Ekalaka in the late 1930s

The following was dropped off at the Eagle years ago. It had been long forgotten until a recent, chance conversation in Billings. It was given to the Eagle by Ms. Mariellen Neudeck, eldest daughter of Marie and Alexander MacDonald.

The text contains a chapter from an unpublished autobiography, "Montana Woman," written by Marie Peterson MacDonald. MacDonald was born on February 24, 1913 to Swedish immigrants who homesteaded near Great Falls. She attended the University of Montana for one quarter. After the onset of the Depression, she transferred to Western Montana College to earn a teaching certificate. She taught for two years near Highwood, then enrolled at the University of Minnesota, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Journalism in 1936.

Marie then taught school at Carter County High School in Ekalaka (the following chapter is about this time in her life) before marrying Alexander MacDonald in 1941. Alexander studied dentistry at the University of Minnesota and served in the U.S. Army Dental Corps during World War II, stationed at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Eventually, the family moved to Glendive, where Alexander set up a dental practice in 1946.

In 1954, Marie became the first woman elected to the Glendive City Council. She also served two terms as a trustee for the Montana State Historical Society. From 1964 to 1974, Marie worked as the city of Glendive's librarian. During this time, she wrote two books about Eastern Montana history: "After Barbed Wire" (1963) and "Glendive: History of a Montana Town" (1968).

18. Ekalaka

"Eek-a-lacka," said the stage driver, "is a good town. Great dances - last all night and into the morning. Great people - awful hard up, what with the drought and grasshoppers eating all the grain, and no price at all for cattle and sheep since '29. Two-thirds of them would be starving if it wasn't for President Roosevelt's WPA. And they're honest, hard-working folks, who've never begged for anything. But now, with WPA, they are building roads and reservoirs and planting shelter belts and doing the country some good, as well as earning a little cash money. There's the CCC camps for the young fellows there aren't any jobs for. Up on the Missouri River, they're building Fort Peck Dam, and plenty of people from all over Montana are working there. Having a lively time, too, I hear."

The stage driver was a natural guide. Although I was his only passenger that morning, he did his best for me. As we drove through miles of open pasture, we saw occasionally a cluster of buildings (he would name the owners) or bands of sheep or cattle. When we passed the Medicine Rocks, weird outcroppings of sandstone sculptured by the winds, he told me about them. The rocks had been a holy place of the Sioux. In the 80's and 90's, the cowboys who brought longhorns from Texas and Oklahoma carved their initials into the soft rock. Most of the earliest settlers had come with the Mill Iron or the Hash Knife, the biggest cattle outfits. They looked around at all the open land, squatted on it, and went into the cow business for themselves, sometimes at the expense of their former bosses. Then just before the First World War, the honyockers came in and tried to raise crops. They learned better. The country was still mostly stock pasture.

Only place for a person like me to stay was Mrs. Kowitz's hotel, said my mentor. He left me and my luggage at the hotel. Mrs. Kowitz put me upstairs and suggested I get my meals at Mrs. Perso's cafe next door.

After lunch I walked to the high school and met Bill Rowley, the principal; Bill Greer, science teacher and athletic coach; Jessica Hunt, social studies teacher and drama coach; and Luella Baum, commercial and music teacher. Mr. Rowley taught mathematics. I was to teach English, supervise the library and school publications, and coach girls' athletics.

Teaching under Mr. Rowley was an exhilarating, rewarding experience. Himself an excellent teacher, he ran a well-organized school. He gave us forms for our weekly lesson plans, so that both he and the teachers knew what we were doing. As for discipline, he told me I need never tolerate rudeness or disturbance. At the first sign of trouble, I was to send the offender to his office. If the same student offended twice, he automatically failed the course and would no longer be in my class. I sent one boy once.

The kids arrived at school, expecting to behave, expecting to learn. Many of them came 50 and 100 miles from drought-dessicated, lonely ranches. Some of the boys were over-age, grown men, who couldn't find work and had decided to get the diplomas they had not sought before. Most of them seemed glad to be in high school.

As I look now at my lesson plan books, I am amazed at how much I demanded from my pupils. "What is English for?" I asked them and they came to understand the importance of clear and exact word use, whether for a cake recipe, or for business letters, or for writing a friend. I loved literature, loved presenting a special poem, or story, or play. Years later, at a class reunion, a grown man brought a book of poems and asked me to read to the group, as I had used to do.

