This excerpt is published by agreement with The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions, milkweed.org. Copyright © 2024 by Chris La Tray. All rights reserved. It may not be republished without the express consent of The Permissions Company, LLC.
Chris La Tray wil host book release events Aug. 21 in Missoula, Aug. 23 in Great Falls, Aug. 27 in Bozeman, Aug. 28 in Billings, Aug. 29 in Helena, and Aug. 30 in Lewistown. See the author’s website for details.
Chapter 17: 2020 — Choteau, Montana
It’s a midmorning in February with a storm barreling toward me from off the Front Range of the Rockies when I pull up in front of an unassuming ranch house on a quiet street in Choteau, Montana. Despite being so deep into winter there isn’t any snow on the ground, and it really isn’t that cold . . . yet. By the end of the day that will all change, and being a three-hour drive from home, I’m trying to stay ahead of it.
I park my car and get out. I start up the walkway to the entrance of the house. From inside the inner door opens, and a figure appears behind the storm door. That door swings wide with a springy rasp and a tall, lean man in denim and a blue western shirt with colorful patterning across the chest and sleeves steps outside and holds the door open. He has clean-shaven, angular features over a rectangular face and wears wire-rimmed glasses. His white hair is close-cropped. He looks at his watch, then at me, and flashes a crooked smile. “You’re right on time, on the dot!” he says. He offers his hand. We’re off to a good start.
The man’s name is Al Wiseman. I’ve known of him for far longer than I’ve known him. Few have done more to keep the story of Montana’s Métis people alive than Al. I met Al briefly once before, and we spoke on the phone to coordinate this sit-down, but this will be the first time I get to spend significant time with him. The opportunity, I soon realize, is a gift. This meeting marks the beginning of one of the most important relationships of my life.
“Our people settled west of here years ago, but it wasn’t until later years that they came into town,” Al tells me from a chair at his kitchen table just a couple blocks shy of downtown Choteau. Coffee has been offered and accepted, and the small talk is behind us. “They came to the canyon later in the 1800s. They weren’t all involved with the Riel thing in Canada” [the North-West Rebellion of 1885, led by Métis revolutionary Louis Riel], “they were always here. I myself knew some people who were involved when they were little kids.”
Al is referring to a Métis settlement in a place called Teton Canyon, tucked away against the eastern face of the northern reaches of the Rocky Mountain Front. At its height, over a hundred people lived in this community along the South Fork of the Teton River, approximately thirty miles west of Choteau, less than an hour’s drive over mostly dirt roads from Al’s home. It’s beautiful country, and no one alive knows it or its history better than Al does. It’s his family history.
“My mother always made sure that she told us, even when we were little bitty kids, who we were, where we come from,” Al says. “We know a lot about what went on up here because we had so many good teachers. But now all the good teachers are gone. Now I’m the teacher.”
A lot went on “up there,” and Al Wiseman is an excellent teacher. I learn this firsthand when, months later, we make a summer visit to the old Métis community. By now, over subsequent encounters and several phone calls, we’ve become friends, and Al, along with my cousin Kim, is probably the person in my wider Native community I talk to most.
On this particular hot, smoky day, we’re walking through a narrow, weedy stretch of grass that just looks like unused pasture to me. Al sees something different. He points out serviceberry bushes whose ancestors provided much-needed sustenance during lean years to his. Gesturing at a depression in the ground, Al asks me what I think it is, and when my imagination falters he describes it as the remnants of an old root cellar — suddenly I realize there are several in the immediate vicinity — then tells the story of how he once stopped a young man from the nearby Pine Butte Preserve, a conservation area owned by the Nature Conservancy, from “filling in the holes” with a tractor. He laughs and shakes his head.
The Conservancy actually owns all this land, which was never “technically” owned by any of the Métis families but one: the Bruno family (Little Shell enrollment officer Linda Watson’s family, to be specific), who relinquished their final claims in 1930. The rest of the land was simply taken out from under the Métis settlers by homesteaders filing claims to this already-occupied land, as if the people there were mere squatters. Then the land changed hands over the years, as all the stolen land in America has, until we reach the current owners: groups like the Nature Conservancy, whose website describes the area in this way:
Pine Butte is part of a landscape that the Blackfeet people have called home for countless generations. The Old North Trail, used by Native Americans for thousands of years, cuts through the preserve. Tipi rings and a buffalo jump and associated drive lanes testify to the presence of prehistoric plains dwellers. Scant remains of homestead structures dot the preserve, while ranching activities continue as they have for the past century. The location of a Métis settlement from the late 1800s and early 1900s along the South Fork of the Teton River now serves as our management headquarters.
