Old Missoula

An Ignored Beauty

By Al Darr

Now in the long cool evening after supper, a few contemplative Missoulians stroll atop the stout dike provided last year by the Corps of Engineers.

Maybe these strollers think, as I think, of the tremendous blessing the pioneers discovered, a delightful trout stream flowing below their doorsteps. Someone long ago called it Hell’s Gate River, an inappropriate and unoriginal tag. They have a rip-tide segment of the East River in New York called “Hell Gate.”

When you stand below the Madison Street Bridge and you look upstream toward Hell Gate Canyon, some of the river’s pristine magnificence grabs you.

“What an attraction this swift river would be,” you’re apt to think, “if only the pioneers and their descendants had held it precious.”

Another thought came to me the other night. It isn’t by any means too late.

Some enterprising crowd of angels can still make the Clark Fork River through Missoula a pure delight to the beholder. Right now, the river is essentially a thing to be crossed to get home. Serious cash has been laid out to keep the stream within its banks, and more serious cash has been spent to bridge it.

Precious little has gone for stream beautification.

Upstream, the Anaconda Co. has purchased the means to maintain a certain water purity level. Industry and the public don’t dump as many contaminants in the river as they once did.

I have a friend in Missoula who tosses midnight garbage into the Clark Fork, but he and others can be brought around if public sentiment is strong enough.

It’s not, I think, that Missoulians have so much deliberately violated the stream. They’ve simply ignored it, and who could blame the two or three generations just gone? They had breadwinning to think about, almost exclusively in the early days and in the depression years. They had wars to go off and fight.

So the river flows on, not too badly scarred as rivers go, not too dirty.

And people who think rivers lend enchantment to the scene will wander along the stone dike and pick their way down to the shore beneath the old Van Buren Street Bridge.

I think George and Jim Caras should build a lobster place behind their floral emporium on Front Street.

I think the Milwaukee Railroad or someone should make the old depot below Higgins Avenue a kind of riverside rathskeller, with colored lanterns and such.

I think the garden clubs could lend their energies and talents to making sacred the waterfront.

It’s probably too late for a scenic canal system through the mall. Maybe not. Imaginative leadership will emerge in the years ahead, as the overall plan for Missoula’s growth takes substance. We can hope and fairly confidently expect that the river will figure.

 

The above column appeared in The Missoulian on May 22, 1967.

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Al Darr had an unusual perception of the intrinsic value of some local things that were ordinarily overlooked. Several of his articles during his career in Missoula demonstrated this, and no doubt prompted Missoula people to take notice. He died in Butte, Montana in 1983. He was a WW 2 Vet. His obituary, from The Montana Standard, August 15, 1983, appears below:

 

Alfred Leo Darr, 57

Services for Montana newsman Alfred Leo Darr, 57, formerly of 3134 Floral, will be Tuesday in Duggan Merrill Dolan Mortuary with the time to be announced. Burial will be in Holy Cross Cemetery.

He died Saturday in a Butte nursing home after an extended illness.

Mr. Darr was city editor of The Montana Standard from Oct. 4, 1969 to March 31, 1970, when he was named Sunday editor. He left The Montana Standard Sept. 29, 1979, and worked on several writing ventures, including the publishing of several issues of Montana Crossroads, a monthly magazine devoted to the state’s resource development.

He was born June 27, 1926, in Flushing, N. Y., graduated from Regis College in Denver in 1948, and attended St. Bonaventure University in Olean, N. Y. His parents were Charles and Marie Darr. He served in the Army in 1944.

His journalism career began at The Register in Denver. He was a reporter and photographer for the Grand Island (Neb.) Independent from 1956 to 1959 and city editor from 1963 to 1964. He was editor of the Ord (Neb.) Quiz from 1960 to 1963.

In 1964, he moved to Montana and worked as a reporter and photographer for the Missoulian for three years. In 1967, he was wire editor for the Ottumwa (Iowa) Courier and was a reporter for the Omaha World-Herald before returning to the Missoulian in 1968. He was the Flathead County reporter for the Missoulian before moving to Butte.

 

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Al Darr married Rogene Roby in Grand Island Nebraska in 1964. They were parents of three sons, James, Geoffrey, and John.