Elliot Paul - A Ghost Town on the Yellowstone

This edition is published by BORODINO BOOKS www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books borodinobooks@gmail.com

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1948 under the same title.

Borodino Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

A GHOST TOWN ON THE YELLOWSTONE

BY

ELLIOT PAUL

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Affectionately Dedicated to

BARBARA MARIE MAYOCK,

My Mother-in-Law

THE town of Trembles, Montana, during the fifteen years it existed, lent much distinction to the Lower Yellowstone Valley and the whole northeastern section of that great state. Trembles is no longer on the map. There are no traces of it left, except in the memory of those who lived there in the early nineteen hundreds. Those who drifted through, on foot, by saddle horse, harness rig or stagecoach, and later by Model T Ford and bus, en route between the nearest railroad points of Glendive, on the Northern Pacific, and Mondak, on the Great Northern, took little notice of Trembles. In its declining years, when a branch railroad passed a few miles away, no train, not even a handcar, stopped on Cedar Coulee, near which the vanished town was built.

The nearest historical landmark was Johnny OBriens old store at Newlon, on Fox Creek. Johnny, who was a spry old timer before I was old enough to vote, is dead but not forgotten. His establishment, a general store, fell down and blew away just after World War I, so that the sole returning war veteran found nothing left of Newlon, or Trembles. The post office, of which Old Johnny was postmaster, has long been discontinued, and the handful of ranchers and farmers in that vicinity get their mail at Sidney, the county seat of Richland County.

On the northern horizon may be seen Three Buttes, of which Audubon made a drawing in 1843. Anyone who thinks he can do better than the great artist and naturalist is welcome to try today Buttes are not indestructible, exactly, but they change shape very slowly in the course of a few hundred years.

Directly south of where Trembles used to be, the Yellowstone River, as it rushes toward its confluence with the Missouri, splits itself, in sheer exuberance, into many narrow tricky channels to form the group of islands named The Seven Sisters by Captain Grant Marsh. Captain Marsh, the foremost skipper of the roaring steamboat days, grasshoppered the first steamboat up the Yellowstone from its mouth as far as Miles City just after the close of the Civil War, which sent scores of renegades from both armies into that perilous frontier. The same captain, as an old man, took the last steamboat out of that river.

East of the river lies a stretch of bad lands which, for utter chaos and colorful desolation, match any area on this planet. West of Trembles, where the valley begins to fan out toward the bottom lands of the confluence, foothills start rising from the plain cut by Crane Creek, Fox Creek, Cedar Coulee, Youngs Coulee and their unnamed branches. Some of these still flow a few weeks in the year and all of them become raging torrents just after a cloudburst, which almost invariably comes at the wrong season. Their approximate courses are marked by tiny crooked lines on the government topographical survey quadrangle. On nearly all other maps the whole region is blank, except for two quite meaningful words: SIOUX COUNTRY.

According to Joseph Kinsey Howard, in his stirring book, Montana, High, Wide and Handsome, when a group of eastern bankers were inveigled out to see that part of Montana and its prospects, one of the railroad publicity men said, All this country needs is water.

The head banker remarked ruefully: Thats all hell needs, too.

To help give a narrow strip of land on the west bank of the Yellowstone the only advantage it would have over hell was what brought me, and others, into the Lower Yellowstone country in 1907, while the United States Reclamation Service was building the dam and diversion works below Glendive and the canal and laterals that extend along the foothills as far as the Missouri River. There are 640 acres in a square mile. Montana has 146,997 square miles (about eighteen times as many as my home Commonwealth of Massachusetts), therefore, 93,878,080 acres. The Lower Yellowstone project was designed to irrigate at the most, 70,000 of those, a little more than one-thirteenth of one percent of the state. So it will be seen that those of us who worked for the Reclamation Service on the Lower Yellowstone were trying in a modest way, indeed, to improve the score between hell and Montana. Even that tiny fraction of Montana acreage would have contained my native village of Linden one hundred times.

Trembles, founded in 1907, got its name from a small clump of trees near the mouth of Cedar Coulee. There were few trees to be seen anywhere in that vicinity. The tangle of cottonwoods, alders and underbrush along the river was on a lower level and was not visible from the mesa on which the stage road ran. In the bare foothills languished a few scrub cedars, clinging precariously to crumbling rocks and cut banks. In front of Simards ranch house, near Newlon, a small grove of tall cottonwoods offered shelter and shade.

The half-dozen trees that marked the site of Trembles were quaking aspens, which are called trembles in French. Quite a few of the early settlers of the Lower Yellowstone were French, including the Simards (locally pronounced Seemores) at Newlon, Those early French Catholics, in common with many others elsewhere, if they remembered anything about religion at all, believed that the Gross on which Jesus was crucified was made from the wood of the quaking aspen and that, as a result, all aspens quake perpetually in shame. Be that as it may, the aspens of Trembles shuddered when-ever there was enough wind to stir their leaves. The town never experienced what is known back east as a breeze. Either the wind was high and violent or there was no movement of air whatsoever. In summer the thermometer would have registered one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, had there been any shade or any thermometer. In winter the temperature seldom dipped lower than fifty below.

That end of the valley, in prehistoric days, was a favorite haunt of an adventurous kind of dinosaur called tyrannosaurus, which learned to stand on its hind legs and eat meatthat is to say, the flesh of other, less progressive types of dinosaurs. One thing has been eating another in that region ever since. The great herds of buffalo passed through and across the valley, grazing, twice a year, on their north and south migrations. Elk, antelope, white-tail and black-tail deer, beaver, otter and three kinds of bears were plentiful, not to mention wolves, coyotes, gophers and rattlesnakes. The Arickaree Indians were the first human residents and proprietors there. They were driven out, more or less, by the Sioux, after the latter had been chased westward by the Chippewas and forsook canoes for tough little Indian ponies.