We’re standing in the middle of that settlement. From here, we can see the log cabin where the writer Joseph Kinsey Howard lived, near the Nature Conservancy buildings. On the way up from Choteau we also passed the larger cabin where A. B. Guthrie — author of the classic fur-trade novel “The Big Sky” as well as 1950 Pulitzer Prize–winner “The Way West” — once lived.
It’s generally accepted that the community began in the early 1870s, but Al, whose family arrived via social connections made just a short jaunt south at St. Peter’s Mission in the 1880s, says he’s seen documentation that establishes settlement as early as 1862, and probably earlier. Either way, when the Métis founders first arrived they lived in tents and tipis, but over time those dwellings were replaced by cabins. It was hardscrabble, subsistence living. Water came from the river, and there was no electricity. The people grew what food they could, supplemented by foraging, and they hunted and fished.
Even through the haze of wildfire smoke the view is breathtaking. Craggy mountain peaks rise all around us, and the South Fork of the Teton River is both visible and audible from where we stand, rushing over and around rocks and deadfall pine and cottonwoods, even at this point in the summer when flows are low. It’s as beautiful a spot as I can imagine living in, and I tell Al so much. He nods, and tears well up in his eyes.
“These mountains kept our people alive with food and with their timber,” Al says. “We always had horsepower. When homesteaders came in and started making claims they had to make improvements on their places to keep them And they wouldn’t have survived their first winter without us! So that’s where our people fell in with [selling] fencing material, house logs, corral poles, just generally anything to get [a homesteader] set up. And then they sold firewood. They called themselves woodhawkers. A lot of the women went out right with the men. A double-bit ax and a crosscut saw, that’s all they had.”
These woodhawkers (like my Grandpa Mose not so far away in Lewistown) would load their wagons and head for the growing town of Choteau, making the twenty-five-to-thirty-mile trip in one or two days. (“I can show you where they camped!” Al tells me. “My grandfather showed me!”) They might make ten dollars a load, or perhaps barter the wood for other needed supplies like groceries, harnesses, or oats.
They were known then as the “Canyon People.” Over time, and as attitudes toward them changed, their community became known as “Breed Town.”
“You don’t hear too much anymore about that half-breed stuff, you know,” Al says, not without some bitterness. “When you were calling us half-breeds, if you’re more than one blood [of anything] you were talking about yourself! But back then, you know, we were just ‘dirty old half-breeds,’ and ‘drunken half-breeds.’”
It’s astounding to look closely at a map that shows all the places the Métis people spread out across the landscape to either establish settlements or live on the fringes of existing ones, even if one merely focuses on Montana. Métis were well established in the state before it became a territory in May 1864, let alone by the time it became the forty-first state in November 1889.
From the extreme upper-northeast corner of the state — like the towns of Plentywood, Scobey, and Opheim — all the way to the western border with Idaho and beyond in towns like St. Regis and Stevensville, Métis lived here. Settlements across the Hi-Line that are connected one to the next by Highway 2; places like Glasgow, Malta, Harlem, Chinook, and Havre. Towns on the other tribal reservations — Poplar, Wolf Point, Hardin, Browning, Heart Butte, Pablo, and St. Ignatius — to such an extent that we are as deeply entwined as marriage-related people; we are family.
There were settlements near what passes for cities in the state today: Butte, Missoula, Billings, Helena, and Great Falls. Various forts, missions, and trading posts whose histories tend to leave out mention of the Métis at all and, when they don’t, still call us halfbreeds or even just “breeds.” There are the towns of Lewistown and Roy, where my closest generational relatives established themselves, and places like Plains, where my grandparents are buried, a community resettled from White Horse Plains way up in Canada near the original Red River settlement, now known as Winnipeg, by people who carried the name of their home with them.
