Old Missoula

The article below is an excerpt from “The Baron, The Logger, The Miner and Me,” by John H. Toole, published by Mountain Press Publishing Co. in 1984.

Toole grew up in Missoula and became mayor of the city in 1983. John Toole Riverfront Park is named for him. He spent five “marvelous summers” working with members of his family in the Garnet area, starting in 1933 at age 15, and witnessed the tail end of the last Garnet mining boom. Among his many talents was his musical ability, playing the accordion, guitar and harmonica. He and his companions were in great demand any time they could be corralled by the miners who gathered for Garnet’s local entertainment. His group often played on Saturday nights when the miners were flush with gold dust from their Saturday cleanup, and were ready for a lively time. Listen:

Garnet had everything: a two-story hotel, a large dance hall, a post office, and a saloon. All thumped to life in 1934. In place of skinners cracking their whips over the rumps of their horse and ox teams, there was now the roar of Model A Ford pickups.

The Nancy Hanks mine (situated right in town) had fifty or sixty men, the Dandy mine about the same, and droves of prospectors, part of the great army of the unemployed, roamed the mountains. They all converged on Garnet on Saturday night.

Some Saturdays, John Brown picked us up at the Top to haul us to Garnet. Often, we hoofed it.

Brice [Brice Toole, John’s uncle] and I were an integral part of the band for the dance. Brice was a marvelous banjo player. He had played his way around the world on a luxury liner. I can still hear the loud melodious, metallic slap-slap of his music. An old guy with a fiddle joined us, and I played the accordion or guitar.

The dancers were there when we arrived. We were ushered in, carrying our instruments, with extravagant yells and backslapping. We unlimbered, broke into ragtime; feet started stomping, the old hall swaying, the men yelling, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” and we were off.

We played ragtime, jazz, waltzes, polkas, and schottisches. Men outnumbered women two to one and some men danced together. The placer miners were bronzed by the sun; the deep-mine men were pale. All were vigorous, lusty, muscular, and enthusiastic.

Many were veterans of World War 1. It became a ritual that, at midnight, we would play “My Buddy,” the poignant song of death in the trenches sixteen years before. Everyone would rise, heads bowed, and silently gaze at the floor. The song would end; a miner would boom out, “Parlez Vous!” and we would launch into the rollicking “Mademoiselle from Armentieres.” The miners would sail across the floor, yelling “Hi-Yee! Hi-Yee! Hi-Yee!” and the old hall would begin to shake and sway again. Was there an economic collapse in America? At this moment of the blending of rhythm, music, and pure mountain air, these superbly strong people were happily unaware of it.

The orchestra was paid by taking up a collection. A gent wearing a derby took it off and held it in front of him, soliciting money. As he danced – danced all by himself, waltzing, sashaying, jigging – the hat began to fill with coins, quarters, half dollars, silver dollars. The bar was just down the street; the miners kept going back and forth, and whiskey brought forth generosity.

One night the gent danced by the orchestra, tipping his hat for us to see. It looked enticing. He went on dancing, dancing. He danced to the front door and danced right out. Brice rose to his feet, pointed to the door, and yelled, “Stop that man!”

The crowd surged to the door, but the thief had disappeared into the woods. Oh, well.

At 2 a.m., the music stopped. Brice and the fiddler went to bed down with Billy Liberty, an old miner. The miners grabbed me, saying, “Come on down to Lar’s place, kid. You can’t quit now!”

I could play the accordion all night, so I went. Lars Ness’s little saloon resounded with the thump, thump, thump of the dancers. Lars was a nervous Scandinavian. The rush of business got him all shook up. His cash drawer had no stop on it. When he frantically pulled it out to deposit coins, the drawer fell out and coins spilled all over the floor. Miners scampered for them and used them to buy more drinks. Lars was a flustered human wreck by morning. . . .

One afternoon, a band of about two thousand sheep came traipsing through the camp. The miners snorted in disgust at the sheep, the infernal bleating of lambs and ewes, the smelly droppings covering every inch of bare ground. Our beautiful mountain stream turned into a muddy chocolate torrent, but there was nothing we could do. The sheep rancher had government grazing rights on this place.

Behind the band of sheep came the dogs, their cream-colored tails flashing in the sun, driving the band up the canyon with uncanny teamwork, shifting responsibility back and forth like hockey players. And at the rear, there were two sheepherders sporting black moustaches, dressed in black clothes and hobnail boots, with 30:30 rifles crooked in their arms.

