Montana - Day 17 - across Montana's plains

Trafton Park Campground, Malta

Wednesday, 17 August 2022

Before leaving Ft. Benton this morning, Dext and I wandered down the street from the campground, looking for any place with grass.  A couple of blocks away we found what was obviously a church, with a nice yard of grass, but I couldn't find a sign anywhere on it that said what denomination it was.  That just seemed weird (chalk up another weird thing about Ft. Benton) but the 2nd time we went there, I finally located a very small sign attached to the building near the front door, half hidden by overgrown bushes.  I didn't want to walk so closely to the building just to read their sign, but when I stopped for gas on the way out, a guy at the next pump told me it was an LDS church.

I'd read somewhere about a dog named Shep and his grave here, and as we were driving out of town, I saw the big sign that said "SHEP" up on a hilltop.  Shep actually made it into Ripley's Believe It Or Not! and I'm attaching a link to a local news item about it from a few years ago.   https://www.krtv.com/remembering-shep-the-forever-faithful-dog-of-ft-benton

today's route

I crossed the Marias River at Loma and then got blared at by a semi driver.  He was towing double trailers and had been following me fairly closely for a while.  There was no shoulder at all, but I signaled and slowed down and pulled to the right side of the lane so he could pass.  The trouble was that I didn't realize he had a car behind him and that driver decided to pull out to pass us both.  This forced the semi driver to brake suddenly and he had trouble doing it of course.  But by then there was nothing I could do to help the situation, so the semi driver blared at me for what the other guy did - passing everything in sight all at once.  And the real problem was that the double load was too much for the conditions on a road like this one, where neither I nor the guy behind him could see the other and the weight of the 2 trailers made it hard for him to stop.  Anyway, I hope that's the only time I get yelled at in Montana for trying to be nice.

Most of the vast fields I passed were cultivated.

A sign said I was passing the Bears Paw Mountains.

I got to the town of Big Sandy, home of US Sen. John Testy, and we stopped at the city park, which is a designated highway rest area.  But it turned out to be a rest area only for humans, not for the critters so many of us travel with.  The fence around the park was plastered with signs saying "No Dogs Allowed," so I walked Dext around the perimeter of the fence.  Only when we got out to the edge along the road, we found there were stickers along there and it was hard walking for poor Dext.

There really wasn't much of a place for us to walk except the large dirt parking area, but I took him to a nearby gazebo where I found a couple of signs about the town.

I would have liked to see the "world's largest
tractor" but, unfortunately, it was not in sight.

I suppose the "Big Sandy" sign is entertaining, but by this time I was so peeved with this town (no dogs on the grass, stickers off the grass, not even a large tractor) that I (like Queen Victoria) was not amused.

I passed a sign that pointed to a road for "Rocky Boy Agency" and for "Stone Child College."  I didn't think I'd read those right until I looked them up.  Stone Child College is the name of a college affiliated with the Chippewa-Cree Tribe and located in Rocky Boy Agency, a census-designated area.  I've seen quite a few places with the word "agency" in their name, all of them Indian-related.  But I still haven't figured out quite what that word refers to.  The Rocky Boy Indian Reservation has been designated as land belonging to the Chippewa-Cree Tribe, and I guess the Rocky Boy Agency is a town within that land?

By the way, Montana is the only state that has a tribally-controlled college on all of its reservations.

Especially here in Montana, I've been seeing so many Canadian license plates that I'm able to identify their province almost as easily as I can the state license plates.

I saw a sort of Burma-Shave series of signs:

     For every white cross

     A trip to Heaven

     A wreck sent one

     But smoking sent seven.

     Say No to Corporate Tobacco.

I've tried but can't quite find anything that seems to relate to this "corporate tobacco" thing.  The state department of health is advocating for teenagers to avoid tobacco, of course.  And a few years ago the state attorney general discovered that tobacco companies have been reneging on the consent decree they, Montana, and 45 other states reached to pay annual compensation to account for the greater need each state has had to fill for health services because of tobacco use.  The settlement was signed in 1998 and I can't tell if the tobacco companies ever made any of those annual payments, or if they did but stopped after a couple of years.  Anyway, in 2020 the Montana AG filed suit to enforce the consent decree (plus accrued interest) for lack of payment in the last 10 years.

We came to the town of Havre, "The Pride of the Hi-Line," they say.  The "Hi-Line" is US-2, a highway I pick up here in Havre.  It gets its name from being the most northerly east-west highway in the state.  The town has a very large park that has "No Dogs" signs plastered all over.  I thought Montana was supposed to be a state that valued wide open spaces and freedom, and maybe they are, but they sure don't seem to like dogs.

