In the house, a sign lists Plenty Coups' belongings at the time of his death.
PRYOR — I drove down to Chief Plenty Coups State Park on a smoky Wednesday, planning to see some sights, snag some photos and interview other visitors.
But as soon as I got out of my car, Kaleb Perdew turned the tables and started interviewing me. Turns out he’s a Fish, Wildlife and Parks “visitation intern” this summer, a University of Montana student conducting quick surveys at state parks in this part of Montana.
All he wanted to know was whether I was a resident of Montana, and if so what my zip code was. Then he asked how I’d heard of the park.
I told him I’d heard about it from Frank Linderman. Not in person, mind you. But I read Linderman’s as-told-to biography of Plenty Coups shortly after moving to Billings in 1989, and I drove down to Plenty Coups’ place in Pryor as soon as I finished the book.
It struck me as one of the most beautiful, peaceful spots in all of Montana, and it still does. But I hadn’t been there in five or six years and on Wednesday I got a sudden hankering to go. I figured I could satisfy my own urge and at the same time let others know what they were missing, or remind those who’d been there how fine a spot it is.
Another visitor, Roberto Capitani, had never been there before, but he shared my enthusiasm.
“Ahh,” he began, when I asked him whether he was enjoying his visit. “It’s beautiful, just beautiful. And I love the story of the Indians.”
Capitani was big and stocky, dressed in jeans, a Wrangler shirt and a black cowboy hat. But that accent… They speak some odd quasi-dialects in isolated corners of Eastern Montana, but this wasn’t one of them.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Plenty Coups’ two-story house sits in the shade of huge cottonwood trees.
He explained that he’s from Modena, Italy, that he came to Montana and Wyoming for the first time in the early 1990s and soon felt compelled to stay. Now he has a guest ranch near Devil’s Tower, Wyo., where he entertains clients from Italy, Germany, France and Switzerland, among other countries, giving them a chance to do some ranch work and see the sights.
“I discovered the best place in the world for me,” he said.
His tour group on Wednesday consisted of 11 other Italians, and they reveled in the serene beauty of the park, with its visitor center, a tepee, creek-side walkways and Plenty Coups’ solidly built old house.
I used to take my daughters to the park when they were young, when the park was open only in the summer and amenities were few. It’s open year-round now, the grounds are well maintained and numerous interpretive signs impress upon visitors the importance of this hallowed ground, and the stature of the chief who used to live on it.
Plenty Coups is known as the chief who led the Crow Tribe during the painful transition from the “buffalo days” to the modern era. He was acquainted with U.S. presidents, knew foreign leaders and spoke at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
When Plenty Coups died in 1932 at the age of 84, the Billings Gazette wrote, with great respect and just a hint of condescension, that “his character, courage and genius were such that, set down in any race, and in any era, he would have made an everlasting mark.”
In Linderman’s book he comes across as dignified, imbued with wisdom and full of stories that Homer might have been happy to relate.
The park is a reflection of the man — quietly grand, unostentatious but awe-inspiring. The 189 acres that make up the park were deeded by Plenty Coups to the U.S. government, not as a memorial to himself but to the Crow people, and it became a state park in 1963.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
A bust of Plenty Coups sits next to a bison mount in the main room of the house.
It includes a small but interesting visitor center, which has interactive displays that tell the story of Plenty Coups’ life and Crow culture, plus a small gift shop and bookstore.
From there you follow a sidewalk to the centerpiece of the park, Plenty Coups’ big-timbered two-story house that sits in the shade of towering cottonwood trees. The house used to be in pretty sad shape and was not open to the public. It has since been renovated to endure the elements without losing any of its antique charm.
Beside it is the sod-roofed one-room outbuilding where Plenty Coups set up as a shopkeeper in his later years. Beyond it is a tepee, a reminder that Plenty Coups, in all the years he lived in the house, always kept a tepee erected nearby.
In the yard in front of the house there is the frame of a sweat lodge, made of willow branches, and a stone’s throw from there is the spring that Plenty Coups saw in a dream, beside which he was instructed to build his house. People still leave small offerings there, as Plenty Coups’ guests used to do.
