Tales and Trails of Montana

Montana has many visitors. Few people live there. No one really owns it. Not the descendents of the mostly Northern European homesteaders; not the cattle ranchers; not the sheepherders; not the robber barons; not the gold miners; not the fur trappers; not even the Nez Pierce, the Sioux, the Crow or the Cheyenne. God alone can call it home. All others, like Lewis and Clark, were just passing through.

Who is it then that has the right to post those signs, "Welcome to Big Sky Country" where the blue highways, three railroads and two standardized interstates cross those imaginary lines into God's country?

More than one visitor, and more than one returning temporary resident, has laid claim to a heightened experience crossing those thresholds. And these claims have been made whether the crossing be in the southwest by way of the high dry plateau marked by Devil’s Tower; the endless horizons along the old highline route of the Great Northern Railroad; the lazy carving curves of the Yellowstone and Missouri through their strip of green hugging bottomlands; or the steep switchbacks climbing to the Mullin, Lookout, Lolo, Monida and Cooke City passes of the Bitterroot Range guarding the Western border.

The uninitiated and the skeptic might very well observe that, absent the welcome signs, the landscape looks pretty much the same in all directions at each portal. What could be more arbitrary than three borders rectified by latitude and longitude heedless of such markers left by the snowmelt of receding glaciers dripping tears that turn to salt a thousand or more miles down stream? And even ignoring the divide that separates naturally along the ridge line, from peak to peak, the great watersheds of this region and the continent?

Nevertheless, that is Montana -- geographically and a state of mind. This is the story of Dick and Doris Bell Holzworth, how they came to be there, married there, raised their five children there, then willed their final resting spot near heaven itself to watch, I think, the scattered seeds of their lineage taking root across the far reaches of the continent.