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This is a story about dirt. It includes cowboys and horses, trains and timber, mining and farming, war and politics, and settling the west. It is about hard work and hard times, choices and commitments. It is an American history lesson that spans a century. While it is not unlike most homestead stories in the early 1900’s, this is our story. It is a family tale about the Wortman Homestead, founded one hundred years ago. It is a love story about dirt.

Homestead legislation was a hotly debated political issue at the time. Before the Civil War, the southern states had voted against homestead legislation because they foresaw its ultimate result. Opening the settlement of western territory added to the number and political influence of the Free states. The Free Soil party of 1848-52 and the new Republican Party after 1854 supported the idea of “yeoman farmers” which contrasted sharply with slave owners controlling large estates. The Homestead Act signed into law in May of 1862 allowed any applicant including single women and freed slaves, to put in a claim for up to 160 acres. Forty-seven years later, The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 supposedly encouraged dry-land farming. Most of the low-lying alluvial tracts next to rivers had been claimed. Because the more marginal tracts could not be easily irrigated, legislators doubled the allotment to 320 acres. Unfortunately, for many, legislators grossly underestimated the climate and soil condition of the western plains. The more marginal the tract of land, the more difficult it became to “prove-up” on the homestead. Many did not succeed. However, a century ago, that siren call of free land originated the merging of two families who claimed their marginal tracts next to a seasonal creek called Black Coulee, 45 miles east of Big Sandy through the southern foothills of the diminutive Bear Paw Mountains in south Blaine County.

Leonidas Wortman, born in 1859 in Missouri, came to Montana territory in about 1884. He staked out his claim near Salesville, MT, presently called the Gallatin Gateway, near Bozeman. He then returned home to marry his long-time sweetheart Mary Rosetta Billington. They had five children all born in Salesville. She had an abdominal malady and actually died on the operating table in 1904. Apparently devastated by that loss, Leonidas sold his land in Salesville and moved his young brood to the Kalispell area. He most likely worked as a teamster freighting goods to the mining fields. Leonidas died in 1918, one month shy of 60. The first child of Mary and Leonidas, Rosetta (Rosie) Louisa, born 1888, died at 21 of tuberculosis. Florence Lele, born 1892, became the mother influence. The younger children were James Ernest, born 1894, Alma Lavina, born 1896, and Everett Alexander, my grandfather, born April 16, 1899.

Everett and Jim traveled around western Montana taking whatever jobs were available. They worked as miners, loggers, and cowboys. At some point, Everett learned the skills of  a blacksmith. Florence Wortman married George Howard, a telegraph operator, in 1914, and together they moved to south Blaine County but did not apparently prove up on their homestead. Florence’s persuasive letters however brought her younger brothers to the area where the Homestead was established in 1916. When their father, Leonidas, died in 1918, Everett joined his brother Jim on the homestead.

A little over two miles east of Black Coulee resided another family who came to Montana from Peabody, Kansas. William H. and Mary Ellen Godsey, people of property, had thirteen children. William was reportedly a  man who raised his children to recognize opportunity. His daughter Grace with her husband Harry Bence had moved to Montana where he worked in the mines. His son Bill with his wife Jennie had moved to Idaho, but after a year or so moved to Montana. With his daughter Edna, her husband Claude Loveall, Claude’s folks and the bachelor brother Roy, they rented a freight car and moved to Montana to Homestead in 1912. The brutally cold winter convinced William and Mary that a year in California visiting William’s brother John sounded more pleasant. They returned to Peabody, Kansas. It was another four years before Mary Addaline Godsey Stevens, my grandmother, having left a disappointing marriage in Oklahoma and returned to Peabody with her four young children, was swept toward Montana in a box car with her parents, her children, some chickens, her milk cow, and “old Sam” her horse. She was thirty years old. Needing that all important “grub stake”, she worked at the Blue Moon Cafe in Big Sandy for nearly a year before coming further west to Black Coulee. Her little chunk of ground had a partial building on it from a failed homestead but in the early 1900’s, South Blaine County was a thriving community. There were neighbors and family nearby with tools and willingness to help with the manual labor. It was not long before the little cabin had a new roof, the chickens had a coop, and Addaline had a root cellar. Grandma’s homestead was just south of The Cow Island Trail and a mile from the Wortman boys’ place. No stranger to adversity or hard work, Adde, as Grandma came to be known, needed wages and after placing her children in the care of sister Edna, catching a passing freight wagon into Big Sandy and on to Fort Benton, she washed and ironed clothes in the Chinese laundry.

