What Lies Beneath

By Bennett Owen

Do we really need any more evidence that everything’s big in Texas? Those million acre fires may be out but the drought that fueled them lingers in THE worst and longest dry spell the Lone Star State has ever recorded. A friend near Austin laments she usually has the fireplace roaring at Thanksgiving … this year the air conditioner was still on full blast.

One unforeseen silver lining is that history is revealing itself throughout the region as man-made lakes recede in the face of the very drought conditions they were supposed to ameliorate. And so, long forgotten villages like Bluffton are revealed for a short while.

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Follow this link to see a video of Bluffton.

This gravestone marks the burial plot of a boy who died just short of his first birthday in 1882.

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Further north, Lake Texoma has dried up enough to expose Old Woodville, Oklahoma…

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An historic railroad town, legend has it that Bonnie and Clyde attended the cock fights here, camping out at a place called Washita Point –

Bonnie and Clyde, March 1933. Credit: Wikipedia

A retreating reservoir in Navarro County, south of Dallas has uncovered an antebellum slave cemetery…

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And along the southwest border, Falcon Lake has receded enough that the ghost town of Guerrero Viejo is accessible, including its impressive church, Nuestra Señora del Refugio. Unfortunately, it’s also virtually a no-go area due to the drug cartels. Please go to the website for more incredible images.

Credit: hectorastorga.wordpress.com

Credit: hectorastorga.wordpress.com

Seems sometimes it’s just one dam thing after another.  In my part of the world, the Clark Canyon Reservoir sits atop what used to be Armstead, Montana, a rough and tumble outpost that, in the early decades of the 20^th century, had bragging rights as the biggest cattle shipping point on the Union Pacific Railroad.  Cattlemen out on Horse Prairie, the Big Hole, the Grasshopper, Blacktail and Centennial would trail their herds into Armstead for loading on a one-way eastward journey to the great feedlots and slaughterhouses of Chicago.    

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One of Armstead’s honored residents was a champion rodeo rider named Alvin Owen who worked four jobs during the depression to keep his wife and two sons fed and who once beat a man to a bloody pulp for calling him a liar, the worst of all insults.  That gave rise to his youngest son’s oft-repeated threat, “be careful what you say or my Daddy will beat the hell outta you!” 

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Soft spoken, affable, yet resolute, Alvin Owen went on to found a trucking company that supported Southwest Montana’s economy for well over half a century.  His legacy lives on, though not too many people could pinpoint Armstead anymore. 

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What I remember of the town is limited to the Hershey Bars I’d get at the general store when we drove out for a visit. By the time I was six we were riding over the town in an outboard motorboat. A couple of times since then, water levels have dropped enough to reveal parts of the old highway, the railroad bed and some building foundations. But what’s scarce in Texas is plentiful in Montana. So for now at least, Armstead remains buried in a watery grave.

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We Bearly Knew Ya’ – 10 Surprising Facts About Yellowstone

By Bennett Owen

As part of the My-West fall road trip, we took an early October swing through snow-capped Yellowstone Park…no lines, no traffic jams…and no lollygagging either, because it was freakin’ COLD! The kids will most likely remember one very photogenic chipmunk, a few snowball fights and the view of Yellowstone Falls from Artist’s Point, which suitably blew away the CGI saturated munchkins. 

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In an effort to entertain and enlighten the kids en route, I uncovered some things about Yellowstone that entertained and enlightened me more than anyone else and since they didn’t impress the kids I’m trying ten of them out on you:

10 – Tiny little Isa Lake is the only body of water that empties into both sides of the Continental Divide…feeding both the Missouri and mighty Columbia rivers.

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9 – Redwoods once grew in Yellowstone. Geologists say the Petrified Tree near Tower Junction is “anatomically indistinguishable from modern Redwoods growing today along the California coast.”

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8 – Gardner, Montana at the north entrance of Yellowstone is located directly on the 45^th parallel…halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.

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7 – There is an appropriately named ‘Mae West’ curve on the Grand Loop Road near the Antelope Creek overlook.

