BROWNING HOUSING
Moccasin Flats ran along the boundary street on the south side of Browning. Basically, it was a row of log cabins that could be thought of as the first housing project in Browning. The original idea (1910 or so) was to get the old people out of tents and into solid shelter. The line of public schools ran across that street so my classroom windows looked across the dirt road at what had become a jumble of lean-tos, abandoned cars, out houses, and TV antennas. There must have been electricity. At some point someone ran a city water line down the road but people still had to come out to the spigot with a bucket or jug.
Everyone assumed that Moccasin Flats was a federal project and criticized the Feds for not updating it, or at least cleaning it up. Once the old people were there, relatives in trouble or other people with no better place to go just attached however they could. The federal government paid Johnson O’Malley funds to compensate for the land taxes not collected for the schools because the People were on federal land, which like reservations and military bases, don’t pay taxes.
After years of this assumption, it turned out that the land under Moccasin Flats was privately owned. No one knew. I don’t know what broke the story but School District #9 had to repay the feds big time. Probably it was the estate of the original land owner that opened the can of worms. I think he was white.
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Where people are poor and assistance is missing, these improvised communities develop wherever they can. Today they happen in every patch of wasteland or shelter, like under a bridge. People squat in empty buildings. When JFK began to develop small housing groups, Moccasin Flats was the first target, then the Big Flood housing, then the Easter Egg houses (painted pastel), the Last Star homes (dark colors, no eaves) and others (modern log houses) until Browning was only an aging hub in the middle of scattered housing projects of various ages and origins.
What no one expected was that after the new housing was allotted, people moved back into the old cabins, even the ones that had been flooded, because habits are stronger than unfamiliar new places, esp for the old. This is so strong in mammals that horses will run back into a burning barn because the belief that their stall was a safe place is stronger than the fire that made them need it. Calves who are lost will go back to the last place they had a good meal from their mother. We humans are seeing it act out politically.
The business parts of Browning, the street from the hospital to the schools at right angles to the highway, was stymied by land ownership. Inheritance rules went through the trust system, which had to divide inheritors equally. Soon there were people who owned 5% of a lot, or people who had disappeared long ago, or dead people whose inheritors couldn’t be located. It was a mess. Laws had to be invented that would allow either bulldozing or sale to viable owners who could upgrade.
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Widows and retired women in Browning often invested in little rental houses. Bill McMullen’s mother lived across the street from the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and had a little house next to her that she had bought when the block was cleared to build the Glacier Studio photography business and maybe the Hagerty Hotel. Bill McMullen worked for various federal law enforcement programs, not in management but as an officer. He was a close friend of Bob’s. So I rented the little house, which proved to be a mistake because pets went back and forth across the highway and were killed by traffic.
It turned out that the little house, which had been last owned by Hughie Welch, who may have been related to the writer but was into electronics, had originally been occupied by Jim Welch’s father’s parents and Jim’s father grew up there. (Three generations of Welch had the same name.) It was a typical one-bedroom house and Hugh had fenced the front yard with no gate because he didn’t want his little kids to escape onto the highway.
I woke in the night hearing voices closeby. Instead of curtains I had put up shutters, so I opened them to see what was going on. A little drunk man was trying to get a big drunk man over the picket fence. I tried to tell them they would be trapped with no gate, but they paid no mind. They didn’t seem to hear me. Just some old woman.
Finally the little guy heaved the groaning big guy over the pickets. Then he climbed over. I went to the front door to see what would happen next and it was a repeat. Except there was a drainage ditch outside the fence so the big guy fell twice as far, still groaning. I never knew who they were.
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One spring day Bob and the crew abandoned work and went out to a fox den that they dug up to get the pups. The mother circled them warily the whole time, but did not attack. I was napping when Bob brought in his fox pup and dropped it on my bosom. It was crawling with insects so I went straight to the shower and jumped in, pup, clothes and all. Many little black dots washed down the drain.
The pup was with us always, sleeping with us warmly until she chewed her way through the electric sheet, wires and all. But by then it was summer. She wanted to be out at night and we left the window open so she could come and go. In the morning she was always curled up between us.
But she matured enough to be sexual and we didn’t want to have her spayed. She didn’t come home anymore. At first I was dumb about it and went looking for her. I came upon one of the first housing projects, built mostly of concrete and cement blocks, more like a prison than a housing project. The premise was that the people to be housed would try to destroy the project, that they were degenerates who couldn’t maintain anything nice.
The women who owned rentals were sympathetic. Many renters left the little houses with broken toilets, holes in walls, clogged plumbing. Suppressed anger? In those days I didn’t ask. When I visited a few, I wondered why the rooms were always painted flamingo pink. Still don’t know.
The fox, as I was too dumb to know, would be killed because it was accustomed to humans. That’s what happened to our “pet” bobcats and a little black bear cub who wandered into town. It was shot off the telephone pole it had shinnied up to escape. Bob brought it in and dumped it into my arms as though it were a baby. Love mixed with cruelty and death.
The last animal he plunked in my arms without warning was a near-adult badger, chattering with laughter. It was like holding one solid muscle wider than deep. Not unpleasant and it didn’t use it powerful claws. I don’t know what finally happened to it.
The last bobcat was in a cage built in the workshop. Bob let it out if no one were around. It reached all the way from floor to ceiling and had ledges. When I went over to talk to it, it looked me in the eye and peed on my head. Bob was divided between snickering and embarrassment. I went straight back to my room at Brownie’s in East Glacier and into the shower.
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