Meanwhile, up the creek, Jim and Ev Wortman of solid German stock were going about the business of erecting cabins. They spent the first year in a dug out lean-to next to the spring. With their work horses and logging knowledge, they cut and drug timber off the nearby hills to build each of them a cabin. They too had root cellar, a chicken coop and eventually a  log barn, and a blacksmith shop. People came from all around for two things from Ev Wortman: getting horses shod and a haircut.

Even though Addaline and Everett were neighborly and no doubt noticed each other, the flu epidemic cemented their relationship. It is one thing to assist a neighbor with her roofing issues, but it is another to render medical attention to a woman and her children all suffering  from the flu. Perhaps my Grandmother knew that she would always be safe with my Grandfather. She knew after he tended her livestock, hauled in water, kept the wood box full and a fire going, and fed and bathed all of them, that he would always take care of  her and her children. History proved the truth in that romantic notion. Addaline was eleven years older than Everett and there was much frowning from Ev’s big sister, Florence, about the match, but the two were married on May 16, 1922, in Havre, MT. They lived fifty-three years together here on the Homestead until the end of their love story in 1975 when they died just one week apart.

Their marriage wrought more than a homestead and two children, my father, Jim Richard (Dick) Wortman, born in 1922, and his sister Betty Eileen, born in 1924. A simple choice, using simple tools, they cleared land of rocks and sagebrush, planted and harvested crops and a massive garden, canned produce, kept chickens for eggs, cut fence posts out of nearby coulees and dug post holes. Using an ax and shovel and the ever-present team of horses, using the strength of their backs and convictions, they literally chopped and dug a life out of Black Coulee.Without a milk cow and a garden, there was no butter or spuds to put it on. That vital root cellar had to be full before fall or it would be a lean winter. They butchered their own chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows. They even made a little wine and whisky. In the winter, there was more wood needed for a fire, ice chopped open for livestock, and blocks of ice cut to put in the root cellar under saw dust or straw. My Grandfather, called Pa, was a master with an ax. It was all about survival, not necessarily prospering, but they were entirely self-sufficient. Country folks still needed sacks of flour, sugar, and coffee from time to time though, so occasionally town trips happened, but the mail carrier became everyone’s best friend. Still, working away from the homestead part of the year was — and remains — necessary. For example, my father was born in Denton because his parents were working with a threshing crew there. My grandparents’ partnership, their choice, infused a respect, at least in me, for making a commitment to building something beyond them.

They played just as hard as they worked. Although one-room school houses became community halls, many would hold parties in their houses. There was “Fiddling Swede” up the creek, Blotto’s to the east, Walker’s to the West, to name a few. Great Uncle Jim, Dad’s namesake, was reportedly the fiddler. Dad and his sister Betty would sneak up outside of Uncle Jim’s cabin and listen to him play impossibly fast reels and jigs. Great Uncle Jim suffered mustard gas poisoning in the war and died at 42. Pa learned to play the fiddle by purchasing gramophone records and practicing with them (much to Grandma’s dismay) until he could play the tune. At these parties, the kids asleep on the floor or in one another’s beds, Grandma played a slide guitar on her lap with Pa fiddling, and handful of neighbors danced around making the glass chimneys of the kerosene lamps jiggle. Anyone who had an instrument came and played. There were no closing hours, only a long wagon ride home at dawn in time to milk the cow. In addition, every community prepared a baseball field for their team. The Sourdough Flats team here with Pa pitching and Dad catching would go down to the Missouri River to play the team from Winnifred. They played the Chinook Valley Owls who were reportedly tough to beat. Dad grumbled once about that, saying the town boys had more time to practice and less work to do. Taking a baseball to the eye was just another right-of-passage around here as Dad lobbed one toward us kids out in the yard.

