The Medicine Tree

  

 

January, 2024

Victor, Montana

The Bitterroot Valley, like the Nile, is upside-down. Both take their directions from rivers that flow from south to north, so when an old-time “Bitterrooter” talks about her beloved headwaters, she’s really talking about its tail, its southern end. And just so, conversations in the Bitterroot (and maybe in Egypt) get unnecessarily confused. 

Think about how it is here: fourth-generation Bitterrooters forever insisting that they are going “down to Missoula”, which is actually north, while newcomers who have only been here a few decades—and considerably outnumber the old timers—equally insisting that since Missoula is north of the Bitterroot Valley, it is therefore “up” and that native Bitterrooters are “down”. Native Bitterrooters who “know better”, take umbrage at these know-it-all "libtards", vote for fact-free religious zealots with an assault-gun fetish (and sometimes a criminal record) to "show them" and it becomes a reverse-polarity sort of thing, a tough, mental divide when applied to a whole population, because it challenges the People to reconcile their opinions about geology and religion, which some people, of course, will never do. For instance:

 

The Medicine Tree

 

In the fall of 1928, white men bristling with guns and sitting in the back of black Ford pickup trucks roared past the Medicine Tree at a high rate of speed, admonishing their neighbors to arm themselves against a Papal takeover of America. The bristling men had been sounding the alarm all day, roaring up and down Western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, then down and up, and now they were headed to Sula at the far southern end to make sure that the people living just below the Great Divide heard the news. It was an election year and Al Smith, the Democrat, was running against Herbert Hoover, the Republican. The problem, the bristling ones wanted their neighbors to know, wasn’t that Al Smith was a Democrat. The problem was that he was a Catholic. 

The Medicine Tree had been at the upper end of the Bitterroot Valley forever, or at least since the beginning of Time, which is measured, by those who know about such things, from when Coyote started telling good jokes. The fact that it was still standing despite the county wanting to blast it out of the way and “fix” the narrow spot the Tree forced cars into between the cliff and the river was proof that Coyote still held sway on that particular stretch. They also knew that Coyote, whose coloring could have been anywhere from off-white to deep red, liked a good laugh and so it’s a wonder that the bristling men didn’t dump themselves into the East Fork. But, for whatever reason, he gave them a pass and allowed them to squirt gravel instead, asses and elbows around the S turns that topped the riprap constricting the river into a straight neck of pretty fast, pretty deep water just below the road.

The only route going to and from what would become Ross’s Hole, where Lewis and Clark met the Salish and where Sula now sits, had always passed directly underneath the Medicine Tree. It was the Salish people’s ancient trail, and there had always been a little bit of space between the river and the tall Ponderosa Pine with the Bighorn ram’s head embedded in its trunk for people, dogs and horses to pass. But Fresno Scrapers and bulldozers had long since dumped sand and rip-rap into the river and crowded the trail even closer to the tree to widen the path into a road. Wheels came, first the wooden ones and then the inflated ones made from African rubber gathered by local people enslaved to a happenstance Belgian prince who wanted an empire and, it could be argued, mistook the Upper Nile for one and couldn’t take it back when he found out otherwise. It was this rubber that began compacting the tree’s delicate root system, compromising its health while rutting the decomposed granite and tiny layer of topsoil that comprised what passed for dirt in the canyon. By the time the bristling men passed under the Medicine Tree, the road had been improved so much that cars could zip past faster than human caution had evolved. The bristling ones, of course, were not cautious and they didn’t stop to give thanks to the tree either, as had been the Peoples’ custom for centuries. Like Lewis and Clark, who passed under the tree a century before, they weren’t inclined to do so and were on a mission besides.  

