Living the Legacy of Bison and Mastadon

In the high country of the Rocky Mountain west, newcomers often marvel at the sweeping vistas of broad valleys bounded by unbroken ranges of mountains, streaked with snow, even in summer. It easily can be assumed to be an untracked waste, as one can drive on some highways for miles and see few habitations of any kind, or even another car.

That doesn’t mean that the land is without story. After living here for most of my life and hearing tell of history, it seems every mountain, canyon, and valley has a story to tell. Some I have lived through cowboying and timbering in these places; others are the tales of folks living and some long gone. They are always attached somehow to the terrain: a peak, a mountainside, or canyon. Bannack Pass, on the Continental Divide between Idaho and Montana is one such place rich with narrative.

Daughter Melanie and I came over the pass early in the morning a few weeks ago with a trailer load of fresh boxed beef from our new processors in Montana. It was pretty lonely up there in the early morning light—it’s the only dirt state highway in Idaho, and it doesn’t get a lot of use. It’s because so few people live in this wild and remote area of the US. As we descended the Idaho side, I noted the deep ruts left in the mud along the shoulder of road a mile below the summit. They were our signature from 2 weeks ago.

We left those tracks during a near calamitous ascent the summit with a trailer load of beeves. It was a lovely late winter/early spring day in big country. Sunlight from azure skies reflected off snow blanketed peaks of the Great Divide. Oldest daughter Melanie was driving and we chatted about the history of this high basin—how it was here years ago, on the wilderness of Grizzly Hill, a few miles to the north that we used to live at our family logging camp while I felled trees and skidded them out of the woods with our big draft horse team. Melanie was just a wee lass at that time.

I pointed up to some of the highest crags and remarked about how Ron, a friend of mine, had stumbled across the giant ivory tusks of several intact wooly mammoth skeletons protruding from the sedimentary layers exposed on these windswept Divide ridges. Unfortunately, a sudden heart attack killed Ron before I was able to join him on horseback to find them. One of life’s many regrets. I’ll never know where they are—they could be anywhere in hundreds of square miles. It would take months to cover it all.

It was also here in 1877, through this very pass, and on the soil we traveled on that HinmatóowyalahtqÌ“it, known to us as Chief Joseph, walked his band of 700 some Nez Perce 1,170 miles in “fighting retreat” while being pursued by the US Calvary in his desperate attempt at freedom from Army control. He was heading for Canada and refuge with the already escaped Lakota chief, Sitting Bull.

Several weeks later, on the Eastern Montana prairie, just 40 miles from freedom from pursuit and the Canadian border, he surrendered, heartbroken, due to a 5 day battle in the Bear Paw Mountains that left him with many dead and the rest of his people suffering from starvation and bitter cold.

Bannack Pass was also the only rail freight and transportation link to the East from the remote Salmon River Country. The old Gilmore and Pittsburgh railroad grade and tunnel was still very apparent along the way up the pass, hacked and blasted into the mountainside by tracklayer crews in 1909. Because of the increased grade near the pass and lack of room for switchbacks, trains were stopped on a dead end track, were placed in reverse and switched onto a second track to back in reverse all the way up through the tunnel at the top. Then, once through on the other side, the train stopped and then moved forward again onto another track and then down into the Horse Prairie of Montana. Unfortunately, those Pittsburgh, PA based railroad investors never saw their money, as the G&P went bankrupt in 1939. Tracks were pulled to provide raw iron and steel for war materiel bound for Europe and the war effort there, but the railroad bed and many of the of the old hand cut tie timbers still remain.