Trevanian Had the Words for It

The Dismality Index around here is setting records. Color it gray, wet it down, fire up the fog machine.

In "The Main," which all should read, Trevanian's Montreal street cop called it "pig weather," and I've never happened across a better term.

Hubris in Red Cloud's War

A knoll just beyond Lodge Pole Ridge where 79 American soldiers died with their ball-enhanced, judgement-deprived Captain William Fetterman. On Dec. 21, 1866, the entire command was suckered into ambush and wiped out by Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors of Red Cloud and Roman Nose near Fort Phil Kearny on the Bozeman Trail in northern Wyoming.

Fetterman had earlier bragged that with 80 cavalrymen he could "ride through the entire Sioux nation."

September, 2009

Altitudes

Autumn yields to winter in the high

country of the northern Wasatch range.

(Southeast Idaho, October 2009)

Montana 2

Sacajawea, and so-spelled on the inscription with no revisionist "gaw" vulgarity.

This is one of the more moving representations I have seen. Bird Woman is depicted without contrived heroism, shown simply as a human dealing competently with the circumstances imposed by life.

The child is Pomp, probably the son of Pierre Charbonneau, a mixed-blood fur trader and guide. Beloved by Captain Clark, he would go on to frequent royal halls of Europe but return to live out his life on the American frontier.

Livingston, September, 2009

EDIT: The work is by Mary Michael of Bridger, Montana.