Montana - Day 18 - continuing east on the Hi-Line

America First RV Park, Sidney

Thursday, 18 August 2022

The silverleaf maples in the Malta campground were 10'-15' in diameter.  I understand this is a fast-growing tree, but these were still some really big trees.

The town of Malta got its name from the railroad (as did so much of the rest of the country).  The Great Northern Railroad came through in 1887 and the town was established around it.  In 1890, when they were applying for a post office, a Great Northern official spun a globe and plunked down his finger . . . on Malta, in the Mediterranean.  Hence, the town's name.

Gasoline here was $4.09 for regular at a Cenex.

I'd intended to visit the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum yesterday, because they have one of the best-preserved dinosaurs ever discovered and one of the few that were fossilized.  For that I was even willing to pay the $5 entrance fee.  But I wasn't willing to drive any more yesterday than I already had and I didn't want to walk to the museum without Dext (and I was sure they wouldn't let him inside).  And today, I could go but they don't open until 10:00, so it's something I have to put on a list of places to visit when I come back with more time.

today's route

As I drove from town, I saw wide lumpy plains.  Lumpy as in what a comforter on your bed looks like after it's been used.  It all seemed to be grazing land along here.

I noticed a couple of historical markers by the road, but it wasn't them as much as it was the other display there that convinced me to stop.

Not the sort of display I usually see at a pull-out on the highway.

See these rocks below.

The Sleeping Buffalo rock is on the right, and
the Medicine Rock is the one in the sun on the left.

The 2nd historical marker at this pullout is a complete non sequitur, but I'm including it because I thought it was interesting.

". . . opens to the tourist the door of the treasure-box . . ."?
I don't know if it's good or bad that we don't talk like that any more.

At the town of Saco, a sign told me I'd find the "restored Chet Huntley school."  I didn't go look because I hadn't heard he was from here.  But he was.  This is Chet Huntley, the other half of the Huntley-Brinkley News team with David Brinkley.  We watched them every night.  They were displaced for prominence by Walter Cronkite, though our family stuck with the originals.  Anyway, Chet Huntley did indeed grow up here, and the one-room school he went to is indeed still here.  I was sorry to have missed it.

I saw a partly flooded field with 100 little birds feeding there.

I saw huge farms of silos - well, it seemed like that because there were so many silos and they were all so large and all grouped together.  Quite a few groupings like this.  And vast fields of grain.

I thought earlier I'd seen smoke (very worrisome in this dry area) but I think now it was just a vehicle driving on an unpaved road.  Lots of unpaved roads around here.

Past Hinsdale, we crossed the Milk River again - this is the river that ran through last night's campground - and here it didn't look quite as silty/milky as it did in Malta.

I stopped at a rest area to walk Dexter and enjoyed some of the informational signs they had here.

These were all displayed together near the restrooms.

(I'd like to meet the person who came up with this one.)

Do you suppose the highway department is trying
to drum up public support for increasing its budget?

Those are pretty high percentages, considering from 
October to May they've got snow and ice on the roads.

I'd never heard of "dyed diesel" before this
sign, but I've since seen it where I'm pumping
regular gasoline.

enlargements below

Curious, I looked up the obvious similarities of mammoths and elephants
and learned that elephants, both Asian and African, are close cousins to
mammoths.  They have a common ancestor. 
Surprisingly, elephants are also related to manatees.

Showing how the ancient glaciers covered northern Montana.

We walked all around the rest area but had to contend with what seemed like thousands of grasshoppers.  Actually, I thought they were grasshoppers, but then I remembered seeing them in these quantities last year at this time and checked my blog posts in South Dakota (next door to Montana, after all).  Toward the end of that month, I wrote about how grasshoppers tend to just hop, while locusts use their wings to fly.  All these bugs were doing a lot of flying.  Also, last year I noticed those critters had dark wings with yellow on them, and these critters do to.  So I'm guessing we've got locusts here at the rest area.  (Good thing I'm keeping this blog so I don't have to keep relearning the same things.)

And for some history more recent than mammoths:

Back on the road, I've been noticing that maybe a majority of both the towns and the ranches I see have metal signs with designs and their names cut out of the metal.  Some metal worker has a very healthy business in Montana.

I noticed the turn for a town called Tampico and wondered how it got its name.  I still wonder that because nothing I could find online told me.  Tampico in Mexico (meaning "place of otters") was named for a large number of otters in the area.  Since they had to run an irrigation ditch and put up a dam in this area of Montana to get a water supply, I'm guessing there aren't many otters here.  It didn't look like the area was colonized by immigrants from Mexico, so maybe the name is something lost in the mists of history.

The town of Glasgow was named in the same way Malta was named: railroad folks spun a globe and plunked a finger down on Glasgow, Scotland.  I drove past the 1915 "historic Glasgow Hotel," now called "Rundle Suites" with the hotel recently remodeled and named for the original building owner, and through the clearly historic downtown area.  Glasgow was established in 1887 as a train stop, reaching its heyday in the 1930s (construction of the New Deal Fort Peck Dam) and the 1940s (WWII Glasgow Army Air Field, used for bombardment squadrons and a German POW camp).  But it still has 3,200 residents and is the leading town in the area.  The high school mascot is the Scotties.  I found gasoline right at $4.00/gallon here.