Playing ball and music became as much a part of the legacy as the skill to use an ax. Dad was playing the drums in a one-room school-house when a buxom blonde girl from Chinook walked in and hooked that young cowboy’s heart. Eulela May Ness, born January 12, 1932, in Dodson, MT, had lived her childhood with her two younger sisters in Bullwhacker, a miserably harsh, dry coulee several miles east of Pa and Grandma’s Homestead. She lived with her Grandparents, Josephine and P.S. Gilmore, while her Dad, Gordon Ness, worked on the West Coast. It was prewar years and work was hard to find here. Her Mom, Annie, living in Chinook, was too ill to manage three young girls. When they were old enough, they attended high school in Chinook. Dad was smitten at that dance, and soon they became a couple, marrying on November 21st, 1947.

Grandma and Pa took them under their wing and into the house as they began their married life. The homestead cabin became too small however when Dick and Lela’s first daughter Christine Vey made her entrance and they moved down to Uncle Lee’s place. Lee Stevens, Dad’s half-brother, had his place adjacent to but further south down the bench below Grandma’s. Houses moved from off the prairie and attached together made our home. That working-away-from-the-homestead policy was immediately put into effect as Dad, Mom, baby Christine, Aunt Betty with first baby Mike and Charlie Rutherford, went to work “skinnin’ cat” near Fort Peck. It was 1954 before electricity came to the community. Dad helped as a lineman, working with John Broesder, the line boss. Mom recalls going to town to buy an electric toaster, radio and coffee pot. That February their second daughter, Glenna Lou, was born. Three years later, their third daughter, Gayla Marie came on board, and in 1961, I was born. Aunt Betty and Uncle Charlie had their second son, Ross, in December of 1960. Mom and Dad harvested and hayed and farmed and ranched as a team for sixty-five years! When Pa and Grandma passed, Mom and Dad swapped again with Uncle Lee and we moved back up to the homestead.

South Blaine County, Black Coulee specifically, is not the best ground. It is rock and clay and shale banks. Thirty below in the winter is as common as 95 above in the summer. Annual precipitation averages ten inches. The soil supports sagebrush and cactus well, but will seal over in a hot year and hold seeds until the conditions are right, then bloom into a stunning display of plants as hardy as the people who have lived on it. It is “next year” country. It will break your heart and crush your will one year, and flood you with joy and ambition the next. It is only dirt, but it is ours.

I find I am living with ghosts.  I can lay my hands on the actual tools that carved century old logs into a home. I need only step to the barn to hear Pa’s great cheerful guffaw or sit on the upturned corner post of Grandma’s garden to feel them with me. I am living in a renovated one-room schoolhouse with cupboards Pa made for the old house. On the back of one of the drawers are tiny little numbers, carpentry notes in Pa’s handwriting. To see them is to feel like I am working with him. My grandparents and my parents infused their love into every broad ax handle, every log, every fence post. Yes, I have dug a toilet hole by hand, and I do dig post holes with a shovel, and I can wield an ax well enough. If my back allows, I can trim a horse’s hoof and I am learning to play slide guitar. I grow a tiny garden and freeze rather than can anything. Grandma would raise an eyebrow at that, and the fact that I do not have a root cellar … or a husband. She might have been disappointed in me for that, not for my independence or feminism, but because this place requires a team. Dad is gone now too and a century of conviction is on my shoulders. The “proving up” for this marginal piece of dry-land homestead is more personal now and the emotional scenery is changing. I am getting comfortable with being just a placeholder for the next generation. I fervently hope that somewhere Addaline and Everett Wortman feel content with that and maybe even approve.

Credit for genealogy research goes to Gayla Wortman Oehmcke.

 

The year I turned five, Dad and I set the parameters of our relationship. Huge piles of snow figure prominently in pictures of that 1966 winter. I have seen a picture of me, unrecognizable bundle on dad’s best mare, next to him astride his favorite gelding, snow piled all around, with a caption reading “pretty cold for a four-year old”. I was born in March of 1961. My earliest memories do not include any of my three older sisters, or my Mother. My earliest memories do not include anyone else at all. It was solely Dad and me. I have no memory of my oldest sister, Christine, graduating from high school that May. I remember being aware that she went to some mysterious place called “college”, which no one ever explained to me. I thought I would never see her again. I know now that Mom and my sisters were gone to town, 45 miles away, for school during the week, and came home on weekends, roads permitting. Dad filled up my world, my consciousness, my existence with his reality. So, my earliest memories are only me and Dad, a barn, and horses.