We studied grammar together and learned the structure of sentences by diagramming them.

For composition I gave my six sections of English, 139 pupils, a written assignment almost every week. At first it was only a paragraph, perhaps based on some phase of the week's work.

"I do not want to be bothered by mechanical errors: bad spelling, bad grammar and sloppy sentences," I told them. "When I correct your papers, I'll circle each such error, When I have found three, I'll hand the paper back to you to do over. Once it is mechanically acceptable, then I can grade your thought." I asked for simplicity and clarity, not overblown rhetoric.

If the students worked hard, they knew that I worked harder. When Mr. Rowley gave them standardized tests, their scores were well above the national average. In my third year, the class I'd had since they were freshmen achieved a median near the national 75th percentile.

In those days, scholarship was considered important enough to warrant an annual contest with neighboring high schools. The winners of the first and second places would receive a school letter, even as basketball players did. We competed with students from Baker, Mildred, Ollie, and Plevna, and won the trophy overwhelmingly. Mr Rowley's entries in mathematics got every first and second place (only two entries per subject were allowed) and my English students did equally well. Rowley, who carried on an intense rivalry with Mr. Gullidge of the larger Baker High, was ecstatic.

That first year I neglected the school newspaper. Fortunately for the school, the editor was Sid McLean, an outstanding senior. She edited the paper, saw to its production, solicited the ads, got it out on time.

The library also suffered from my neglect. In my third year, when we moved into a new high school, I was finally able to organize the library.

Athletics were extremely important in Ekalaka, as in all small towns. The senior girls coached me in coaching volley ball. But then came basketball, where I could do the coaching, since I'd played basketball with fervor myself. There was much talent available: Maxine Powell, Phyllis Putnam, Sid and Barbara McLean, Helen Frye, Dori Kortum, Ruth Albert, Gloria Barnes, Thea Nies, Myrtle Gundlach, Mary Kennedy. About my three years of coaching, I remember best the one game we lost, at Ismay, with questionable refereeing. As the boys were on a long losing streak, my girls were the darlings of the town.

Bill Greer, the science teacher and boys' coach, really did emphasize character. Never willing to risk a youngster's health for an athletic victory, he did not think he had to win every game. He didn't.

Rowley, although he liked to win and particularly liked to see Gullidge humiliated, appreciated Greer's sterling qualities and kept him at Carter County High School as long as he would stay, seven years. Bill went into administration and was superintendent at Whitehall and Glasgow.

Jessica Hunt, who taught Latin, history and biology, was one of the fine personalities you meet occasionally in a lifetime. She and her husband Carl had come out as homesteaders to the Camp Crook area of South Dakota. She had supported the claim by teaching school; Mike McDonald (an Ekalaka High School alumnus) remembers her as a strict teacher. By the time I knew her, she had been back to get her Bachelor's degree in her native Indiana and had been at the high school since 1925. She was a gifted story teller, had a fine sense of humor and much tolerance of other people's frailties. Without the title, she was the Dean of Girls. Her husband Carl was an invalid, a house patina who had developed lead poisoning. He and I talked baseball; we were both St. Louis Cardinal fans, especially of the Dean brothers.

If our high school was good in many ways, its building was not, a ramshackle wooden building. In the center was a sort of barn that served as gymnasium, assembly and study hall, theatre and dance hall. When the school day ended, a crew of boys would stack the desks on the stage and the sides of the room, so that the floor could function as a gym. Every morning the crews put the desks back for the day. After a school play, the desks were removed from the floor for the inevitable dance.

The school was the center of the town's activities. And it was staunchly supported by the merchants, because many of the ranchers in the south end of the county could have sent their children to Belle Fourche or some other town of the Black Hills.When Mr. Rowley began the campaign for a new building, he had strong encouragement. Leaving nothing to chance, however, Rowley and the rest of the faculty went to dances all over the county, promoting the necessary bond issue. It passed. During my second year at Ekalaka, we had the excitement of the actual construction and for my third year, the luxury of enough class rooms, a study hall with an adjacent library, a separate gymnasium, including adequate and separate locker and shower rooms for boys and girls.

Outside of school there was the Old Stand, the town's leading bar, where the ranchers met when they came into town. Sometimes the ladies' bridge club met there also, so their drinks might be served them. Across the street was the New Life Bar, with a dance hall attached. Festivities there commonly continued until breakfast time.

