G.A.S.P.

The next day (7-29) was one of the most difficult of the journey. I knew when I planned it that it could be ugly based on length alone (about 73 miles), but then I also encountered a very hostile wind for most of the day. I was riding northwest and the wind was coming from the northwest at about 25 miles an hour. I left Choteau at about 10:15 am and arrived in Browning at about 9:00 pm, just as it was getting dark. I was literally blown off the road four times, but was never going faster than about 6 mph when it happened, so I was able to catch myself in the gravel each time before I fell. At one point, after struggling uphill for 45 minutes, I struggled downhill for nearly an hour to go just six miles. On the steepest part of the downhill, I had to peddle hard to go just eight mph. At the end of that downhill, I stopped at a creek, had peanut butter and crackers for dinner, waded in the creek (until I saw cows crossing just upstream) and just waited for the wind to die down. The strategy worked. The wind did start to die down about 7:00 pm, and the rest of the ride wasn’t nearly so unpleasant (or so slow).

The town of Browning, however, was very unpleasant. It is the main town of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and one of the most depressed and depressing towns that I’ve seen. The once proud Blackfeet – the most feared of the northern plains Indians in the early to mid 1800’s – now sit around town, drive their old cars around town, drink beer and panhandle money for beer. There is a Community College in town, and I’m sure some are taking advantage of it to improve their lives, but there are so many who are not able or willing to do so. This is a sad commentary on the "reservation" system that was developed at the end of the last century. The Indians were forced off their homelands, had their way of life completely destroyed by white men, lost their main source of food, clothing and shelter (bison), and then were sent to live on reservations. In short order, with no industry and poor agricultural land, the reservations simply became ghettos for the Indians. Many families are on welfare and probably have been for generations. There is little hope for improvement in their lives as long as they remain on the reservation, but apparently most are reluctant to leave. It’s very sad.

At one of the Historical Markers along the road, I read a commentary related to the above situation. There is a Blackfeet legend that the first bison came out of a hole in the ground. When white men wiped out the bison almost to the point of extinction, there were many Blackfeet Indians who believed that the white men had found the hole in the ground, had driven the bison into it then plugged the hole. I guess if I were a Blackfeet Indian, I wouldn’t want to live among the white men either.