We ended up walking around the neighborhood a bit.

This road without shoulders is a problem in a farming area.  I got stuck behind 3 large pieces of farm equipment plus a moving van plus a truck with a sign saying "oversized load."  The farm equipment was going 25 mph in a 70 mph zone that was also a "no passing" zone and I wasn't the only one frustrated with the situation.  We all got to a space with a passing lane and the farm guys politely moved way over, but one of them had tires so huge it took up more than his lane and into the passing lane - on a curve with the passing lane running out quickly.  All three of us followers made it past them, but this road wasn't designed for farm traffic and for the rest of us.

In Chinook, I found what I thought was a small park that actually turned out to be a green area for a statue next to a retirement home.  But we stopped anyway and walked around the block.  Here's that statue.

At first, I thought this was Will Rogers, but a plaque said
it's the famous artist Charles M. Russell.

Odd that they didn't want a statue of a guy in a hat.
I thought everybody wore hats back then
(and I still think most men look better in them).

A dress shop in town was called "All Dahl'd Up."  The owner's last name is Dahl - but you knew that.

I saw a large sign on a fence that said, "Protect Our Children!  Vote Republican!"  

After leaving Chinook, I got into a long line of vehicles stuck behind 3 extra-large pieces of farm equipment - the same ones I got stuck behind earlier.  This time they were kind enough to pull over in the large parking lot of a defunct bar so we could all go by.

In the territory of the Ft. Belknap Indian Reservation, I passed a pink church that looked like one of the old Catholic mission churches.  The sign said "Pink Church" and then an inscription in a Native language.  I looked it up and learned that it was built in 1931 as the Sacred Heart Catholic Church.  It stopped being used in 1964, but the graveyard beside it is still in use.  I didn't stop to take a photo, though I wish I had, but I've found a web page of a photographer who did stop.  Along with the Pink Church (the 4th photo on the page), he's included other abandoned buildings - mostly in Montana though a few are in Vermont - in photographs so beautiful they look like paintings.   https://bigskyjournal.com/beauty-in-decay  They show what the countryside around here looks like.

Besides that, one of them - the 6th photo down - shows grain elevators in Rapelje, MT, and those are the tall narrow square buildings I've been seeing here and there.  The ones that I couldn't figure out at first what they could possibly be but finally decided maybe they were grain elevators.  And sure enough, this photo says they are.

I think the only state I haven't seen a license plate for here in Montana is Rhode Island.  I'm pretty sure I've seen all the others.  Strange that they should all end up in Montana (not the popular destinations of Nevada or Arizona, for instance).  Although maybe I'll see them all again when I do my month in Florida.

I crossed the Milk River twice; it runs beside the campground I'm going to tonight.

Near the town of Dodson, I saw 4 white †s at a railroad crossing.  They tell a sad story all on their own.

I saw horses and cows and calves all in a field together.

I passed a historical marker titled "Early Day Outlaws" and was curious enough to look it up.  Both the marker and additional information farther down on the page talk about the Great Northern Train Robbery, where Kid Curry, Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid and others stole somewhere between "a bag of gold coins" and $83,000, depending on the source.

It was mid-afternoon when we got to Malta and I went straight to the campground.  That's partly because I wasn't sure if we were going to stay there or not and, if not, I wanted time to find someplace else.  All I knew was that it was a city park, that they didn't take reservations (which made me nervous about there not being space available), and that they didn't provide utilities.

It turned out to be a very nice city park, though not particularly developed.  In fact, the city was doing a lot of construction there during the day, so I guess they're making improvements.  But it had lots of very large silverleaf maples, and I found a fairly level spot, so I decided to stay.  On the way into town we'd passed one of the regular RV parks I'd found online, but I noticed their RV sites were in a gravel-covered lot and knew Dext wouldn't like that nearly as much as this place with dirt RV sites.

Camping was on the honor system - they asked folks to deposit $5 in a metal box, which I did.  Despite the beautiful trees, we were hot so I turned on the generator to be able to use the AC.  And tonight, for the first time in all these years of travel, I decided to run the generator all night so we could have the AC all night.  The forecast for this afternoon was 95° with 60° overnight, but I knew we wouldn't get that low until about 7:00 tomorrow morning.  I didn't want to sacrifice privacy just to have open windows for the night air, which is what we'd need to make the warm night bearable for sleeping.  I've always figured the generator noise would drive me crazy and I wouldn't sleep - but desperate times call for desperate measures (or something like that).