Mac Niccum's movie palace showed pictures on weekends, the big crowd appearing on Friday nights. It was the heyday of the romantic pictures; I remember the Astaire-Rogers musicals, "Captain Courageous," Bette Davis in "Jezebel" and "The Letter," "The Good Earth," Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." "Gone With the Wind" was the book-of-the-month and swept the country. I had to wait my turn to read the Woman's Club copy and stayed up late to read it.

For social interaction, for the exchange of news and opinion, there was Perso's Cafe. The food, including the bread and rolls, was made by Mrs. Perso every day of the year, and Mrs. Perso was a fantastically gifted cook. Her pies and cakes, her potato salad, her roast beef and turkey and chickens, above all, her bread stuffing, were a delight to the regular boarders and an astonishment to visitors.

One man told her, "I haven't had a lemon pie like that since my wife ran away." Traveling salesmen would often drive scores of miles in order to come back for an evening meal and breakfast at Perso's.

The more prosperous townspeople and ranchers came for Sunday dinners. State and Federal officials and business people ate with us when they came to Ekalaka.

At table we discussed with friend and strangers alike the election of 1936, Roosevelt against Landon. Gordon Berg and I organized a Young Democrats Club. One day two travelers from Kansas assured us that Landon would not carry his own state. He didn't. The time-honored "As goes Maine, so goes the nation," became "As goes Maine, so goes Vermont," those being the only two states that voted Republican. "The Literacy Digest" had polled its readers and predicted a Landon victory; the election results killed that magazine. "Time" replaced the "Digest" as the national news magazine.

The romance of King Edward and Wallis Simpson filled our newspapers and gave rise to some off-color jokes. Most of use heard Edward's abdication speech on the radio.

Our more distinguished visitors were the scientists and professors from America's leading natural history museums and from universities. They came to see Ekalaka's paleontological museum and the extraordinary men, Walter Henry Peck, Septon Cady, and De Loss Hall, who had actually added to the sum of world knowledge.

The plains of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas, now semi-arid grasslands, were once semi-tropical swamp, the home of the last great proliferation of dinosaurs. These and other creatures of 75 million years ago left a richness of fossils.

When in 1902 and 1904 the Peabody Museums of Yale and Harvard send expeditions to dig this rich paleontological material, they found ideal guide in Walter Henry Peck.

In 1888 Peck had come west for his health immediately after graduating from an academy in Connecticut. He was in succession a sheepherder, cowboy, rancher, merchant, and creamery operator. By 1900 he knew the county thoroughly. Well-educated for his time, he had noted and wondered about the outcroppings of bones in the landscape. Then as a guide for the Peabody scientists, he learned their digging and preserving techniques. It was not only that archaeology became his lifelong avocation; he interested and educated others in fossil-finding, so that the whole county became knowledgeable bone-hunters, able to recognize significant fossils on the open range. The citizens willingly taxed themselves to support the museum he founded and the Carter County Geological Society.

As a dues-paying member of the Society, I seldom missed the monthly meetings, which were discussions of the discoveries of the group. These included a fine triceratops skull, an almost complete anatasaurus skeleton, three jaws of early mammals, fossil figs and sequoia cones and seeds, a section of cycad, scales of ganoid fish, agatized remains of crocodiles and giant turtles. The Society's greatest find was a skull of pachycephalosaurus grangeri, a lizard with a tiny brain in a thick layer of bone. "The original bonehead," we called it. This had never been found anywhere else; it was a hitherto unknown species.

Remote, isolated, the Ekalaka area was a last outpost of the cowboy West. Its people, male and female, favored jeans, heeled boots and Stetsons long before they became the national craze. Although many Scandinavians had settled in the county about as early as the trail drivers, they eagerly adopted western traditions. The prevailing accent was a Southwestern drawl. Ekalakans had the cow country's penchant for nicknames. Rodeo was their regional sport. At the Baker fair and at local celebrations, Tuffy and Stub Askin, of my first freshman class, were the Roman race, i.e. one man standing on two horses, racing another one standing on two horses. Their uncle, Bob Askin of Ismay, had won the world bronc riding championship at the Madison Square Garden. Tipperary, a horse from neighboring Camp Crook, was considered the world's toughest bucker.

"Pistol," by Adrienne Richards, is a wonderfully evocative novel of eastern Montana in the early Roosevelt years. Richards has captured exactly the sights and sounds, the fears and feelings of the kind of people I knew there.