Dateline July 9, 2013, Montana, Big Sky Country
After leaving Yellowstone, we drove out the south gate of the park directly into Teton National Forest, on our way down to Jackson, commonly known as Jackson Hole. Grand Teton National Park covers about 310,000 acres and includes the major peaks of the forty-mile-long Teton Range plus most of the northern Jackson Hole valley.
We drove the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Parkway south, a beautiful stretch of road with lakes all along and the Teton Range walking with us to the west.
After about eighty miles we rolled into Jackson. We parked the Roadtrek on a side street and walked the few blocks to the town center. It being Saturday, the farmers' market was in full swing. Charming little place, full of people from every walk of life and busy with their summer trade. One of the gentler things about being older is that you already have all the trinkets and souvenirs you need, so the shopping was light. Pleasant for an hour. After a while though, what we really wanted was a ghost town.
There just happens to be one in Montana called Virginia City. North we went, through part of eastern Idaho and its long lines of potato fields. We called ahead and reserved a spot in an RV park in Virginia City. The park was clean and nicely run.
About Virginia City. In May 1863, a group of prospectors heading toward the Yellowstone River ran into a party of Crow Indians and were forced to turn back toward Bannack. On the retreat, gold was discovered when Bill Fairweather stuck a pick into the ground near Alder Creek, joking that maybe he could turn up enough gold to buy some tobacco.
The real reason we picked Virginia City: Bill Fairweather was John's mother's great uncle. In 1958, when John was eleven, the Wilson family drove down from Seattle and toured Virginia City. It was an interesting reason to come back: to see how much a ghost town can change over a stretch of fifty-five years. The answer turns out to be: not much.
Back to the story. The prospectors could not keep the discovery a secret, and as soon as the strike got out, they were followed. A town quickly formed to handle the rules around individual gold claims. On June 16, 1863, the township was registered under the name "Verina," meant to honor Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the first and only First Lady of the Confederacy. Verina sat in Union territory, but the men who founded it were thoroughly Confederate in their loyalties. When the registration paperwork landed on the desk of a Connecticut judge named G. G. Bissell, he objected to the choice and recorded the town instead as Virginia City. (Which, given that Virginia itself had seceded and then West Virginia had seceded right back to the Union, had its own kind of ironic fitness as a name for a Dixie town in Yankee territory.)
Within weeks Virginia City was a boom town of thousands, deep in a gold rush with no law enforcement whatsoever. Most of Montana ended up under the de facto rule of the Vigilance Committee, the infamous Montana Vigilantes, who operated on both sides of the law.
Bill Fairweather was one of the wealthier men in town. The legend is that he slept with rattlesnakes inside his shirt and under his jacket. The Crow Indian story is told in Golden Gulch: The Story of Montana's Fabulous Alder Gulch by Dick Pace. When the Crows had the prospectors surrounded in camp and were taunting them, Fairweather pulled two rattlesnakes out of his shirt and started prancing around with them and thrusting them toward the Indians. The tribe decided he was crazy. They believed killing a crazy man would bring bad luck to the tribe, so the elders let the prospectors go the next morning. The younger braves chased them later anyway. The encounter happened near Bozeman. The prospectors moved farther west, where they found the gold. They looked around at the alder trees lining the creek and named the strike Alder Gulch. Whiskey was Bill's drink. A good portion of the craziness probably came from there.
The local hotel was named after him.
He liked to throw coins to the Chinese workers in the street, because he enjoyed watching them dive into the mud to get them. He died penniless at the age of 39. When John visited the grave in 1958, it had a fence around it like the current one, but only a stake marking it on Boot Hill.
Sometime in the 1980s, most of the Boot Hill graves were moved up the hill to a new cemetery, and the local historical society set a proper gravestone for Bill. There is a sign there now noting that he was the one who discovered the gold at Alder Creek.
The State of Montana now owns the historic buildings of both Virginia City and nearby Nevada City, and leases them to operators who run businesses inside the protected districts.
We left Virginia City and headed up to Big Sky, Montana to meet with another dear family connection. John Bohlinger was a close friend of John's parents, Jack and Jean, and of the whole family for years.
He and his first wife Bette had bought a condo at the base of Big Sky Mountain when it was first developed by the old NBC anchorman Chet Huntley in 1973. John has had a standing invitation to use their place for as long as anyone can remember. We had spent time with him and Bette on our way back from Alaska two years ago. Bette has since passed away from cancer, and John has remarried, to Karen. At the time of our visit, John was serving as the Lt. Governor of Montana (2005-2013) and was up at the JFK School at Harvard for a course, so seeing them this summer had been one of the main things on the trip plan.
We checked in at the Huntley Lodge, where the Bohlingers had bought a newer condo in 2001. Beautiful two-story unit looking out at Lone Peak with views of the Summit community and the ski slopes. John arrived about an hour after we did. Karen was in Seattle with one of her sons and would meet us in Helena for lunch on Tuesday. We had champagne at the condo, then drove out to dinner, where all three of us ordered bison. A good few hours of family stories, catching up on John's children, our children, and our grandchildren.
It was also great to talk politics with John. He had been in the Montana legislature and state senate as a Republican. In the summer of 2004, Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic candidate for governor, came to John and proposed something unusual: a bipartisan ticket, with John as the Republican Lt. Governor. The argument was that the combination might actually accomplish good things for the state. They ran together, won, and were re-elected in 2008. John said it was a wonderful, rewarding experience.
John drove back to Helena in the morning. Janice and I took a hike on a beautiful trail to Ousel Falls.
Up and down about a mile of trail, with the river beside us the whole way, ending in a beautiful set of falls. About an hour round-trip, just right.
We spent the rest of the day catching up on reading, doing laundry, and planning the rest of the trip. The Roadtrek had developed an electrical problem, and we found a dealer in Kalispell that could take us at 10:00 AM on Wednesday.
Tuesday morning we packed up the rig and drove up to Helena to meet John and Karen for lunch. It was an easy drive and we arrived at their place around 11:30. They live in an extraordinary residential section of Helena that also includes many of the mansions built by the kings of Montana's gold and copper rushes. Helena is a vibrant, beautiful city, with a magnificent history of its own. We had a lovely lunch with John and Karen at the Montana Club, an old establishment founded by the copper and gold barons. Beautiful old building. The dining room had a brass-and-mirrors bar that belonged in an old western movie. John gave us a route up to Kalispell and told us to head for Flathead Lake, where we would find plenty of places to stay.
Many thanks to the Bohlingers for their wonderful hospitality at both Big Sky and Helena. It was a real pleasure to be with them both.
The drive north was beautiful. Kalispell sits a few miles outside Glacier National Park. We found Spruce River Campground, with a site right on the river, and had another magnificent evening.
The next day the dealer diagnosed the Roadtrek's electrical problem but did not have the right part in stock. We ordered it for pickup in Seattle, since we would be heading there anyway to see John's brother Will and his wife Cathy.
On to Lake Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