They set up camp on the creek above us, and that night came down to our cook shack for dinner. They fascinated me. I’d never seen men like these before.

There was little conversation at the dinner table, but that was not unusual. Taciturnity at meals was expected of men of the out-of-doors in those days so many years ago.

After dinner, one of the herders handed me a harmonica and asked, “Can you play that, kid?”

Playing the harmonica was one thing I could do, and do well. I nodded enthusiastically.

“Well come on down to that old stone boat, and I’ll put on a dance for ya.”

A stone boat was a sled built of big timbers. It was used to haul heavy rock behind a team of horses. Its bottom was a single sheet of quarter-inch steel, like a toboggan. This one was lying inverted down the trail a way below camp.

When we reached the stone boat, the sheepherder rested his rifle against a log, took off his hat, and stepped lightly to the steel surface. He took a few tentative hops, then commanded, “Play fast.”

I launched into “Yankee Doodle,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and other tunes. He picked up the beat immediately and became a transformed man. He whirled, stamped, and gyrated. He put his hands behind his head and kicked his legs to the front, then swung round and kicked the other way. Next, he leaped upward, clicking his heels in the air. His timing was perfect. His hobnails clattered on the steel deck, now lightly, now with a roar. I was fearful that steel on steel would make him slip, but he was never off balance for a second. He stopped once or twice, mopped his brow, then tossed his head at me to start again.

The sun was behind the mountain when he finished. He put on his hat, reached for his rifle, put out his hand for the harmonica, and said, “You play that pretty good, kid.”

He didn’t say another word as we hiked back to camp. Finally, I asked, “Why don’t you dance for a living instead of herding sheep?”

“Nothin’ to do in this country now but herd sheep.”

He went on up the canyon to his sheep camp, and I went into our shack and asked Slim who he was.

“Oh, that’s Dancin’ Jack,“ came the reply. “He’s crazy to dance. I wouldn’t walk across the street to watch him.”

The next evening, I hung around the camp in hopes that he would return. He did. He tossed me the harmonica, and down we went to the stone boat again. It was another wild and dramatic performance: the clattering hobnails, the tossing black hair, and my own feeling that the man was possessed by some sort of strange and turbulent spirit.

I never saw him again. The sheep moved on up the canyon to the divide. The creek cleared up. The infernal bleating was gone. In a few days, a string of pack horses came up the canyon behind a cowboy carrying a rifle in a saddle scabbard. He was the camp tender for Jack’s band of sheep. He stopped to visit for a minute. He said the band was now over in the Chamberlain country. As he left, I called to him: “When you see Dancin’ Jack, say ‘hello’ for me, will you? I played the mouth harp for him.”

The cowboy laughed, “He put on a dance for you, huh?” Then he put the spurs to his horse and was gone.

As I look back now, almost fifty years later, this experience is dreamlike. But it was no dream. Some years later I spoke to Helmville rancher Paul Peterson, who had owned Jack’s band of sheep. He remembered Jack well.

“Oh, yeah, Dancin’ Jack! He was crazy to dance. He disappeared a few years ago. Never knew where he went. He was a good herder, but he never talked much.”

In 1934, I knew nothing about Basque sheepherders, but it seems to me that Jack must have been a Basque. That black hair and mustache! Yet I’m still not certain. The Basques I knew in later years could speak scarcely any English. Jack, though taciturn, could speak very well.

The rapidity with which modern man can destroy places of beauty and wonder is incredible. In the late 1930s one man on a bulldozer punched a road into the Douglas Creek mines in a matter of days. Burros, pack horses, and wagon teams disappeared overnight. Where men had labored ten hours per day in the depths of the Great Depression, buoyed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s increase in the price of gold from $20 to $35 per ounce, no one at all now labors for gold priced at $600 per ounce. The great bands of sheep no longer invade the canyons, the dogs no longer flash their cream tails against the backdrop of green trees, and the mysterious armed men in black have disappeared forever.

The rotting timbers of the old stone boat are still there, but the steel bottom was the victim of a World War II metal scavenger. I stand there and try somehow to recreate the wonder of the intense, lithe, dark sheepherder; his almost frenzied, whirling dance; and the chubby sixteen-year old kid puffing vigorously on a harmonica.

But all I can contrive is a kind of jewel-like memory now wreathed in wonder and mystery.