Among the objects laid out on a slab of rock beside the spring Wednesday were bracelets, willow twigs, a bungle of sage, feathers, a pen, cigarettes, a Copenhagen tobacco tin and many coins.
From the spring you can follow a trail, three-quarters of a mile long, that winds along the banks of Pryor Creek, known to the Crow as Arrow Creek, and through dense thickets and small groves of trees. There is at least one picnic table tucked in beside the trail, a mown pathway through chest-high grass.
Pryor is a long way from anywhere. That helps make the park unusually quiet and peaceful. On the trail, thick with wild plums, chokecherry and wild roses, all you hear is the call of songbirds, the cooing of pigeons and the buzzing of insects. I’ve been there when the mosquitoes were thick, but they hardly put in an appearance on Wednesday.
The trail meanders back to the park’s expansive picnic area, with latrines and a relatively new playground. In the middle of that area is a chained-off circle of ground where Plenty Coups is buried alongside his wives, Strikes the Iron and Kills Together, and one of his adopted daughters, Mary Man With a Beard.
Walking back toward Plenty Coups’ house for another look, I ran into Dykeman Stoakley, a Tennessean now living in New York. He flew into Great Falls and rented a car, intending to take in some of the major sights in Montana.
He’d already been to Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, Butte, Anaconda and the Little Bighorn Battlefield. How did he find Chief Plenty Coups State Park?
“Somebody from Europe told me about this,” he said.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Visitors still leave small offerings beside the sacred spring, next to which Plenty Coups, in a dream, was told to build his house.
His European friend said Plenty Coups and Pictograph Caves were the prime attractions near Billings, but if he had time for only one not to miss Plenty Coups State Park. He took his advice and was glad he did.
I didn’t see any other Yellowstone County license plates in the parking lot, but park manager Chris Dantic said probably three-fourths of the people who visit the park are from the Billings area. Visitation dipped to just over 25,000 last year, he said, but there were 36,000 the year before that, which is closer to the average.
The park also has a lot of online “visitors,” students across the state who are reached via live podcasts.
“We actually have the fastest Internet of any state park,” Dantic said.
In May, park ranger Aaron Kind gave a two-day virtual presentation on Plenty Coups State Park and Crow culture, reaching 1,078 students at schools all over Montana.
In another educational partnership, researchers with the Montana Natural Heritage Program recently went down to the park to look at six apple trees planted by Plenty Coups in 1906.
“They’re still flourishing,” Dantic said. “We had tons of apples last year.”
Researchers will examine apples and seeds from the trees to see whether they are a rare variety. If so, Dantic said, there is talk of harvesting apples for sale, with proceeds going to the park.
I left the park in mid-afternoon. I’d driven down via Blue Creek Road to Pryor Road, so I headed back to Billings due west out of Pryor on Edgar Road. It’s 15 miles to Edgar and the road is mostly gravel, but it’s worth a slow drive, particularly when you clear the last rise coming out of the Pryor Creek Valley and peer into the valley of the Clarks Fork River.
Even with the smoke from Canadian fires obscuring the horizon, it is one of the grandest views in Montana.
Details: Plenty Coups State Park is 35 miles south of Billings. You can take Blue Creek Road to Pryor Road, or go through Lockwood and take Highway 87 to Pryor Road. You can also go in from the west by taking Highway 310 to Edgar and then following Edgar Road to Pryor.
The park is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week from May 1 to Sept. 30, with the visitor center open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. From Oct. 1 to April 30, park hours are 8 to 5 Monday through Friday, with the visitor center open by appointment.
The biggest day of the year at the park is Chief Plenty Coups Day of Honor, held on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. If you’re looking for a good excuse to get down to the park on the 4th of July, Crow artist Rabbit Knows His Gun will give a free presentation, “Artwork and Inspiration,” from 1 to 3 p.m.
Admission is free for Montana residents, $5 per vehicle for nonresidents.