The reason they were in such a hurry was that they had evidence, unimpeachable and from a secret source (probably divine) that could therefore neither be revealed nor doubted, that there were nefarious black ships anchored in New York Harbor which, in those days, was as far away from the Bitterroot Valley as the Moon. Rural areas like the Bitterroot hadn’t even fully-engaged with the age of electricity yet, so the Bristling Ones had to overcome the vast limits of geography and slow-moving information that was their lot and would naturally impose upon their prejudices, and this they did. The black ships, they duly informed their neighbors, had been known--by those who know such things--to have been there “for a while” and no one had been seen either boarding nor disembarking from them except for boats bringing loads of food which were being unloaded at night, and every Friday night that food was fish! How could any patriotic Bitterrooter doubt, the bristling men wanted their neighbors to ask themselves, that this was the Pope’s infamous Army of Conquest, the one their forefathers and mothers had been dreading since the Irish Potato Famine. It was now floating right off the shores of America, waiting stealthily for the signal from their landbound co-conspirators—Socialists even then! —that the Catholic Candidate had successfully stolen the presidential election and then…then O Bitterrooters! The Papists would swarm off the ships with guns the efficiency of which America had not yet taken the measure of, to overwhelm the freedom-loving people and convert them by fire and force to worship a female god! Then…then O Bitterrooters! Not a man among you will be able to burn your tires in your fields whenever you want! 

Sure enough, it turned out the Klan had been behind that one and, almost a century later it again became trendy for white people on similar missions to pass under the Medicine Tree. Disaffected urbanites attracted to our white demographics, the hit TV series “Yellowstone” and other parables of rugged individualism, and also the fishing. They would flick their dry flies out into the ancient currents with what they hoped looked like the practiced, steady hand of a gunslinger or a pro golfer, and try their luck at catching a flashier version of themselves that they believed was swirling just under the surface and, when they caught it, throw it back. But they forgot, or just never knew, that there are no narratives in our western rivers that they couldn’t have found closer to home with less effort and expense. They mistook our lack of cluttered landscape for a last, best chance at simpler times, but the only real difference between their homes and ours is that we can still measure our wishful thinking against the lay of a land still recognizable as such. We still have our stories. 

Henry Ford, that singularly-American enigma, had his. He bragged that even though his America was Main Street, Christian and white, you could order your Model A in any color you wanted so long as you wanted the color black. He was a pacifist during World War I, a Presbyterian, hired African-Americans in his factories when it wasn’t fashionable and was a virulent anti-Semite his whole life. He, like many Americans between the big wars, admired Hitler and reckoned that maybe the Fuhrer and his “team” were on the right track with their robust application of Henry’s own political philosophy, which is really a corporate one that has been applied with equal vigor to many things by many like-minded CEOs ever since: “There are winners and losers.” Simple, and Henry and Hitler did a brisk business with each other until Roosevelt finally ordered Henry to aim his fabulously-profitable, steel-extruding operation toward his own country’s war effort instead. But Shakespeare and Coyote knew, and Henry might have, that irony is the better part of comedy, so it was Coyote who had the last laugh on those who would fly through his sacred narrows too fast in the back of black, white Presbyterian pickups to warn the People about black Catholic ships in New York Harbor, the dark side of the Moon, or whatever, and this has always been so, at least since Fresno Scrapers and Ford pickups.

Of course, the stories of the Salish and Kootenai people who actually knew Coyote and those of auto magnates, Belgian princes and the KKK wobble and diverge away from each other even before the beginning. According to tribal accounts, a giant ram had chosen to live where the Medicine Tree crimped the old trail exactly where the bristling men had squirted gravel, where the valley bottlenecked into a narrows that was the only path the People could use to squeeze themselves through and still stay out of the river. There were friends and relations to visit east of the Divide, buffalo to hunt, enemies to fight, and Coyote knew that, if these migratory people would make their home in the Bitterroot, which he knew they would want to do once they arrived, they would have to pass through this slot regularly. 

