Buster's Cattle Field

Prologue to the as-yet unsigned and unpublished memoir, "Billyville: Confessions of a Post-Punk Homo Altar Boy from Montana".

My hometown, Billings, is the rodeo buckle cinching a big fat land grab. Big for being so far from it all. Small by most other standards. It began as a river bend rail stop on the Yellowstone, named for a Northern Pacific Railway tycoon who never once stepped foot there. Frederick Billings was just in it for the money. White settlers wanted land. They needed plows and guns. So in 1882, Billings, Montana, was planted on the high plains using crop seed, bullets, whiskey, and cows. Lots of cows. Later came the oil refineries.

Twenty-one years prior, in 1861, George Armstrong Custer had graduated last in his class at West Point. Still, after commissioning into the U.S. Army during the U.S. Civil War, this short blonde boy got lucky. He was repeatedly promoted for shoving his way out front and up on top, battle after battle, without being killed. After witnessing the Confederacy's surrender, and with an ego fueled by rapid ascent, this youngest of Army Generals moved west to pursue greater fame in the name of “Manifest Destiny,” the 19th century religiously-tinged conviction that God wanted white men to seize dominion over the North American continent, by any means necessary. Custer killed American Indian women, children, and warriors with equal impunity. Usually women and children first, though, as a tactic to lure their warriors close. He was foul this way, and others. Eleven horses were shot out from under him in the process.

In 1874, Custer's troops found gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. And, in finding it, gave victorious U.S. Civil War Commanding General turned middling President, Ulysses S. Grant, a weapon to combat America's post Civil War depression: another gold rush. All Grant had to do was break the treaty he had signed just a few years earlier, in 1868, in which he had released forever to the Great Sioux Nation all U.S. claims to the Black Hills, for the Sioux held these hills as sacred. Per the historic record, President Grant didn't give his betrayal, or lack of integrity, a second thought. There was gold in them hills, and he wanted it.

This treaty violation, alongside many, many others, led thousands of American Indians to resist U.S. incursions into what they had been told they could keep of their ancient, original homelands. Among the most fierce resisters were the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Mandan, Hunkpapa, and Minneconjou. By the summer of 1876, more than 8,000 people from these tribes had gathered along the Little Big Horn river, sixty miles east of the river bend to soon be named for Frederick Billings. It was the largest Plains Indian camp ever known to history.

On June 25th of that year, General Custer approached this vast camp ahead of his undermanned 7th Cavalry, seeking to manifest his destiny. He prepared his men for attack, even though the tribes outnumbered them by over a dozen to one. Reinforcements were only two days behind, but glory was ahead for General George Armstrong Custer, the latest of many white men streaming from the East, intent on thrusting themselves bodily upon the West.

Custer himself was a slender, long blonde-haired dandy who loved to be photographed wearing gold-slathered blue silk uniforms. His fellow officers despised him, yet also followed orders, and prepared to attack. Over the coming hours that day, Custer's arrogance cost 264 U.S. soldiers their lives - every last man under his command - including both of his own brothers. His own dead body was stripped and horse-dragged. His gold buttons were never found.

This event is remembered, in Indian country, as the Battle of the Greasy Grass. White folks call it the Battle of the Little Big Horn. It was the greatest military victory in history for the indigenous North Americans, in a losing struggle to maintain their way of life on lands they had roamed for over ten thousand years. They had tried signing treaties. They had tried trading what they had. But, the United States of America broke those treaties and attacked, again and again, in a filthy, drunken grab for land and gold.

This time, though, Sioux War Chief Sitting Bull won.

If the original, 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty were ever honored as signed, all the land beneath my hometown would be owned by the Apsálooké (Crow) Tribe. The Crow did not fight at Little Big Horn. They scouted for General Custer. The Sioux were gathering and warring to take Crow land. Land the Crow had inhabited for centuries. History is not simple. And, an enemy of the enemy is a friend.

*

Despite Custer’s humiliating death and defeat, out on what locals now call "Buster’s cattle field," over the next century Billings - dubbed the "Magic City" by its local Chamber of Commerce - still managed to anchor itself into the high northern plains with shopping malls, car lots, cattle yards, oil refineries, and hospitals, up where the grasslands launch their long flat sweep across an expanse larger than Western Europe. Hence the magic. Vast red lands turned white using black powder and greenbacks.

The Yellowstone River runs alongside Billings through the high, wide Yellowstone Valley. It is the longest American river still un-dammed. Yucca plants and Ponderosa pine patch and dot the bluffs and gullies, but for wide fields where Uncle Sam pumps cheap water to irrigate his friends. Or, where Billings loosens its belt yet again, churning farms under to build yet more ranchettes, the sprawling ten acre lots where rich coastal folks retire to play cowboy, shitting into septic fields buried in the same dirt from which they pump their drinking water. What could possibly go wrong?

Each fall and winter, keening winds lace icy white powder across this valley, slicing through collars, and snaking over roads until they vanish in a hypnotic ground swirl. Snow piles deep across this wide open slice of Big Sky Country, where the horizons are far enough to leave most anyone feeling quiet under the stars, until they freeze to death. As Dad used to put this, “remember, once it drops below zero, it never feels much colder. It's just a matter of how quick you die.”