The Métis Archipelago. Or, per another word that comes to mind, the Métis “diaspora.” We usually think of that term as it relates to the scattering of people in other parts of the world, not here in the United States. But according to Dictionary.com, it can also mean “any group migration or flight from a country or region” or “any group that has been dispersed outside its traditional homeland, especially involuntarily, as Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”
The Métis and our Plains Chippewa relatives exemplify the criteria for that latter definition, and the dispersal, the forcing out, began long before the events of the late 1870s into the early 1900s. Our search for a place we could call home, a new place because the original was being overrun by strangers who had no interest in sharing the land, began with the first screeching wheel of a Red River cart rolling onto the plains. As each season passed and new expeditions embarked, more families stayed “out there,” or moved on even farther. Change came fast, and Métis people are nothing if not survivors. We found places we could live and dug in as long as we could.
From the settlement clearing Al leads the way along a short path that winds through brittle shrubs and aspens up a short hill to the old Métis cemetery. Halfway up he stops and points to a spot high on the hillside. “You see that outcropping there?” he asks. “They [the Métis community] would always have a lookout up there, after the government started rounding the people up and shipping them to Canada. If anyone started coming up the canyon, they’d race down and let the people know and everyone would scatter.” He flashes his hands out for dramatic effect.
The cemetery is a small, sloping, rectangular place with several grave markers. The grass, what there is of it, is cropped short. Al, the caretaker here, has constructed not only a split rail fence surrounding the area but also a rough-hewn replica of a Red River cart. A signboard identifies who’s buried where. It’s beautiful and peaceful. Aspens with mottled, glowing white bark surround it on three sides. It is sublime in its beauty, quiet except for the rattling of the bright green aspen leaves.
Al tells me the story of an old woman he knew when he was growing up. She had come down from Canada after the North-West Rebellion of 1885 after it became too dangerous to stay. A Métis settlement on the American side of the Medicine Line [the US/Canada border] west of the town of Dupuyer she called “Little Chicago” was already there, and her family decided to head for it.
“This woman and her family came down and had ten head of stock with them,” Al says. “They only traveled at night, and they traveled in Red River carts. That’s one of the few people I ever talked to who ever traveled in one. I think she told me she was six years old. She never did say what they ate along the way because what do you carry? So I asked her one time, what did you do for food? She dropped her head and said, ‘Al, I don’t like to talk about this, but we ate a lot of gophers.’”
Al tears up as he relates the story. It took them three months to complete their journey to Little Chicago, he says. The family ended up in Teton Canyon.
“I often think of this stuff, you know,” Al says. “If it hadn’t been for their will, none of us would be here.”
Al Wiseman was born in Choteau, one of five children. His father was a German from Indiana, and his mother was Métis. The family moved from Choteau just down the road south to Gilman, near Augusta, when he was two or three. Growing up there were plenty of Indian kids around, and plenty of mixed-race kids too. Some were sent to boarding schools and came back changed.
“Boarding school kids were disconnected; they didn’t know who they were,” Al says. “So they turned to alcohol, and drugs.”
His mother made sure her children knew where they came from, but there were limits. For example, Al doesn’t speak Michif or any of the other languages — Cree maybe, or Ojibwe — that the Teton Canyon people spoke.
“The older people wouldn’t teach the language to the kids,” Al says. “Old folks would be in the cabin, visiting, playing cards, and the kids would come to the window and listen to try and learn. But they didn’t want the kids to know.”
He understands why and doesn’t blame the older folks. Think of the boarding schools. Of the punishment Indian children endured for merely speaking the languages of their ancestors.
“When you get burnt, or hurt, or however you want to say, when you’re young, you don’t want to pass that on because you don’t want your kids to go through what you went through,” he says. “If [children] don’t know it, they can’t be punished for knowing it.”
Al had his share of encounters with anti-Indian racism too. He tells me a story from when he entered high school in Augusta and signed up for a class taught by an instructor from Fort Benton. It wasn’t unusual for what all Native children experienced growing up.
“There was quite a few mixed-blood kids [in the school], but in this particular class I was the only one,” he says. “I took Spanish. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know, but at this time anything about Indian culture I could have benefitted from was taboo, you know? No one even liked to say the word ‘Indian.’ Anyway, I take Spanish, and I didn’t last too many days in there. This teacher would come by and just bypass me. He wouldn’t even look at me. I think it was the third day maybe, and he came by and he stopped at my desk and he says, ‘Al, I don’t know what you’re doing in this class.’ And I thought to myself, I don’t know what I’m doing here either. ‘I don’t think you Indian kids would understand anything about Spanish. You