Shirley Smith, standing in a shed behind her house in Bridger, shows a black-velvet painting salvaged from the fire that destroyed the Little Cowboy Bar and Museum in Fromberg last year.
Among items salvaged from the fire was a copy of Time magazine from 1932 and a 1954 photo of the general membership meeting of the Rodeo Cowboys Association in New York City.
Smith swipes at the soot on the forehead of a ceramic Indian maiden.
BRIDGER — A patio table in Shirley Smith’s backyard is covered with soot-blackened artifacts, including a set of antique handcuffs, an old fig syrup bottle and a partially melted saddle bronc trophy from a rodeo in Malta.
Smith has been trying to restore them, using a variety of cleansers and scrub brushes.
“It takes time and a lot of figuring out how to do it,” she says.
It has been a melancholy task, sorting through and trying to clean the relative handful of items salvaged from what was once a large and very personal collection. Most of it was lost last December, when a fire gutted the Little Cowboy Bar and Museum in Fromberg, six miles north of Bridger on Highway 310.
Smith bought the tavern in 1972 and quickly began stuffing it with memorabilia, much of it related to the history of the Clarks Fork River Valley, particularly its cowboy and rodeo history.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
A blackened, partially melted saddle bronc trophy and antique handcuffs sit on a table in Smith’s backyard.
A self-described pack rat and the kind of person who inspires generosity in others, Smith amassed so much memorabilia that she eventually added a 20-by-40-foot room onto the back of the bar. That was the museum. It was full of Native American moccasins, badges, purses and belt buckles, cowboy gear of all kinds, weapons and works of art, an original photograph of Buffalo Bill Cody and two bison fetuses preserved in alcohol.
“The museum was special,” Smith says with some understatement. “It was not organized. It was homey.”
Locals crowded into the bar, tourists from around the world stopped by and in 2007, Esquire magazine called the Little Cowboy the best bar in Montana.
The recognition was nice for a gal who spent her first seven years crowded into a 10-by-12-foot shed near Byron, Wyo., with her parents and three siblings. But Smith always seemed happiest when she could show people around her museum.
She had something to say about everything in the place, and about local families, historical events and enduring legends. She was the go-to person locally for information on the Little People, said to live inside the Pryor Mountains.
In 2012, Smith sold the bar and museum to Randy Wike, a native of Fromberg who works in Alaska but is planning to return home to retire. Smith continued to tend the museum for Wike in a kind of informal partnership.
The bar was empty on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-December when the fire started. Smith said it apparently was sparked by faulty wiring between the bar and museum.
Smith salvaged a few items on the day of the fire, but it was months before the building was considered safe enough to go in and sort through the debris. With help from friends, she hauled what looked salvageable to her house in Bridger. She’s been through some of it, but a pile of untouched artifacts is covered with tarps in a corner of her backyard.
Other materials sit in large plastic bins around the yard. “Here’s some stuff I haven’t gone through yet,” she says, popping the lid on one bin. Inside is a soot-covered Navy uniform and sailor’s cap, among other goods.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Smith lost a large portrait of her painted by Alberta Albertano, but she still has this smaller copy of it.
In a shed there are more boxes of memorabilia, some of it damaged by fire, smoke and water, some of it hardly touched. There are rolls of laminated newspaper clippings, paintings, photographs and a black-velvet painting of three Indian dancers in full regalia. The frame was ruined in the fire, but somehow the painting was hardly damaged.
Inside the house are the more valuable possessions she pulled from the wreckage, including a large black-and-white photo of the general membership meeting of the Rodeo Cowboys Association Inc. in New York City. The gathering was photographed in October 1954 and includes a few Clarks Fork Valley cowboys, among them Bill Dygert and Jim Shoulders.
A smaller memento is a framed newspaper photo, undated but quite old, showing a gathering of members of the Greenough family, including Turk, Bill, Alice and Marge, all of whom made it into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.
“That’s pretty special,” Smith says, cradling the photo in her hands.
She saved several photo albums of the cowboy and cowgirl reunions that used to be held at the Little Cowboy.
“It was all black,” she says, holding up one of the albums. “I didn’t think I could save it. But I scrubbed it and scrubbed it.”
And she still has numerous folders and spiral notebooks crammed with clippings, photos, book excerpts and her own writings, documenting countless aspects of local history and her own life. Those, fortunately, were in her house during the fire.
Among the prized possessions that were lost was a large painting of Deb Greenough, a former world champion rodeo cowboy, and a portrait of Smith painted by Alberta Albertano. Smith says Albertano also painted the portraits of the dance-hall girls that used to hang in the Northern Hotel’s Golden Belle restaurant. At least she has a few smaller copies of her portrait.
And Smith still has the homesteader cabin that she moved several miles from a relative’s ranch to the highway right-of-way near the Little Cowboy in 1984. Lyle Nott was going to burn it down, she says, but she talked him into letting her have it.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
A Masons Lodge button from 1935 came out of the fire relatively unscathed.
During a cowboy and cowgirl reunion, Smith and a group of volunteers boarded up the old cabin, wrapped it with wire, put a haystack loader under it and hauled it into Fromberg behind a tractor.
She still has a notebook documenting the life of Edwin O. Chaffin, who built the cabin in 1884 and staked a homestead claim in 1902.
“Everybody wants to know, how in the world did I get all that information,” she says as she fans through the collection of documents about Chaffin. “Well, I’m nosy.”
Smith says Wike plans to return to Fromberg this winter and start rebuilding the bar and museum. He has asked her about possibly moving the homesteader cabin closer to the bar, to make it part of the complex.
He also asked Smith to help display whatever she manages to salvage from the fire, and to start taking care of whatever donated artifacts begin trickling in again.
In the meantime, Smith will continue to do what she can to preserve those things salvaged from the fire.
Walking through her backyard, she pauses next to a fire-blackened ceramic statue of an Indian maiden. Smith flashes a wan smile, runs a finger across figure’s cheek and says, “She’s getting a little cleaner just from the rain.”