Dad had no choice other than taking me with him wherever he went. I do not remember learning to ride, but then I do not remember learning to walk either. I rode his buckskin mare named for the forties song “Mairzy Doats”. I didn’t know the words then: “mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy. A kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?” I simply heard the words mashed together into Marezydoates. She was already old and experienced by the time I came along and she taught me more about riding and myself than any horse or human ever did. I rode her that year, my feet in thick socks stuffed into cheap kids’ boots. I have dressed a few stubborn four-year olds in winter wear before, so I imagine the conversation every morning that winter could not have been particularly … easy for either of us. I cannot now say how Dad acted towards me on those mornings, getting me dressed, fed (he told me I wouldn’t eat oatmeal), ready for a big girl day. I know he expected much from me and perhaps because of that I have never considered not doing any necessary difficult task. I recall the usual argument about wearing my cowboy boots of course, but it was too cold. I recall bulky outer wear, a scratchy knitted hat with a hood over it, and itchy tights under whatever snow pants I wore. I hate tights to this day. It seemed like I was always cold. I was either born tough or thought it was important to be tough (there is a damned thin line between tough and stupid) or maybe I was merely proud and willful and stubborn. Snot and tears were frozen on my face, but I would not admit being cold when Dad asked. I never admitted needing to pee either. If you are cold and miserable and a couple of miles from home horseback, wetting your pants does not improve your situation. I did that once. I do not remember doing it a second time. Finally back at the barn, Dad would lift me off. I would be so cold and stiff that my toes, fingers, and cheeks were all numb, but I would hang out with Dad just the same while he unsaddled the horses and tended the tack. We rarely got back in time to enjoy the late afternoon sun slanting into the barn’s south door, cheering and warming the interior, but I was always glad to be in it.

Dad purchased our barn from a place up in the Bear Paws Mountains — hills really. The wonders of the barn, a simple structure of substance, included a hayloft, a bronc stall, cow stanchions added by Dad, and numerous carved brands from long gone cowboys. It was situated away from the prevailing winds so the large heavy wooden sliding doors were north and south on either end with stalls along the east side. It had wide boards as saddle racks nailed high enough to the heavy studs of the walls so that horses could walk along without knocking the saddles down. Milk cow calves would sometimes suck on the saddle strings or latigo ends. By the time I was six, I was tending to my own horse. I would prop my saddle on its horn, wrestle it onto my head, stand, and from there lift with both arms and jump to reach those racks. That winter, Dad would tell me to go on into the house to get warm. I would stay with him though. Of course, he still had chores to do because we needed supper and then he would do the dishes. There were probably cows to milk too. There may have been warm baths, but I don’t recall that. I must have been whimpering or crying loud enough for him to hear in my own bed. He came and brought me to bed in his room. I remember wanting very much to snuggle next to him, but I felt afraid to touch him. He was never demonstrative, and so like still water that reflects the sun and the stars and the moon, I have never been either. I would lie stone still next to him as close as possible. His broad back radiated warmth, and, like the barn, loomed strong and secure next to me in the dark. It was like falling asleep next to a stove.

March may be the cusp of spring, but it doesn’t always materialize as one might like. By the end of January, I am tired of winter. If I were snow skiing or ice skating or snowmobiling, it might be different, but following bovine around all winter with the added effort of staying warm and making equipment run is exhausting. I remind myself that Dad did it without equipment or electricity. Dad had a team and wagon and forked the hay on and off. Sometimes he had to sling bags of feed over his saddle horn and together with the ax ride out to the cows. Dad did it because he loved the life style. But that was before my time. Sometimes, I think it has all been before, or outside of, or beyond my time. The winter of 2013 was mild but particularly awful as Dad was unable to leave the house easily. Going about the chores took on a lonelier cast with no good-natured banter between us. Without the support and companionship of my sisters, it could not have been born. Every year, Dad expected a February thaw and promised it to himself as much as to me. Perhaps not coincidentally, he died smack in the middle of February on a day that reached fifty degrees. It had been warm for days before. The snow in the mountains released a glut of water and the creek rose and eliminated that ice chopping for the cows.

