Leaving Montana--Chapter two, part 2

Although I spent nearly every day for eighteen years with Mom, most of it with just the two of us eating and working or studying, relaxing and sleeping, in our tiny apartments and house, I hardly know more about Mom’s life before her marriage than I do about Dad’s, and most of what I do know I learned from the stories of others. Perhaps I was strangely uncurious, but I had the sense that she was reticent to talk about her life with Dad or in college, or growing up in Montana.

I know that Mom was born in Chicago, and that Grandma and Grandpa spent much of their time apart during the time that Mom and her younger sister Nonie were young: the winters were too harsh and the Montana frontier too raw when Grandpa first set up his business in Glasgow. I know that eventually they did build a house in Glasgow and that Mom graduated from high school there and went to the University of Montana, and that Nonie went East a few years later to study music at Northwestern, in Chicago.

Most of what I know about Grandpa I learned after he died. Grandpa once told me that when he was a boy in Lithuania he wanted to be a poet—in fact, I think he said that he was a poet. He spent a lot of time as a teenager in an orchard, reading, but whether his family was poor or rich, whether his life was urban or rural, I don’t know. He told me that he left Lithuania around 1907 because the Russians were killing or oppressing families like his, and he came to the United States to have a better life, perhaps at first to simply survive. I have never known anyone who was more devoted to his adopted country than Grandpa Orvis, or anyone more passionately grateful for all of the good things that happened for him and his family because he became an American.

Years after he retired--about 1958--the newspaper in Glasgow interviewed him about his years as a pioneer merchant in Eastern Montana. I have filed away that article in some forgotten place where it will be found by my grandchildren, but what I remember is that Grandpa at first lived in Chicago where there were many other Lithuanians and where he had relatives: a cousin named Cliff who was prospering in the furniture business, and another cousin with whom he lived, a vaudeville comedian named Jack Benny, who was just getting started.

The railroads were heavily promoting the availability of farmland in the Dakotas and eastern Montana, and a lot of new immigrants from Sweden and Norway, Germany, Scotland, Latvia and Lithuania—all used to both stubbornly unyielding earth and harsh weather—were tempted by the promise of cheap land to try their luck at dry farming. The railroads had been encouraged to build rail lines tying the Midwest to the west coast by grants of free land from the government for their right of ways. They were given alternate sections of land along the tracks to help them recover their investment in steel and railroad ties and labor. They could log that land, sell it for farms or towns, or use it for anything else they thought might turn a profit. Look at a map of Montana that shows who owns the land and you can still see the pattern of alternating mile-square blocks of railroad land along the original tracks of the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and Milwaukee railroads.

What the railroads wanted was settlers whose household furnishings and supplies and fuel and relatives they could move west, and whose produce of grain and cattle and sheep and sugar beets they could move east. About every ten miles along their right-of-ways they built a siding and a station and started a tiny town. Some of these towns still survive today, but many more were abandoned when their settlers could not make a crop during drought years or better prospects elsewhere tempted them to move on.

Grandpa’s cousin Clifford apparently saw a chance for Grandpa in one of these settlements: if people were settling they would need nails and hammers and gloves and cloth and thread and needles and ready-to-wear clothes and pots and pans and chairs and tables: they couldn’t bring everything with them, and what dry goods they brought would quickly be used up. Cliff provided Grandpa with enough goods to get him started, packed in large shipping crates, and Grandpa joined the westward migration. He landed in Glasgow, Montana, near where the Milk River snaking, down from Canada, joins the Missouri. What Grandpa found was a rough prairie town with a few wooden buildings set out along the railroad tracks, half of them bars or hotels or restaurants. He set up business in the back of a building that housed a bar, and he turned one or two of his packing crates into a shack.

Grandpa told the interviewer that he and a lot of others nearly died during the first few winters, barely holding on through temperatures that were steadily between minus twenty and minus thirty, with constant winds. Few of the early settlers had the money to buy his goods; they had barely enough to buy groceries to supplement what they had grown the previous summer. Grandpa’s packing crates were uninsulated. He had no money for fuel, and firewood was scarce on the eastern plains of Montana. The railway crews kept Grandpa and many others alive by dropping coal off the tenders while they were loading and unloading at the Glasgow station. When the trains left Grandpa would scavenge the tracks and bring back to his packing crate shack’s stove enough coal to keep a fire burning through the night. If the drifting snows of a big blizzard kept the trains from getting through and there was no coal, after burning any scraps of wood or cardboard he could find, he would burn a little of his stock of furniture—a chair or a table or a chest. There were nights when he was not sure that he would wake up the next morning.