Giant rams are hard to figure, though, and this one was ornery besides. He decided he wasn’t going to let the People pass, and grew inscrutably violent. Coyote, whose aim was to prepare the valley for his friends to live in peace within, decided to play a trick on him. He knew that, since even normal-sized rams had testicles that were not an insignificant part of their total body weight, this ram’s testicles were as big as the hotrods that equally-charged young men would use in the future to bypass their own self-preservation instincts, sometimes at this very spot where the drop into the river was such a short, missed-turn away. Those who know might say that Coyote had that warped sense of humor we still mistake for high comedy, but he was also far-seeing and wise, which is to say that he could recognize a slam-dunk when he saw one. He pointed to the tree and bet the ram that he couldn’t knock it over. The ram immediately accepted the challenge, of course, revved himself up and powered forward, hit the tree and lodged his horns deep within the trunk’s wood. Coyote walked up and, with a few quick slices of his flint knife, cut the ram’s head off. The skull remained embedded in the tree as it grew over the years, and the People, when they arrived, were grateful. They would always thank it with offerings and prayers whenever they passed. The path became their ancient road, and time passed. 

Then in 1841 the first whites came to settle in the Valley, after the Corps of Discovery came and went, trappers and traders, too, for a little while, and a good few of these first whites were Catholics. The Black Robes, Jesuits who built a mission where the valley widens into vast, protected horse plains for several miles on either side of the river until they toed the foothills of the magnificent Bitterroot Range to the west and the rounded, fecund Sapphires to the east. Everyone, the Catholic priests and especially the Salish whose beloved home the priest had built their mission in the heart of, agreed that the current site of Stevensville was a beautiful spot, and from that very spot the priests admonished their native neighbors (‘charges” in the vernacular of the U.S. Government) to live in peace with the coming whites, which they were already pretty good at doing.

Blackfeet raiders, though, armed with trade guns acquired from Scottish Protestants up north who directed Hudson Bay Company affairs, disagreed with these Catholic priests about peace in general and peace with the whites in particular. Conflict ensued and the Jesuits moved on, selling their mission and pastures to an American sutler from Pennsylvania with a drinking habit, Major John Owen. Fort Owen soon became a popular trading post and then the jumping-off point for white settlement in Montana. Gold discoveries and the rash of deserters to the west from Confederate recruitment drives in the southern states drove the white population to explode, and the People’s ancient road became a wagon trace in almost no time at all until it was forgotten by—or didn’t matter to—the recently-arrived ones that the valley was the home of the Salish by fact and by treaty. A critical mass of land-hungry squatters was achieved before reason or compassion could catch up. The buffalo famously disappeared for good by the 1880s, corruption and bureaucratic incompetence balled up any intention by the government to live up to their 1855 Hellgate Treaty obligations and the Bitterroot Salish under Chief Charlo, who were living up to the treaty and refused to leave, faced starvation and gunpoints. Charlo and his people were forced out of the Bitterroot in October of 1891, passing through the newly-surveyed streets of Missoula and over the Clark Fork River, their horses’ hooves clopping in dirge-time as they led them across the board planks of the Higgins Street Bridge. 

By this time the Jesuits had built another Catholic mission further north in what would be called the Mission Valley, and, as the federally-designated denomination to settle and acculturate the tribe, beckoned the Bitterroot Salish to leave their home and come to them. Congress, whose only real concern for the tribes was to move them off the lands most-coveted by ranchers without spending too much money on bullets, figured the Mission Valley would do, and those whites who witnessed the procession over the bridge from their homes made of fresh-baked bricks recalled it as quite a sight. The Salish recalled it as their Trail of Tears. 

Almost simultaneous to the Bitterroot Salish’ removal was the removal of the ram’s horn from the Medicine Tree, cut out by an anonymous vandal and it wasn’t long after that before the wagon road became a motor highway between the tiny logging town of Darby and the tinier ranching community Sula. Now that the Salish were gone and the “Wild West” done, “safety” was on the county’s mind as automobiles were built to go faster and faster and they pressed the highway department to blast the Medicine Tree out of the way. But, given the Tree’s upper hand in the upside-down Bitterroot valley, the highway department could never get enough political bunnies in a row to pull it off outright. 