Dad had chosen his own burial site on Grandpa’s homestead. Mom and Dad had moved there, a mile and a half from my childhood home, after Dad’s parents died. They had moved the barn as well. The day we buried him was bright, clear and cold, and there had been a nasty little snow storm a few days before. I found it remarkably suitable to follow on horseback behind Dad’s casket on a horse-drawn wagon to that site. It felt appropriate too leading his last best mare, his spurs buckled through a cinch ring chinking when she jogged, almost as if he were there. It was eminently fitting as well, I suppose, that I was cold and stiff and shivering, with tears and snot on my face and my feet stuffed stupidly into my cowboy boots. A few hundred yards northwest of the buildings, the site allows a full view of either road coming into the creek and close access to first calf heifers grazing by amiably or muzzling in nearby feed bunks. A hard, bitter wind beat at us the day we scraped an old wagon and some other deteriorated horse-drawn equipment out of the frozen ground in our best attempt at preparation. Dad would be pleased we got rid of the junk.

That day, after the burial, the task completed, Dad would have told me to go to the house and get warm but he would not have been the least bit surprised if I had stood stubbornly there while his grandchildren covered the casket. But this time with that watery half-light of a winter’s late afternoon slouched around the south-facing door, I went back to the barn without him. My feet like blocks, his coat sloppy around my shoulders, to tend the horses, remove the tack and spend a minute with his gear, comforted by horse smells and sounds, in the first best place I knew him. A place, no doubt, I will visit more often than the grave site   to discover what I will do now in my own time, and who I will be without him.

Michelangelo’s David, a Carrara marble statue over 14 feet in height, is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created between 1501 and 1504. It represents the Biblical hero David. You know, the guy who slew the giant with a slingshot. Is it the world’s greatest sculpture? Possibly. And possibly it was created by the world’s greatest sculptor. It glows, glistens as if from perspiration, but seems oddly pale. One might almost expect it to be warm to the touch. I viewed it with all proper awe and respect, but it might just be too perfect.

Oh sure, the right hand is disproportionately large because in the middle ages David was considered strong of hand, and yes, David is holding the sling in his left hand because he was left-handed. Consider the etymology: from middle English sinistre, “unlucky”, from Old French sinistra, “left” from Latin sinestra, “left hand” and in present day English, sinister. But David displays Michelangelo’s perfect understanding of human anatomy — all from another sculptor’s cast-off: a flawed block of stone.

There are other notable facts about the David. He was originally planned to be placed on top of the Duomo,  but when interested parties (including Leonardo and Botticelli) saw the finished product they decided it would be a waste way up there.  They formed a commission and placed it in the Palazzo Vecchio and it became a political statement — sort of like, hey you enemies, you don’t scare us! Some clown threw a chair out a window and broke the left arm in three places, but he stayed there until 1872 when he was moved to the Galleria. With train tracks laid in the street, it took three days for David to trundle on a cart to his present location.

But hold up a minute. The Hall of Slaves or Prisoners leads up to the David in the Accademia Galleria. Huge blocks of marble seemingly unfinished with figures writhing and straining against the grip and weight of the stone. Why did he leave these unfinished? Maybe he’s chipping away with his hammer and chisel and decides he can’t get these pieces quite right so he just quits? This from the guy who whacked the knee of a statue with his hammer and yelled at it about speaking to him? Nah, not our guy Michelangelo who believed that it was the work of a sculptor to release the statue already in the stone. These pieces seem to represent the human struggle to be free of whatever holds us back from completion and thus perfection. Remember that M. did not work from plaster casts or mark the blocks of stone in any way. He just went to chipping on a piece of stone and let the work emerge from it. David was a commissioned piece. And it is perfect. The Prisoners or Slaves are masterpieces of a different sort and are a personal message, a philosophy, if you will, of an artist.

 

Michelangelo was more than just possibly the finest sculptor ever. He painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling of course and drew and painted all his life. He was also a renown poet. From humble beginnings at his father’s quarry, Michelangelo learned to wield a hammer and chisel while working for a stone cutter, proving that humble tools in the right hands may render extraordinary truths across the centuries.