Billings is the largest town in Montana, Wyoming, or North Dakota, and for that reason alone gets called a "city" by the locals. You will drive 600 miles to find anyplace larger. When I was born there, in 1966, it numbered about 60,000 white folk, too many of whom didn't much care for the red, and were all too happy to make a point of it. Cattle country racism targets red more so than black. Old boys are lazy. They hit what is near. The population has nearly tripled since.

The Beartooths are one of the easternmost of nearly a hundred named mountain ranges in Montana. They sit sixty miles west of Billings, cradling the sunsets, and rolling storm clouds down the valley like a bowling gutter. Billings itself sits at the base of a long ridge of sandstone cliffs known as "the Rims." The airport sits up top, five minutes from the courthouse. Locals use these cliffs like a beach. Every few years another drunk steps off to die four hundred feet below in someone’s backyard. This is Montana. Watch your step.

Southeast of downtown, the Yellowstone River curves below a former buffalo jump known as Sacrifice Cliff, past two oil refineries where there used to be a river stop. It also passes near a sugar beet processing plant which dents the fall breezes with a burnt and earthy stink that reminds you you’re in Billings. Yellowstone Park is ninety miles as the crow flies southeast over the Beartooths. Half that distance the other way will get you to Pompey's Pillar, where William Clark carved his autograph high up on a cliff, after telling Meriwether Lewis to find his own damned way home. Many years the grizzlies nail a tourist or two. That's how locals know tourist season has begun. There is room down many roads to get lost. Plenty do.

Billings' commercial diversity underlies the abiding local confidence that folks will keep on buying what the Magic City has to sell. Which is a bit of everything, though the economy never runs as fast as elsewhere, nor as slow. There's a big meth trade, and a whole lot of angry drunks in oversized trucks. Montana politics are a study in carpet-bagging. Less than half those who call themselves “Montanan” were actually born here.¹ Everyone likes to act as if they got here first, except the natives, who know the truth.

*

A green gabled house on Yellowstone Avenue held my family for forty-five years. It is fronted by a maple so thick it takes three kids to fully hug. Years ago, its backyard had an apple tree, with treehouse, plus one plum, two cherries, three lilacs, and a double peony bush, all long gone now. It sits six blocks down from the Moss Mansion, a red sandstone showpiece from Billings’ early days, which was built complete with a wrought-iron greenhouse designed by the architect who built Manhattan’s famed Waldorf-Astoria. Old Miss Moss herself, youngest and maiden daughter of her home's namesake, would still answer the door herself back in the mid 1970s, to give a kid a Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon donation, during the last few years before her family home became a Western history museum. My Catholic high school sat one block across from her front porch, on the far side of the mortuary where Dad used to take me to visit his church buddy who owned the place. I played hide and seek with myself among the coffins while they planned the machinations of the local Knights of Columbus.

Dad hadn't always lived in Billings. He was born into the Great Depression on a dustbowl farm near Rattlesnake Butte outside of Wheat Basin, a much less successful train stop twenty-five miles west-northwest of Billings, which had dried up around WW2 when the local boys went off to die. After the war, someone hauled away the long wooden dance hall where Dad’s family ran a regular Saturday night dance, as a side-hustle, in the 1930's, between the wars, back when speaking German could get you jailed. Ten cents got you in, plus sandwiches at midnight. Dad and his brothers played their fiddles to a stomp, while Aunt Marie and their mother fixed the midnight meal. I never met their mother or their dad, who would have been my grandparents. Dad married late and I was his last kid. Folks often thought he was my grandpa. Even the old Wheat Basin grain elevator is gone now, along with the tracks, though you can still find the foundation of the Catholic Church where he was baptized back in 1921. It's about the size of a one car garage.

Mom grew up down in Casper, Wyoming, in a family that had oil and auto dealer money until her father gambled it away down at the Elks Club. She and Dad met over spaghetti tongs at a fateful church supper up in Billings, in the Knights of Columbus Hall. They married soon after, in 1961, each two decades late to the usual wedding game, on the far side of past lives they kept largely private from their kids. He was an army sergeant gone into sales, with jokes and timing to conquer his waistline. She was a hot Irish nurse-anesthetist who had wanted to be a doctor, but wound up a mother, and was never much too happy about that.

Until our Cable TV arrived in 1980, we had three broadcast channels, programmed out of Denver, Salt Lake, and Calgary. Evenings included the national and local news, Family Feud, and M*A*S*H, before the boob tube would be turned firmly off with orders to "go read a book." Beyond one pop and rock station, and classical radio from the local college, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash owned the airwaves. Doctors and bankers ran the economy. It was a town to work your way to Friday, drink all Saturday, and drive to church on Sunday: wash, rinse, repent, and repeat. There will be snow for Christmas, and you blow shit up on the Fourth of July.

Then, in 1984, during the sunny springtime week of my eighteenth birthday, I learned Billings was also speckled with queer post-punk death rockers, clown-painted vampire wannabes, a psychedelic librarian, a purple wizard, a freckled boy-princess, and one remarkably large and well-organized shoplifting ring run by a gun-slinging drag queen named Billy.

We'll get back to them.

1. https://montanafreepress.org/2023/09/26/how-many-montanans-were-born-in-montana-2022/