I was born in Sweetgrass County, Montana, named for the traditional medicine plant that is burned for smudging and purification. Up north, near the town of Sweetgrass, Blackfeet women make sweetgrass into tea, but I was born in the traditional lands of the Apsáalooke nation, known as the Crow Tribe. My hometown was part of their lands guaranteed by the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty which tribal elders signed and was taken away by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty which was not signed by the Apsáalooke. By the time I arrived, the reservation had been further downsized by congress. The boundary of the reservation was nearly 70 miles from my town and only a few tribal members remained, mostly working as summer sheepherders in the mountains.

The Big Timber hospital was across the alley from our family home. My mother walked there when the time came for me to be born. I didn’t wait for the doctor’s arrival. The nurse knew what she was doing, and the doctor was only needed to sign the birth certificate. Perhaps in the excitement my naming was rushed. I do not know, but I ended up with a mono-syllabic first name and no middle name while by three sisters and three brothers all got multi-syllable names and middle names as well. I might chock it up to being the fourth and middle child, but I was also the first boy, something that meant a lot to my father who told me about it repeatedly.

Local lore says our town got its name from the cottonwood trees that grow down by the river. On their way back east after wintering on the Pacific Coast Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery divided into two teams to cross what is now Montana. Clark led his party into the Big Hole and over the Bozeman Pass into the Yellowstone Valley. They had been traveling overland since they left the Columbia River in what is now Washington. After following the Yellowstone for a brief while, they finally found trees big enough to make dugout canoes. They felled some large poplars or cottonwood trees and made their boats near the confluence of the Boulder and Yellowstone Rivers. Clark named the camp Big Timber. The town that later was established on the site, however, was named Dornix. The name change came when the town moved a couple of miles to be next to the railroad tracks.

The wind can blow in Big Timber. Strong winds flowing down the eastern slopes of the Rockies are funneled between the Absaroka mountains to the south and the Crazy mountains to the north. On very windy days the official wind gauge, located at the airport would read 0 mph because when it passed 100 mph it reached a peg just before zero. Other times it read random numbers because it was frequently broken by the force of winds blowing faster than it was designed to measure.

In those days it was a farm and ranch town, having been settled by folks from the east including a lot of Norwegian immigrants who arrived after the Northern Pacific Railroad was granted right-of-way for their line west and the area was opened to homesteading. The economy of the town was tied to farming and ranching, with winter wheat producing some profits to the north and east and cattle and sheep being raised in the valley. Big Timber was once known as the wool shipping capital of the United States. Once the railroad reached town, the wool terminal in Big Timber loaded more bales of wool onto the trains than any other single shipping point for several years. The wool business was dependent upon leases to graze sheep on federal land in the mountains.

Two sheep ranches herded their sheep through town and up the road into the mountains each spring and back each fall in the time I was born. A dozen years later they began to truck the sheep for the fall return and in another dozen years the leases had expired, and the sheep ranches shrunk to lamb production for the grocery market.

Cattle and sheep ranchers didn’t get along. The last main street shootout occurred when I was ten and is said to have resulted from a cattleman mistakenly walking into the Court Bar, which is where the sheepherders hung out. Cattlemen belonged in the Grand Bar. You can still find old timers with high emotions about cattle and sheep.

It took a lot of the dry land in the hills to raise animals. We talked in terms of acres per cow, not cattle per acre. Along with the sweetgrass, which is good feed, there was plenty of sage which isn’t very nutritious. Several of the ranches supplemented their incomes by welcoming dudes from back east and entertaining them with horseback rides, fishing trips and campfires under the blue of Big Sky country with day trips into Yellowstone National Park.

Growing up in the shadow of the mountains, I developed a strong bias about mountains. I confess to a smug elitism. When my eastern cousins told me of climbing mountains in New England, I reminded them that the floor of the river valley south of town was higher than the tallest mountain in New England. I scoffed at anything lower than 10,000 feet that people dared to call a mountain. Our town, however, was in the valley at just over 4,000 feet. The land slopes downward in that part of the state. Bozeman, 60 miles to the west, is 800 feet higher than Big Timber and Billings, 80 miles to the east is nearly a thousand feet lower.

Our house was not only right next to the hospital, but only one block from the grade school and one block from the high school. I have had to employ considerable fiction when telling my grandchildren about the strenuousness of walking to school as a child. There was a sign next to the elementary school that said, “Slow Children,” but we weren’t slow. I could run from our house to the school in less than a minute. If I started to run when I heard the school bell, I wouldn’t be late for class. My rush, however, would be reported to my mother by several of the neighbors. It was that kind of town. Everyone knew everyone else’s business.

Of course it is all different now. And my memory is less than accurate as the decades go by. It has been more than half a century since I lived in that place, and I was quite eager to leave when I did. Romantic thoughts are less than accurate, but the mountain scenery is every bit as spectacular as it was when I was born. I know because I drive through the valley every once in a while and never fail to be grateful to have been dropped into such an awe inspiring scene.