{"id":22188,"date":"2018-04-16T09:31:37","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:31:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=22188"},"modified":"2018-04-16T09:31:37","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:31:37","slug":"montana-viewpoint-much-to-ponder-in-small-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/04\/montana-viewpoint-much-to-ponder-in-small-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Viewpoint: Much to ponder in ‘small history’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Elliott\"<\/a>

Jim Elliott<\/p><\/div>\n

Often, when I sit down to write, I have to search for a topic. It\u2019s common for me to write three or more articles and then decide which one I want to run that week. For the record, this is version four. I figure if I\u2019m going to write something I at least ought to be interested in it.<\/p>\n

I write a lot about politics because I was involved in it for a long time, but today\u2019s politics is not a joyous subject. In fact, it\u2019s downright depressing as far as I\u2019m concerned. So, on occasions like this I try to write about something that is, at the very least, not depressing. That\u2019s not a very high standard, I know, but it\u2019s the one I work with.<\/p>\n

I have written a couple of times about what I call \u201csmall history.\u201d That\u2019s the history that never makes it into the history books because it doesn\u2019t impact a lot of people\u2019s lives, as does \u201cbig history.\u201d Big history is the saga of nations and world leaders. It is the saga of war. Small history is the story of one person in one war. It is the story of one person\u2019s struggles and successes \u2014 and failures \u2014 in the course of a life.<\/p>\n

Small history is embodied in an abandoned tool found while walking in the wood, in the remnants of a dug-out dwelling in the prairie. There is a stretch of road not far from where I live that is lined with abandoned homesteads. Many of them have a scrubby tree growing nearby. It is dry country, and I think how important that tree must have been to whoever lived there.<\/p>\n

On two occasions I came upon the remains of dwellings in the woods on my ranch. The timber is thick and it is easy to get lost \u2014 or at least turned around \u2014 so while I have been able to find one of them again, the other, which was just a log foundation, is once again lost.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>I know nothing about whose homes they might have been. I do know about the Fox place, a log cabin with a dog trot that had already lost most of its roof when I bought the ranch. I have allowed it, as a friend of mine so kindly said, to decay with dignity.<\/p>\n

There was a barn and some outbuildings, which I have seen on an old aerial photo, but no sign of them now. Perhaps a summer kitchen under a group of cottonwoods. At least I found the door to a Great Majestic cookstove there.<\/p>\n

The Shade house burned down 20 years before I got here. The Melnricks, who lived here after Shade left, said it was a beautifully made squared cedar log house. Whatever structures the Melnricks built were also gone when I got here. There was, however, a fallen-down chicken shed that made good kindling.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t often get to settle on a place where no one has lived before, so the heritage of my predecessors is also my heritage, and it\u2019s important to me to keep at least a small part of their memory alive.<\/p>\n

Twenty years ago, Paul Shade, the son of the man who built the cedar log house, came out to the ranch looking for it. I was disappointed he couldn\u2019t see it, but knowing him added to my personal collection of small history. He was raised here on the place from the time he was 11, in 1924, and in his 80s moved back to Trout Creek from Seattle to live out his life.<\/p>\n

Every once in a while I will find a small object \u2014 an old medicine bottle, a coal scuttle, a marble or two. They meant something to somebody once, so they mean something to me, and I put them someplace where I can look at them from time to time, and wonder.<\/p>\n

Jim Elliott served 16 years in the Montana Legislature and four years as chairman of the Montana Democratic Party. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek. Montana Viewpoint appears in weekly newspapers across Montana and online at Last Best News and Missoula Current.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Often, when I sit down to write, I have to search for a topic. It\u2019s common for me to write three or more articles and then decide which one I want to run that week. For the record, this is version four. I figure if I\u2019m going to write something I at least ought to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":22189,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[6907,6906],"class_list":["post-22188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-history","tag-homesteads","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22190,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22188\/revisions\/22190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}