Mists
It is an unsettling feeling to look back at life and ponder the passage of time. It is unsettling to wonder how or why things worked as they did. It has been said that life is a mist, here and then gone. Perhaps the key is to live in such a way that every day is made to count, that every day is meaningful in some way? In the grasslands of Central Montana, in a small town named Roundup, the mist of the Milwaukee Road's life is slowly dispersing out across the curve of time. The grasses sway and the trees rustle in a warm summer breeze, but the sounds of America's Resourceful Railroad have been gone for many many years. Like the cattle drives that preceded the railroad, lending Roundup its name, quiet is here and life is moving on.
In the tall grasses an old signal stand sits alone with the remnants of a few electrical wires at its base. The insulation is cracked and crusty and their connection to a national lifeline has long been severed. Like other tombstones spread out across the Milwaukee's West, these that remain in Roundup are the fading mists of a line and people who have moved on. A few still stop and take notice of them, but how many? Off the beaten paths, places like Roundup and the Milwaukee Road are where we've been, but somehow, no longer wish to go.
Undeniably, however, these fading signatures of different times still make a difference. I can't explain it, nor even understand it, but I know days I've spent along the route of the Columbian were meaningful and counted for something. I wonder if we would live life differently if we asked ourselves at the end of the day, "what counted today?" It is ironic that even in its life after death, the Milwaukee Road still counts and makes a difference. It fulfills no purpose ever envisioned by those who sent it west, but it remains a difference maker for a few of us nonetheless. On that warm summer day in Roundup, on that day, it made a difference to someone. Now, many years and many miles away, it still does. I guess that's a day that counts for the old girl.
Comments
In addition to oil and coal, copper was on the menu. A cynic may speculate as just what fickle finger of fate brought the Milwaukee Road through this area in the first place. Probably not influenced by the fact that the early Board of Directors counted members of the Rockefeller family, no?
On the darker side, the Roundup area was infested with Ku Klux Klan and there was a city ordinance forbidding Black porters on the Milwaukee varnish from billeting overnight.
Enjoying your odyssey along the fallen flag – makes one aware just how little we really know about the history of our own states, yes?
John Blau
us "back east" to visit our grandmother in Minnesota when I was eight. I will never forget the splendor of the dining car, seeing my first Negro, the porter, the astonishment when the berths appeared.
"It was the Milwaukee that took me to Missoula to the university
with a wardrobe trunk, the only one in my class to go in that depression year. The Milwaukee took me to Chicago en route to New York City to a job the year I graduated. It was the Milwaukee that brought people to Roundup and it was the Milwaukee that was our way out. Now it is gone."
Wetzel, Betty, "Coming Home to Roundup," Montana Magazine, 60, July-August, 1983.
Best regards, Michael Sol
O-E, you bring up an interesting question about "how much do we really know" about the history of the places we're wandering through? Sounds like a good topic for a future blog (I'm not proud, I'll take ideas from wherever I can).
John - thanks for sharing and have a good trip. That's a neat tie-in to some of the local history, that's quite a unique local paper. Great stuff.
Michael - thanks for the stories as always.
Best to all,
-Leland
I went on a bike ride along the right of way to the depot tonight with my oldest son. It's nice to be back here!
Thanks again Leland and all,
John Blau
-Leland
best regards, Michael Sol
“I got the good out of it,” Betty Wetzel reflected shortly before her death at age one hundred two at her home in Bigfork last week.
"Named Elizabeth Preat, she was born November 7, 1915, in Roundup, Mont. to Alfred W. and Rachel “Preat” Johnston Eiselein. Her father had arrived on the first Chicago, Milwaukee Railroad train into the new town of Roundup in 1908 to establish a weekly newspaper, The Roundup Record. Her mother was the daughter of ranchers in the nearby Little Snowy Mountains, who had come to the new state of Montana in 1891. It was Betty’s experiences while growing up in the lively town of immigrant coal miners, cattle and sheep-ranchers and dry-land wheat farmers and summers spent at the family ranch that sparked her lifelong love of Montana and interest in the state’s history.
"After graduating from Roundup high school in 1933, she earned a degree in journalism from the University of Montana. Curiosity about the east coast led her to get a job in New York City the next year. Returning to Roundup to work on the family newspaper, she met Winston. W. Wetzel, principal at the high school when she recruited him to play the hero in a home-talent melodrama entitled, “Gold in the Hills, or The Dead Sister’s Secret.” “He looked better than anything I had seen in New York,” she recalled. They were married in 1940."
She was a character, and it was sad to see that, now, she is gone.
https://montana.funeral.com/2018/03/20/betty-wetzel-2/
Michael Sol