ALATE SUMMER DAY in the small airless towns that sit in the valley of the Yellowstone. Down Main Street in Worden came a flatbed truck, a mound of firewood heaped high in back. Behind the wheel was Ben Steele, next to him his cousin Pat. As the truck came abreast of a block of stores it slowed down, then nosed to the curb.
They shouldn’t have stopped. They knew they shouldn’t have stopped. Ben Steele’s father had told them to drive straight through to Billings. Straight through! he had said several times.
But they’d been hot loading the truck, hot driving down from the hills, and they thought they’d be only a few minutes, a few minutes cooling off with an ice cream cone.
In the heat of the day the sidewalks were empty, the street quiet. When Ben Steele came out of the store, he smelled the whiskey right away, then he saw it—a large dark pool gathering beneath their truck.
He was atop the mound of firewood now, tossing the logs to get at the kegs of whiskey beneath. There it was, the one that had toppled over when they stopped. The keg had popped its bung and the booze was pouring into the bed of the truck and leaking so fast onto the street there was a runnel of whiskey flowing along the curb.
“Oh God,” Ben Steele thought, “the whole damn town smells of it.”
“Get in the truck, Pat!” he said. “We gotta get out of here.”
AROUND NOON one Friday morning in March 1934, a stranger knocked on the back door of the small house the family had rented on Broadwater Avenue in Billings. The three older children, Gert and Bud and Warren, were in school. The two youngsters, Joe and Jean, were home with their parents.
The stranger was a customer come to buy a pint of whiskey. The Old Man had been bootlegging for almost two years now, making moonshine in the hills above Hawk Creek and, most recently, selling it from the back door of their rented house on Broadwater Avenue.
They were getting by, the family. The two-story cottage was crowded, but they were eating three meals a day and had a roof over their heads. In the hills, their mother reminded them, there were folks who were shivering in tents; in the city they were standing in breadlines.
The guy at the door looked legit, asked for the Old Man by name. Still, a bootlegger couldn’t be too careful. Prohibition was nearly over, the state was going into the liquor business, and word had been going around that the governor didn’t want backdoor bootleggers competing with the state’s new stores. The sheriff’s men were cracking down in every county, and one bootlegger after another was being hauled off to jail. Can’t be too careful, they told one another. In hard times the police could always find a stooge to come knocking for a pint.
IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
DISTRICT OF MONTANA
BILLINGS DIVISION
. . . On or about the 9th day of March, 1934 . . . the defendant . . . at certain premises located on Broadwater Avenue . . . did then and there willfully, wrongfully, unlawfully, knowingly, fraudulently and feloniously remove and aid and abet in the removal of distilled spirits, to-wit, about 32 gallons, more or less, of whiskey, of which the United States Internal Revenue tax had not been paid.1
They led the Old Man off in handcuffs and hauled away his basement booze, but the revenue officers were so busy raiding other homes that day that they rushed off without checking the attic, and there, right above their heads in the dusty crawlspaces between the joists, were 150 gallons of the Old Man’s best stuff.
Ben Steele always thought the sheriff knew about that upstairs stash, knew that he and his mother started selling the stuff not long after the authorities put the family’s breadwinner in prison garb and shipped him off to a road gang in Washington State.
At three bucks a gallon out the back door, the family made $450 that summer. Bess stretched the cash as far as she could through the fall and into winter. When the money finally ran out, she started serving lard sandwiches for supper and wondered what she’d do for rent.
THE RAID made the Billings Gazette. “OFFICERS SEIZE KEGS OF WHISKEY,” the headline read. After a while, Bud got tired of the taunting at school—“So your old man’s a bootlegger, eh?”—and he started coming through the back door at Broadwater Avenue with bloody knuckles.
The Old Man came back at the end of the summer, sentence served, still scheming. With an old cowboy buddy he opened a beer hall in Worden, a legit place. Before a year was gone, he was broke and working for wages as a common laborer.
At least there was that, that and the $10 a week Ben Steele was bringing home from odd jobs. His mother always took the money with a smile, but he could see her worry, watched it grow week after week. When he could watch it no more, he quit school and took a full-time job as a camp tender for Jug Clark, a sheep man he’d ranched for summers. Thirty a month plus keep, and every month he sent every cent home.
Late that summer, another Dust Bowl summer that drove up the cost of hay, Jug Clark decided to put his sheep on a train and ship them west across the state to the Big Hole, an enormous mountain valley surrounded by towering peaks. Best hay in the state, and the biggest valley Bud had ever seen.
SIX OF THEM, the boss, four shepherds, and their eighteen-year-old camp tender, trailed eight thousand sheep from the railhead at Anaconda sixty miles into the long valley. Summer and fall were gorgeous, green and gold. Then in late November icy air started to slide down the mountain slopes and collect in the valley bottom. Come December the snow was up to the top of the fence posts and the temperature was the coldest in the state.
The shepherds and camp tender moved into a drafty farmhouse rented out as a kind of barracks. From dawn to dusk they bundled up in woolens and hauled and pitched tons of hay to the scattered bands. Nights they sat around listening to the wind howl and telling one another the same stale stories again and again. Ben Steele learned about boredom that winter, boredom and the company of men.
In the spring, when it was time to return to the home ranch, the camp tender, restless now, convinced the boss to let him ride ahead to Anaconda with their string of twenty horses.
He was on a pinto stallion named Patches, an ornery creature. At the end of the first day the boy was spent and looking for a place to stop and put up the string.
“Where you headed?” said a rancher’s wife, serving him some fried chicken and potatoes.
“We wintered a bunch of sheep up in the Big Hole, ma’am, and now we’re bringing them back to the Yellowstone.”
“Wintered in the Big Hole?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s really something!” she said. “Let me see that coat of yours. Looks like you have some buttons missing.”
He could have stopped anywhere, any ranch along the way for a bed of dry hay and a hot breakfast at sunup. That was the custom of the country. And he knew he could count on it, the kindness of strangers, count on it even in the hardest of times.