Some family and local history - Fort Benton-Highwood-Belt

Determining one's legal status in the Cosmos


Part I   Choosing a team


The Great Falls Mafia, or the Belt, Highwood, Fort Benton Axis?


The older I get, the more I'm interested in my family's past and traditions.  I have not been able to research this stuff, myself, since I have had to practically steal or otherwise surreptitiously record whatever information I could get out of my parents and grandmother before they passed on.  My half-siblings and cousins had always ganged up on me - so much so that I started to call myself a "bastard step-child," which made a good joke since we are the Step-hens's.  


It didn't bother me when I was younger.  I always took responsibility for my own actions, and tried to mitigate whatever bad effects my relatives might have had.  There were several different factions among them, depending on whom they had married, or what their larger-world experiences might have been.  All were seemingly vying for some imaginary status and power.  I never could figure out the logic of this - we could have been one the richest and most powerful families in the world, I thought, if only we would work together and use science and reason, ethics and esthetics, to inspire and lead our efforts.  But for some reason, they never thought of me as "part of the family", or if they did, it was some dispreputable, evil part.  
  
One thing I've always known was a real handicap (besides alcoholism) was an obsession with sex and sexuality - pro, con, and otherwise - simply reducing any issue or question to those of interpersonal relations and status, rather than the merits and facts of the case.  I'm sure we're not unique in that.  Teaching high school is a real lesson in this branch of knowledge - carnal knowledge.  It seems like everything in "civilized" culture is about sex and sexual relationships, and the only ones supposedly free of that are the fundamentalist religious people who actually follow Christian principles on lust, greed, forgiveness, etc.  But even when they don't, it sets an example of a higher way of life.  We know both kinds of people, and those who are most casual and unobsessed with sex are definitely better-off, and more likely to be comfortable and happy. 

As for acquiring wealth, it just never made sense to me - especially in a revolutionary age like ours.  There are very few fortunes in this country which go back 100 years.  In Montana, they are mostly ranches (not dryland farms) with low overhead and the ability to greatly reduce their taxes through conservation easements, etc.  There are a few business and law families who go back that far.  Last Saturday's (it's a couple of months ago, now) story about the Stephenson and Cooper law firm (now Jardine, Stephenson, although they don't seem to have any Jardines, either) is a case in point.  Indeed, although no one in my family ever hired a Stephenson or Cooper lawyer, so far as I know, they were close personal friends, and Sam Stephenson even had a summer home close to our ranch in the Highwoods. 

Robert Cooper, Ransom's son, was a Bowdoin graduate (like our Founder, Paris Gibson), and I knew him fairly well as a small child.  Both my father and uncle were part of his drinking circle, exchanging books and correspondence.  We lived 35 miles from downtown Great Falls, so they probably often crashed at his place, although it was nothing to drive the 35 miles dead drunk in those days.  I still have in my library Coop's copies of the Random House Modern Library Nietzsche and F. Scott Fitgerald.  There was also an old letter from Coop at the ranch when I returned from California in 1972.  I might still have it, somewhere. I remember that it was addressed from "Somewhere in the space-time contiuum," and so I had a few conversations with my father and uncle about him.  They both thought he was a genius - one of the most literate and philosophical people they'd ever known.  Upon receiving his inheritance, he drank himself to death within a few years. 

I also knew that his father, Ransom was the chief attorney for the Anaconda Company, but I assumed it was just local business involving claims against the Smelter by workers, etc.  There was probably a lot of that, but people from this firm, if we can trust Ecke's account, actually went on to head the ACM - one of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average "Blue Chip" companies, in those days.  (Like Kodak, one might point out, which is about to be de-listed altogether from the NYSE).  


Baucus's and Swanberg's were also big-time lawyers, here.  I guess I understand, now, why Max had no scruples about "Panama Paul-ing" Judge Hatfield when he ran against him in the 1978 Democratic Senate primary.  If only Baucus were "the real McCoy" instead of just another crypto-Republican elitist pandering to the "liberals" while the rich people pretend he's their mortal enemy.    


The Swanberg's and A.B. Guthrie, Jr. were also part of that group.  I can still remember, although I must have been only 6 or 7 years old, sitting in Gus and Eddie's (where That Bar is now, but with a beautifl curved bar, neon purple lighting, and faux-leopard skin upholstered booths) with my father, Coop, and A.B. Guthrie, Jr.  That was their main hang-out, I think, along with the Pennant, where all the Tribune reporters and printers hung out.  