A little farther on I came to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and the towns of Nashua, Frazer and Oswego.  It was in this area that I passed a historical marker titled "In Memoriam."  I wasn't able to stop but was curious because of the title.  Though I had a hard time finding it online, I finally did and it refers to a trading company's steamboat that came from St. Louis in 1838, carrying a smallpox outbreak among the crew.  Of course the local tribes caught it and, because they had zero immunity to it, 94% of one of the tribes was killed.  This marker was erected to mourn their passing.

US-2 is called the Dolly Smith Akers Memorial Highway in this area.  Ms. Akers was the first Native American woman to be elected to the Montana House of Representatives.  This was in 1932 and, while there may have been some opposition to her election, she got almost 100% of the vote so there couldn't have been much.

Back between Nashua and Frazer, the Milk River ran into the Missouri River, which was now my companion along the drive.  

A historical marker at Wolf Point explained that this was considered the halfway point between Bismarck, ND, and Fort Benton for travelers on the Missouri River.  They'd stop here at Wolf Point to gather more wood.  The story goes that one winter "trappers" poisoned several hundred wolves in the area, and I guess wolves haven't been a problem in town since then.  (They should have changed their name.)

We stopped here at a small rest area, and a young man came up before I'd gotten out of the driver's seat to ask for money.  He said he was "basically homeless."  I didn't ask what that meant.  He was quite thin and shaking, and my moderately educated guess was that he used drugs as often as he could afford them.  In one of the cupholders, I keep change from paying cash at gas stations, and I gave him most of that stash - and he asked if I had anything more.  Never had anyone do that before.  I told him that's what I had to give him.  I saw him sitting at a picnic table counting it and then walking off toward town.  There may have just barely been enough to buy a cheap hamburger, and I'm sure there wasn't enough for drugs.  But I felt sorry for him.  One of the Lost Boys.

This being the road construction season in Montana (of necessity very short) I've seen a lot of construction zones.  And I can say that Montana is the best state I've seen for posting "end of road work" signs right at the end of the actual construction.  I heard of a driver in another state who'd been cited for speeding because she'd returned to the posted speed limit before she got to the end of the posted construction zone.  We all know in most states there're sometimes miles of clear road between the road work and the "end of road work" signs.  Unlike other states, Montana plays fair.

A sign told me the Port of Scobey ("the most isolated county seat in America") was to the left 48 miles, and Canada was 62 miles away.  I keep forgetting I'm so close to an international border and appreciate signs like that helping to reorient me.

Speaking of road construction, between Poplar and Brockton I went through about 5 miles of construction zone intricate enough to need a pilot car.

I passed a field where 6 horses looked like a scene out of a movie: their heads were all together and they were standing in a semi-circle.

Near Culbertson, in another field I saw 10 or 12 cows all bunched up together so closely it was hard for me to see how many there were.  I remember hearing somewhere that cows are calmed by being pressed on the sides - I guess the way people are calmed by a hug.  Maybe these cows were doing self-help?

After having taken it much of the way across Montana, we finally left US-2 before it ran into North Dakota, and we crossed the Missouri River again.

I passed fields of corn, hay bales, working oil wells in the middle of grain fields, and a batch of silos labeled American Harvest.  That company turned out to "provide the highest quality hemp products on the market," they say.

The town of Sidney calls itself "Montana's Sunrise City" and the map agrees it's the farthest east town in the state.

We stopped at Veteran's Memorial Park for a break.

The plaque is enlarged at right.

They're proud of this native son,
despite the grammatical error.

In my photo of that statue above, you can just see a young woman and 2 of her 3 small boys - all of them looking no older than 5.  You can see this was a big park, and while we were there I watched her walk from that shelter you can see in the background, all the way over to this end of the park, stopping here and there to get her kids to climb here or stand there for a photo or run around in another place.  And most of the time, the 3 boys were following her in single file like a line of little ducklings after their mama.  It was really cute and I was fascinated with her patience.  As we drove away, I passed an SUV with a Montana license plate that read "BOYMAMA" and feel certain it was hers.

It wasn't much farther to the campground where we'll be staying for the next 3 nights.  This campground had recently changed ownership (as evidenced by the conflicting signs at the entrance and on Google), and the new owners didn't seem to have quite gotten organized yet.   A sign at the entrance told me to call a number, and despite it being about 2:00 (usual time for campers to arrive), nobody answered so I left a message.  While I was waiting, I noticed a big sign saying "God Bless America - 2 Chronicles 7:14."  I'd already been a little leery of this place because of its name - America First - and was afraid I might be in the middle of a Trump supporters campground (I heard about them in Nevada).  This sign might just be patriotic, which is fine, but it didn't make me stop worrying.

After waiting a bit and still no return phone call, I drove over to the clearly visible office on the other side of the campground, and sure enough - one of the owners was in there and she got me situated.  But instead of having already assigned me a spot, as she'd suggested on the phone last week, she was just casually letting me pick my spot - so I opted for shade (it was supposed to be warm all weekend).

Later I looked up the Bible reference and found this: "If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land."  That seems like an odd passage of the Bible to cite.  But here we were for the next several days.