Welcome to Big Tree Lodge

It’s raining in Montana so I’ve not been able to ride the Sacred Trails. We’re staying in Glacier Park Lodge - alias Big Tree Lodge. It’s constructed on a framework of enormous trees, Douglas Firs, estimated to be 500-800 years old when they were felled, more than one hundred years ago. Big Tree Lodge is built on land purchased from the Blackfeet Nation by James J. Hill, ‘the Empire Builder’, boss of the Great Northern Railway. He had to go to Congress for permission to buy the land but the anxious 21st century reader can’t help wondering, and worrying, how much say the Blackfeet leaders will have had in this arrangement? The railway was already running through their territory, it had brought in miners and homesteaders, now Hill planned this lodge for holiday-makers, visitors from the cities to explore the beautiful landscape. The concept of the National Parks was still new, Glacier Park, the tenth to be established, was signed into law by President Taft in 1910. People could buy a permit to camp or hike or explore on horseback, ‘Empire Builder’ Hill wanted to bring them in by train and put them up in Swiss chalet style comfort.

That’s what Francis and I are doing now, perhaps 2/3 of the way on our journey across America. There’s a log fire burning, a piano playing, a happy buzz of conversation. We’re seated beside a tipi, one of those brought in annually by the Blackfeet representatives, to remind guests whose territory this is. When I took my photo outside I couldn’t help noticing how the US flag towered over the modest tent. A slightly less comfortable reminder are the notices around the hotel prohibiting the sale of alcohol between 8am and 5 pm Monday to Friday. The Blackfeet have initiated an alcohol control policy on their reservation. It’s complex and necessary but I don’t know whether it has helped reduce the dismal statistics of alcohol related disease and death among their people.

Where are the Blackfeet here? Their nomadic way of life was effectively over by 1888 when they signed the agreement for their present-day reservation. Today some live around the park but most are in the small town of Browning nearby. I noticed that there’ll black tie and blue jeans fundraising event at the hotel in a few days’ time to raise funds for student ships at Browning Community College, there’s a programme here called ‘Native America Speaks’, there are artworks in the gift shop. James Hill hired some indigenous performers to greet and entertain hotel guests and show them round a tipi village; today the Blackfeet run the successful Sun tours company, using minibuses, and my cancelled ride along the sacred trails would have been another of their ventures. I exchanged several emails with Al Boy, the organiser. When he finally had to let me know that the rain had made the paths too slippery, he wrote ‘I’m sorry that Mother Nature is dampening that dream’.

It was the trees that had troubled me particularly on our arrival. I was reading Purgatory Ridge by William Kent Krueger, the third of his Cork O’Connor novels, which I discovered on my only other visit to America, the Bouchercon in Indianapolis 2009. He’s based in Minnesota, which we rushed through during the night. His novels include characters from the Ojibwe nation (and I’ll acknowledge his influence on the heritage of Skye in the Strong Winds series). Purgatory Ridge focuses on the threatened destruction of a group of ancient white pines which the native people revere as Our Grandfathers. Arriving here, to a railway hotel constructed from 800-year-old Douglas firs, was perturbing. After the Blackfeet had been persuaded to sell their land for this building, were their ancestor trees felled as well? In fact these magnificent examples had been hauled across from the forests of Oregon and Washington on the Pacific coast. The hotel floors are made of Maple from America’s eastern states. For a railway king - an Empire Builder - this coast-to-coast unification in wood carried a gratifying message. For a transient hotel guest there remains the uneasy question, is our pleasure worth it. But perhaps someone on her way to a Wooden Boat Festival can only say humbly, isn’t wood wonderful. A few of the straight and sturdy trunks that are holding the roof above our heads, and sheltering us from the cold rain, have had to be replaced over the past 100 years, but most are those originally felled somewhere around 1911 and hauled hundreds of miles to build this place.

 

As I’ve been reading and viewing my way across the country it remains perturbing how much of the splendid pleasures I’ve enjoyed, with Francis, have a darker underside of exploitation or suppression of the rights of others. It began with Taiwan Travelogue (Yang Shuang-zi) which I read in New York, during which the fictional novelist, exploring Taiwan in 1938, mainly through its delicious food, is forced to realise that her status as a Mainlander, a member of the occupying nation (in those days Japan) inexorably prevents her from achieving a relationship of loving equality with an Islander. We visited the Morgan museum and marvelled at the book collection as well the works of art. Then read The Personal Librarian (Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray) a novel based on the life of Belle da Costa Green who largely assembled the collection for J Pierrepont Morgan whilst always concealing her own Black heritage. It was hard enough being a woman in that business world. Reading Overboard by Sara Paretsky while exploring the affluence of the Lakeside area and the astonishing art and architecture in the Loop spelled out messages of exploitation, corruption, brokenness with no need to take City Crime Tour on offer. A return to America’s east coast, reading Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout) was astringent, bringing ‘only’ reflections on the universal themes of ageing, lost time, lost opportunities, lost love. Then a plunge back into exploitation and violence with Iron Lake, Boundary Waters and Purgatory Ridge (all William Kent Krueger). His natural descriptions are spectacular and so are the landscapes we have been passing through and staying in. Next stop the Pacific. I know what I’m reading next, it’s a re- read of Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau of which I can currently only remember deep waters, tall trees, lost love and lost communities.

All I can hope from these books is that they have been printed on C21st eco-friendly, recycled paper (!) Not new trees. I can’t add any more guilts to this absorbingly interesting, educational, horizon expanding holiday. Thank you Francis for making it possible.