My mother, who had grown up in Al Capone's Chicago, was considered a usurper - in spite of being Jean Arthur's cousin, and the grand-daughter of one of the earliest founders of Billings.  When her father, Arthur Nelson, died, Alex Blewett represented her half-brother, Skip, in the battle over the estate.  And Bill Swanberg represented my father in their custody dispute over me.  She won that one, but they always made it clear that I could mix and match however I liked.  Of course I chose the drinking and gambling life of my father - as well as the intellectual aspects of being a teacher and writer.  Somehow, that seems to have precluded me from inheriting the ranch, even though I am the sole surviving Stephens. 

My mother's maternal grandfather, too, was an old hand in Great Falls, John Dunn, having moved here to work at the Smelter, if I remember right, in 1906.  Both of my grandmothers went to high school at what is now Paris Gibson Square, with my grandmother Stephens (Paulson, changed from the Norwegian Sitje) being Salutatorian in the class of 1908.  I think there were 19 graduates, most of them girls, in that year.  You could test for a teaching certificate, and teach in a country school with no college, in those days - grades 1-8, at least.  She also took the Civil Service Test (I still have the results of that), and was first in line for any job that opened (mostly Post Office, then - there was no FBI, Social Security, or other Federal regulatory or welfare agencies).  But she married my grandfather, instead, who was literate and public-spirited, and they made a good match, even though he was 24 years older (not unusual in those days, when many men outlived several wives).  I spent my first 6 years in their home, with my father and uncle more or less serving as co-parents - sort of like "Two and a Half Men," some have noted.


Two years after my grandparent's marriage in 1912, the Great War broke out, and the Lutheran Scandinavians and Germans, as well as the German and Eastern European Jews, were considered suspicious aliens, and actually tried and prosecuted, as well as being punished in many other ways just for opposing or even questioning the war, avoiding the draft, or even possessing German language papers and books.  It was very much like today's situation with Muslims.  They're even reviving "Sedition Laws" passed in 1917 to deal with this supposed "Fifth Column" of "peace activists."


Into my generation, we were still raised as Lutherans, although several of my cousins went to the Methodist Church (my grandfather was a friend of Brother Van, and a sincere Christian), but most of their kids don't go to anything at all, or perhaps some fundamentalist "Christian Right" sect.  Both my father and I joined the local Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship, and since we were fans of Emerson and Thoreau, we fit right into that.  I'll have to write a history of what I remember of that, some day.  Mary Scriver was the circuit-Pastor during that time, and will no doubt leave a thorough account of it from her perspective.  Grace Fishbaugh, Arlyn's mother, was one of the mainstays, along with Dr. Ernst Eichwald and some other doctors and lawyers, including the Best's, who were just getting started in their law practice, then.  Elizabeth's grandfather, Dr. McPhail, an obstetrician, brought me and a thousand or more others into this world.  


Paris Gibson was a Universalist (meaning Universal Salvation - an obscure Christian sect which intrpreted Divine Grace rather more broadly than most).  The Unitarians and Universalists merged in the early 1950's.  


The Belt-Highwood-Fort Benton Axis is the other "affinity group" for the Stephens family.  Upper Highwood, early in the last century, was something like Big Sky is today - an elite collection of trophy ranches, rich doctors and lawyers, and of course the earliest city in Montana, Fort Benton, as well as the Coal Boom towns of Belt and Sand Coulee.  It may seem quaint and picturesque, today, but these guys ruled the world.  There were something like 10 Fleet Admirals and Generals from that "zone" in Choteau County from the First World War through Vietnam.  And famous war heroes, intellectuals, scientists, entrepreneurs, etc., etc.  Don't make me list them - Ken Robison is putting together a pretty good account of it, and there are many others to choose from.


My grandfather Stephens was born during the Civil War - 1864, in Illinois.  His father voted for Abraham Lincoln.  I've recently determined that he was also a fairly close cousin of the VP of the Confederacy, Alexander Hamilton Stephens.   Of course, that Stephens (the leading advocate for chattel slavery) and Abraham Lincoln also knew each other from serving together in Congress.  I suspect my grandfather spent his whole life trying to figure out the massive tragedy of the Civil War.  He was the least combatitive person imaginable.  Like Will Rogers, he "never met a man he didn't like", and according to my father, never made moral judgments about people - even those who were demonstrably evil.  What a gift!    


But his wife, my Norwegian grandmother, grew up mostly fatherless, in working-class boarding houses which her peasant mother ran, speaking Norwegian as a child, and suffering all the perils of alcoholism, sexism, and violent exploitation which characterized life in frontier Great Falls.  She never imagined herself free of control by the indefinable "they" - some "authorities" who secretly control everything.  She was very judgmental, puritanical, and a political Prohibitionist, like most of the "respectable" church-going women of that time.  So, it's no wonder we all turned out so strangely, I suppose.