Liz Bryan - River of Dreams: A Journey through Milk River Country

Copyright 2019 Liz Bryan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, audio recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher or a licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.

Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd.

heritagehouse.ca

Cataloguing information available from Library and Archives Canada

978-1-77203-241-3 (pbk)

978-1-77203-301-4 (epub)

Edited by Karla Decker

Proofread by Lesley Cameron

Cover and interior design by Setareh Ashrafologhalai

Cover and interior photographs by Liz Bryan

Map by Eric Leinberger

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

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To my late husband, Jack, who was the real photographer in the familybefore the digital age made it easy. I have tried to follow in his footsteps.

CONTENTS

Map of the Milk Rivers run through Alberta and Montana and the extent of its international watershed in Montana and two Canadian provinces.

Its place in a larger geography.

SOME LANDSCAPES ARE hard on the heart, like the blaze of first love.

I will never forget that long-ago September evening in Albertas Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park. I had climbed through the sandstone hoodoos to the top of the cliffs overlooking the Milk River, a wonderful viewpoint at any time of day. But I was unprepared for the transformation of that glorious sunset. Let me try to explain.

It was cold, and the wind whipped the dry grass. As the sun slipped away, the afterglow of a flaming sky turned the rocks to gold, the river to deep indigo. And, far away, the hazy blue-grey swells of the Sweet Grass Hills held the last rays of sun. It was an unsettling time of day, a time for ghosts. Vision quests took place here, and spirits of many kinds must surely linger. The light was eerie, swiftly changing the look of the land. My skin prickled. Then a meadowlark called out exultantly as if to defy the approaching dark, and a small string of deer stepped across the river where shallow pebbly fords riffled the water. They came from the south, nosing through low willows to browse among the inscrutable rocks. Did I remember to breathe as I clicked my camera, trying to record the joy of the moment?

I stayed in that loveliness as the light faded and the deer melted into the shadows. And, in a way, I have never left. The river tugs at my heart.

What is it that draws me back to the Milk River, my Milk River? If I believed in magic, I could find it here, as the Indigenous people did. They came year after year, century after century, to dream their dreams and write them on the rocks. And perhaps they lifted their eyes to the beckoning hills, where deeper mysteries waited. There is certainly a sense of sanctity in this kind and sheltered valley.

Grief and despair lived throughout Milk River countrynot only among the tribes who, when the bison disappeared, lost everything, but also among the homesteaders. Come from afar, full of dreams to start new lives in a new land, they worked desperately hard on their dry and stubborn plots. But like the soil, their dreams turned to dust as crops withered and their children died. Does the land itself keep guard on all this emotion, all the memories, both good and bad? I think it does, and particularly in the uncertain hour before darkness, I can easily be affected by it, stirring memories of the hopes and heartbreaks of my own life.

This is how it all startedmy long journey over many years through the country of the Milk River. That extraordinary evening in the sunset, now so long ago, inspired explorations, in books and on the land, on both sides of the United StatesCanada border. What follows is an account of my travels through this beautiful area and its long, colourful history. And of the river where dreams are born.

THE MILK IS the only river in Canada that empties into the drainage basin of the Gulf of Mexico. After such a statement, one might expect applause and a wave of the Canadian flag. But how many Canadians have even heard of the Milk? It is a small and dreamy river, etching lazy meanders through some of the loneliest lands of North America: the dry plains of Southern Alberta and Northern Montana. Dwarfed by such giants as the Saskatchewan and the Mississippi, it is virtually unknown in the geography of North America. Yet few streams can match its incredible international journey, the magical beauty of its landscape, much of it still wilderness, or the long and often sad history that suffuses every stride along its 1,250-kilometre (780-mile) passage.

The Milk Rivers story encompasses the settlement of the northwestern plains at a time of great change, when the old, Indigenous ways of life were fading and new immigrant ones were forged, along with brave hopes and longing, injustice and anguish. It is the story perhaps of all of us, played out on an unforgettable stage. The Milk is a river of dreams.

One of several deserted homesteads in the valley, this one still has some of its old yellow paint.

The forlorn graveyard at Masinasin looks southeast to the Sweet Grass Hills.

Petroglyph of a man and horse at Writing-on-Stone.

The Milk River has always been a special place to the First Peoples of the Northwest American plains, providing sustenance both physical and spiritual. In Alberta, several tribes over thousands of years sought shelter in its valley, guarded by the sacred Sweet Grass Hills billowing like great blue clouds above the Montana horizon. Here the people came for the valleys wood and for the huntbut also for ancient rites and ceremonies, and to scratch their thoughts and dreams and commemorations on rock bluffs along the river. These stories, these histories, enrich the landscape and remind those of us who visit the river today in such places as Writing-on-Stone that there was a time and a way of life before our own, one perhaps richer in its simplicityand one that the tide of European settlement has almost washed away.