Over time, though, the tree’s health started to decline, due to soil compaction and other abuses. Then in the winter of 1995 another anonymous vandal came in the night, and salted its base to kill it outright. The salt was noticed right away and was removed, but it wasn’t two years after that that frequent skiers buzzing through the narrows noticed that the Medicine Tree was dying from the top down. Noticing the same thing, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes bought the 58 acres of cliffs and steep draws that the Medicine Tree site occupied, and then requested an examination of its soils to determine what was killing it. The year the tree died, in 1999, the Forest Service complied and offered up a soil scientist, who offered in turn the opinion that, since the ground was frozen when the salting happened and the salt was gathered up soon after its sowing, it was bugs not malice that was the tree’s demise, and this looked good in the valley newspapers for those who wanted to put such things as cultural vandalism to rest. But there were others who passed under the Tree regularly who had longer memories than soil scientists, and weren’t so sure. 

The next year, in 2000, an epic fire season torched the whole mountainside surrounding the now-deceased Medicine Tree and probably would have consumed it if Forest Service fire crews, instructed by those within the agency who had been re-charged with a renewed appreciation for what a political hairball it’d be if they let the tree burn, hadn’t dug a line around it. When winter snows came and the fires petered out the Medicine Tree, to some white locals’ chagrin, remained standing. 

Then a huge windstorm came through the very next year and blew the top three-quarters of the Tree over onto the highway, leaving the branchless, buckskin lower twenty feet of trunk still standing sentinel over the ancient site. The upper remains of the Tree were brushed into a pile off the highway by a county crew, where the Salish came and picked up every piece and placed them under the Medicine Tree’s designated heir located on their property, the location of which, as non-tribal locals who also cared about the fate of the tree thankfully-observed, was not disclosed. 

Things came to a head of sorts in December, 2013, when the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes decided to place their sacred acres in trust to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for its protection against such obvious threats as the highway department’s condemning of it through Imminent Domain and blasting it out. By then, most Ravalli County officials had been installed in a nationwide, mostly-rural backlash against the results of a presidential election that placed the first non-white person in the Oval Office, and the new commissioners duly objected. They cited “bafflement” as their reason, that the tribes would want to create a “federal inholding” that would deprive the county of its rightful taxes (about $800 a year on that parcel). What they didn’t cite was that, since Ruby Ridge and Waco, Ravalli County had been cranking out anti-government, militant “constitutionalist” as regularly as a Hershey factory cranked out Kisses and so claimed a mandate to be done with this whole “Indian thing”. The commissioners called a meeting in Hamilton with tribal elders to discuss the issue, where one commissioner claimed reverse-discrimination, and accused the tribes of scheming to build a race track or a casino on the dry, rocky cliff faces. He also wanted to know how “out a billion trees on the Bitterroot Forest” the tribes picked the only one blocking the highway department from straightening and “improving” the highway. 

The attending elders who, unlike the commissioners, had a working knowledge of diplomacy between nations, tried their best not to sound like a 150-year-old broken record as they recounted the 1855 Hellgate Treaty, Coyote, private-property rights and the tribes’ rights as a sovereign entity, but it was like trying to feed carrots to cats. The commissioners’ strange words simmered instead, in the overheated, under-ventilated room that used to be a hospital delivery ward, until finally the county’s planning board chairman, who had also gained his official position as a result of local backlash against Black Things In The White House and Other Places, and who was not known for his patience or excessive reading, decided to speed the meeting up a bit with some from-the-hip “testimony”. He claimed that he had recently been on a “fact-finding trip” to Havre, Montana, which shares its county with the Rocky Boy Reservation in North Central Montana and that the officials there complained to him that their jails were being filled up with “drunken Indians”. The planning board chairman was only saying the quiet part out loud, that a casino or a racetrack would surely be built on the side of that hostile cliff and that “drunken Indians” would then start falling out of it, filling up the county’s jail. Maybe it’d be best for everybody, he implied to the not-unsympathetic commissioners, to just blast the Tree out of there once and for all and be done with it. 

