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Musselshell River Is the Valley's THE UPPER MUSSELSHELL VALLEY: A GRASSROOTS AND BIOREGIONAL HISTORY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the North Dakota State University Of Agriculture and Applied Science By Miles Dwight Lewis In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY Major Department: History January 2012 Fargo, North Dakota North Dakota State University Graduate School Title THE UPPER MUSSELSHELL VALLEY: A GRASSROOTS AND BIOREGIONAL HISTORY By Miles D. Lewis The Supervisory Committee certifies that this disquisition complies with North Dakota State University’s regulations and meets the accepted standards for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: Thomas Isern Chair John Helgeland Mark Harvey Kimberly Porter Kevin Sedivec Approved: 30 January 2012 John Cox Date Department Chair ii ABSTRACT The Upper Musselshell Valley: A Grassroots and Bioregional History chronicles the history of central Montana’s Upper Musselshell Valley in an attempt to craft a viable history of region. As a corrective measure or alternate explanation that revises not only historical interpretation, but also takes into account who, or what group, is the driving force behind each distinct narrative stream (i.e. grand narrative history--histories penned by professional scholars and academics—or grassroots perspectives, the history of region as told by local dwellers), which stream is or is not authoritative, and how to modify, adjust, or meld the various interpretations in order to arrive at a more judicious, perceptive, and democratic version of history. The New Regional History is a coalescence of the grand narrative, the grassroots perspective, bioregionalism, and memory studies that is concerned with humankind’s interaction with the physical environment, and the succession of cultures within that environment. It examines the use of historical memory in the creation of regional identity in order to expose and explain regional anomalies while providing synthesis and maintaining a stance of critical scholarship. This is much more than a localized case study; it is a novel approach to the history of region that incorporates local and professional scholarship in order craft a much more viable and judicious history of place. The Upper Musselshell Valley of central Montana provides a strong proving ground for a New Regional History. It is a place rich in regional history and lore, provided by a long tradition of local narrators, while fitting within most of the grand narrative paradigms of Montana and the Great Plains in general. As with most comparable regions within the Great Plains, the Upper Musselshell Valley has never been held up to such a standard. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, and foremost, I would like to acknowledge and thank Tom Isern for having me as a graduate student, being a splendid mentor who provided everything he ever promised and much more, and friend. Without his guidance and acceptance, this work never would have come to fruition. Second to Isern, I would like to thank the members of my doctoral committee—Drs. John Helgeland, Mark Harvey, Kim Porter, John Cox, and Kevin Sedivec—for taking the time to read such a large body of text, in such short order, and provide wonderful feedback and suggestions to make it a more scholarly work. Next, and perhaps most importantly, the people of the Upper Musselshell Valley, past and present, but especially those who took time out of their day to set down an oral history with me. Their insights and recollections are invaluable, not only to this endeavor, but also for the identity and memory of future generations of Upper Musselshell Valley dwellers. I would also like to thanks my wife, Melissa Lewis, for her support over the course of this work, and my toddler son Jackson, for finally going to sleep and letting me write this. iv PREFACE The academic history of the Great Plains and of the American West in general tends to be written from a top-down perspective. Historians have primarily focused on large-scale, generalizable interactions that affect the whole of their geographical, environmental, political, economic, or social scope. They deal with locales solely within the framework of case studies; ones that are generalizable to the broader whole and reflect the universality of specific themes. Frederick Jackson Turner gave birth to the study of the American West, as a field of study, and it is a large enough an area for overarching generalizations and academic respectability. However, much as Turner was imprecise in some of his suppositions, so, too, is the field of study which he spawned. The Great Plains as a region of study, with its scholarly beginnings traced to Walter Webb, mimics the American West: it is large enough for generalization, has multiple academic centers devoted to its study, and is worthy of academic note. State histories (in this case harkening back to Montana scholars like K. Ross Toole, Joseph Kinsey Howard, and Michael Malone) also offer broad generality with their own discrete identities and narratives that are often grounded in civic institutions and educational curriculum. All these styles of history, with broad strokes of inquiry, constitute an overtly wide- ranging form of the discipline, herein referred to as the grand narrative. The general interpretation, written by professional historians and others of the scholarly and literary elite, serves its purpose, that of general interpretation, well but it has flaws: it largely speaks to its own brotherhood, and it lacks specificity, thus omitting important historical developments at the regional level. Its hypotheses certainly may apply to the regional level, but they need to be judged against specific evidence. The grand narrative is neither a monolithic nor a concerted entity. However, it is a cumulative body of historical interpretations, assumptions, and theories v that has accumulated over decades of historiography. The first chapter of The Upper Musselshell Valley is devoted to exploring works by Great Plains scholars like Walter Webb, Carl Kraenzel, Paula Nelson or Craig Miner (and many, many others) as not only individual contributors to regional history, but also their extended dialogue under the patronage of academia that creates the grand narrative. On the other hand regional history, telling how a regional populace views itself, also serves an important purpose: specificity and place. Herein called the grassroots perspective, it is extraordinary in its specificity, perspective, and detail. However, it has its own weaknesses. First and foremost is that it often does not situate itself in relation to the grand narrative; it is almost too specific in its scale. Second, local authors tend to be more concerned with constructing and preserving identity; therefore their accounts tend to rationalize things as they are within their specific region. Expressions of local history are manifest and ubiquitous, especially within the region to which they devote themselves: community and county histories abound, as do local museums, personal memoirs, and localized preservation efforts. Although the grand narrative and grassroots perspective are crafted by vastly different authors, and for dissimilar reasons, they are not independent entities. They influence each other a great deal, mutually contributing to the collective memory of the region. Both, too, tend to tidy up the past into orderly concepts and materially progressive constructs. Their logic for this is separate, and different; however, academics do so in the interest of general truth while local authors do so in the name of identity (at least to the currently dominant group or culture). Academics seek general truths that gain them academic standing in the quest to study the human experience, while local practitioners search for specific truths that in order to give, and maintain, distinctive identities. Such a concept certainly calls forth Peter Burke and his definition of vi schema, which he considered as the tendency to remember a person, or event, in terms of another. Both the grassroots perspective and grand narrative create, recreate, represent, and interpret the past in a vastly different schema. The two approaches certainly interact, and often agree with each other. Such is the case with viewing the hard winters of 1886 and 1893, often referred to as the Great Die Up. Both the grassroots and traditional history of the era claim that the mass death of cattle during those winters was caused by overgrazing. The two narratives cross paths in the work of such historians as David Glassberg, who clearly shows the link between how people create a collective sense of the past, thus allowing them to better understand their place amongst a specific society and its various successions. In his work Sense of History, he argues that people erect monuments in order to create a sense of history. At its most basic, such a drive allows people to understand their past, gives them a sense of belonging to a specific culture, community, region, and nation. In order to do so, memorials are linked to specific places and environments through historical events. A good regional example comes in the form of the small town Harlowton’s E57B Electric Train Park (discussed in chapter 10), which harkens to a railroad culture that many town dwellers of the region take as their historical identity while recollections of professional historians broadly sweep the region into the grand narrative while neglecting regional anomalies. In any case, this creates collective memory, a focus of Durkheimian philosopher Maurice Halbwachs. According to Halbwachs, collective memory is centered within the ways in which people classify themselves, which is a socially constructed perception. According to Halbwachs, collective memory is created by social groups (who determine what is memorable and how it will be remembered), but it is the individual who commit the physical act of remembering. In order for this to happen, the past has to be well grounded and shaped by the concerns of the vii present.
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