Mae West Curve. Credit: mccormacka

6 - You can tell the temperature of the water by the color of the algae. Bright yellow survives at 160 F, while the green stuff means the water temperature is a mere 120 F.

Morning Glory Pool. Credit: jpc.raleigh

5 – That thing hanging from a Moose’s neck is called a Dewlap.

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4 – Bill Clinton was the last of eight presidents who visited Yellowstone Park while in office.

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3 - Steamboat Geyser is the highest erupting geyser in the world, shooting water as high as 400 feet.

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2 – The fastest animal found in Yellowstone is the Pronghorn Antelope, with top speeds of 50 MPH…slightly slower than ME after spotting a Grizzly Bear.

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1-    Yellowstone Park is not only the first US national park but the world’s first as well, and sparked a global effort to preserve and maintain places of rare natural beauty.

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Post Script

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We're just back from our road trip through Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Along the way we passed through about a hundred small towns. And one thing they all have in common is a one-room post office. Here are a few more to add to our prior post, Post Modern Mails.

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Bannack Star Route - Haulin’ the Mail

By Bennett Owen

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The F-S is a good 40 miles from town, connected by a stretch of two-lane that…well, let’s put it this way, if you’re looking for the road less traveled, you’ll most certainly pass by the F-S on the way. It wasn’t always that easy to hitch a ride out to the ranch, so on a few occasions I became unofficial freightage of the US postal service, riding shotgun on ‘The Stage.’

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No, I'm not that old, by my time the horse teams had been replaced by horsepower and a pickup truck but the idea remained the same. Riding with the stage was a peculiar experience because just outside of town he’d start taking detours off of that ribbon of blacktop onto some dirt washboard roads that were often glorified cow-trails. But at the end of those ‘roads’ we’d come upon something like this –

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Or this ...

California. Credit: Gregory Jordan

The ride took hours and was fascinating for the countryside you’d see. And by the time he dropped off me, and the mail, at the F-S, he wasn’t even half way through his route. 

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There was no TV at the F-S and the radio reception was so scratchy that listening was pretty much limited to Paul Harvey News & Comment.  So the stage was an important lifeline and one of my chores was to walk down the lane and pick up that canvas satchel full of mail and the Montana Standard newspaper. The Sunday edition arrived on Monday, feeding my addiction to Rick O’Shay and Prince Valiant via the Sunday funnies. Yes, I read Ann Landers too.

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Yes a ‘link’ literally with the outside world. All that stuff about rain and snow and gloom of night may sound quaint in the Internet age. But I can remember a lot of wind-swept, snowed over winter days when the stage tracks were the only ones on the road.

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Arizona. Credit: WVS

Post Modern Mails

By Bennett Owen

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My family’s ranch is still pretty remote by today’s standards. By that I mean it is one of the few places left where it’s impossible to get a cell phone connection.  An Uncle recently discovered the only hot spot in the valley but depending on the season you’ll need either a four-wheel drive or a snowmobile to get there.

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What the valley DOES have is a post office. Aunt Mary is Postmaster and the single employee at zip code ----- and the ‘stage’ is still a lifeline to the outside world. But wireless Internet has also reached rural America and that’s mighty stiff competition.

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Snow and rain and heat and gloom of night are one thing. A party line is another.  But the Internet Cloud is a whole ‘nother kind of monster.

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The USPS is deeply in debt, based largely on plummeting demand in the Email age. Statistics show that over half of all bills are paid Online…”the check’s in the mail” is increasingly becoming, “the binary transfer is on the ether.” 

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The USPS plans to shutter as many as 37-hundred affiliates in an effort to regain solvency…85 of those are scattered throughout Montana and in some cases closure will leave patrons up to 60 miles away from the next post office.  As one customer in Dixon, Montana said, “a town without a post office becomes a ghost town.”  Not that we have anything against ghost towns, but…

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…The My-West team is fighting back in our own small way. The next great My-West road trip gets underway on October first and anyone who sends us an address will receive a greeting card, sent from one of the post offices pictured here. Now that’s a special delivery.  Do it for fun! Do it for nostalgia! Do it for…Aunt Mary!

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