It’s true that even Coyote probably would have been as concerned as the planning board chairman about drunken beings falling out of hot, snake-infested and otherwise-inhospitable cliffs, but there were some serious gaps in the chairman’s research that the tribal elders were not slow to point out. How, they wanted to know, was it that these drunken beings were dwelling in their sacred cliffs in the first place? And why, if these falling beings really existed, did the lightly-tinted planning board chairman assume they were “Indians” instead of drunks more in-tint with the planning board chairman and the commissioners, the kind who vastly outnumbered natives in almost any Montana bar? And where, exactly, did the planning board chairman think these magical beings were really going? It seemed to the elders like a lot of trouble for such beings to go to if they were only planning on going to jail. The planning board chairman didn’t have the answers and neither did the commissioners, who still magnanimously-objected in principle to drunken beings of any tint falling out of cliffs and robbing them of taxes. 

 

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As of January, 2024, the 20-foot trunk of the old Medicine Tree still stands above the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, at the very tail of our valley which is really its head, still crimping the deeper desires of speedy trucks testing evolutionary principles of Bristling Ones and a couple other things that have so far remained officially unrecorded in objections about the Tree. One of those was revealed a few years ago when its thick Ponderosa bark began to dry and shed. A rusty broad point arrow about eye-level was uncovered, embedded deep in its wooden flesh where someone had bull’s-eyed it. It was a modern point, and the tree’s living wood had been well on its way toward healing around the sharp metal before it died, so it was plain that the wound was several decades old. Maybe the arrow had been embedded as the ram’s horns had been and the Tree’s assailant was gifted a vision instead of decapitation. Or maybe not. But either way, the Salish-Kootenai folks still persist in visiting the Tree and pressing gifts into the cracks of its buckskin trunk or to lay at its feet, offering their prayers. 

Upside down places like the Bitterroot are everywhere and all alike. From the Nile to Middle America’s heart, which I’ll call Fargo, where the Red River flows decidedly-north to Canada, everybody’s always had to deal with their own geology. Global warming and shriveling democracies can be calculated by researchers using computer models, but they can also be more-easily explained by gravity, God and the true weight of water. Your average Egyptian, for instance, could probably recognize a flim flam despot coming for his daughter, just like we can now that we’ve watched millions of our fellow citizens vote for a president who openly bragged about doing just such a thing, and I’ll bet there were bristling incidents in Fargo during the heyday of Klan popularity after World War I when, as happened after the American Civil War, men with undiagnosed PTSD were trying to figure out what had just happened to them and then assigning blame for it. 

Bigotry, like nuclear war, is a revelation you can rely on. The dread of both sit there unexposed, invisible until it’s stirred and forced to the fore, floats for a while like sun specks on the skin of your eyes, temporarily annoying. Then gone just as quickly, denied and forgotten even though it swims before your eyes, like a shark, or sun specks. It’s a word we assign to the inscrutable foible that dictates, almost scientifically, that no matter what facts are presented, what harm is done or whose children or environments die, there will always be a certain percentage within any demographic who will only have their opinions pried away from their cold, dead fingers. 

As for the Bitterroot, I’m not a tribal member with the long knowledge of what’s really at stake. I’ve only lived here 40 years or so and have regarded the Medicine Tree on my way to and from the ski hill for those many years, left my presents and prayers, and have had my suspicions. It’s easy enough to see, though, if the Medicine Tree isn’t just a blur in your windshield because you were driving faster than evolution just to score first chairlift on a powder day. Boil it all down and what’s left is the mere observation that politics and water almost always flow downhill, and if all we’re really looking for are excuses, then blaming a river is as good as the next, which means, of course, that there are no good excuses at all. 

To be fair to the Bristling Ones of 1928, though, they were right, at least about the tires. It’s also fair to say that at least some of those black Model T’s ended up in the Bitterroot River as legacy riprap, ideal habitat for oversized German Brown trout, another invasive species, a nice little loop.

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