wrapped her arm around Fire Thunder’s shoulders, laughing, “Don’t say that!”

“I mean it. He’d better mention Indian people Thursday night. He needs to recognize us in his speech.”

Then Fire Thunder got serious.

“I wanted Hillary in there,” she said. “For Hillary to get as far as she did, it’s a blessing. It shows we can break away from oppression, that we can think, feel and be politicians as good as anyone.”

The same goes for Obama, Fire Thunder added.

“I never thought I’d see a woman or a person of color make it this far. It’s not a good-old-white-boy’s-club anymore,” she said.