THE MONUMENT
It was a sunny Thursday, June 26, 1994, when I turned off Montana Highway 87 onto a side road that led to Fort Benton. As a producer-writer, I had been checking out some locations in and around the Great Falls area for a possible book and film project on the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806 when my research led me to the historic little town. Fort Benton is a picturesque prairie town of about 1,500 residents, nestled in the bluffs of the looping Missouri River about an hour's drive northeast of Great Falls. Fort Benton, known as the birthplace of Montana, played a major role in the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was to accomplish Thomas Jefferson's objective to find the most practical water communications route across the continent. It was near Fort Benton that Lewis and Clark stayed longer than any other campsite of their entire expedition.
Fort Benton is where the eqrly traders exchanged goods with the hostile Blackfoot, where trappers built keelboats to haul their rich bundles of beaver pelts to St. Louis down the longest river in North America. Later steam-powered riverboats unloaded cargo, soldiers, settlers, and miners at the Fort Benton levee because the falls upstream prevented them from going farther.
In the town's early days, a bawdy assortment of saloons, hotels, mercantile establishments, and stables lined Front Stret, the street known as the "Bloodiest Block in the West."
As I followed the highway to the little town on that June day, I couldn't help but think that if God ever took up golf, he would select for his course the endless green, rolling hills of north-central Montana, decorated with snow-capped peaks, a sea of wildflowers, and gushing wilderness rivers. In early summer there is no more beautiful place on the face of the planet.
But as I drove down from the prairie benches into the protective cove surrounding the little town, I sensed that something was different, but I wasn't sure what it was, at least not at first. I couldn't see any cars on the streets. The first gas station was deserted, unusual for a summer afternoon. Slowly, I continued toward the river.
When I reached the historic Grand Union Hotel on Front Street and looked east, I realized what was different. Virtually all the people, and most of the vehicles, were here. A large grassy spot on the riverbank, partly shaded by the biggest cottonwood trees I had ever seen. A Montana Power truck with a big crane had just lifted a heavy object from the bed of another truck and was swinging it toward a flat spot on the lawn where people were applauding.
I found a parking spot, grabbed my notebook and camera, and ran to join the group. Being a writer, I could sense there might be a story here.
I hadn't gone far when I realized that the heavy object being moved by the crane was a bronze statue, but not the usual kind of statue that depicted a wise forefather, noble chief, or brave soldier. If was a statue of a dog, big enough to weigh at least a thousand pounds. Wow, some dog!
I knew from my research that when Lewis and Clark campled here, there was an unusual dog with them, Seaman, a huge, two-hundred-pound Newfoundland that unwittingly helped make friends with the many Indian tribes along the way. The natives, never having seen such a large dog, wanted to get a closer look.
But the likeness of the statue was not of Seaman. It didn't have the bulky Newfoundland look but resembled more a collie--just a plain old sheep dog. Why would a tiny little town with a struggling economy erect a huge statue of a dog?
When I reached the people gathered around the statue, I noticed an attractive woman, perhaps in the late fifties or early sixties. She was dressed in a peach-colored cotton skirt and a white, short-sleeved blouse. Her brown shoulder-length hair, streaked with gray, had a natural curl. She had a distinguished look about her and a figure that was neither thin nor heavy.
The think about the woman that attracted my attention was her frequent use of a white handkerchief to dab away wetness from her intense blue eyes. I guessed she would be able to tell me why a dog deserved his likeness cast into a half ton of bronze, so I moved beside her.
"Is the statue supposed to represent a particular dog?" I asked. She looked at me as if wondering how anyone could ask such a dumb question.
"Just arrived," I explained. "From out of state.
She looked at me more kindly. "Shep," she said, as if that were enough information to answer all my questions. As a lad I had heard about Shep, but I didn't know Fort Benton claimed the famous dog. The woman looked once again at the statue, where a local dignitary was asknowledging Biob Scriver, the renowned Montana artist who a few years earlier had sculpted the Lewis and Clark Memorial Monument in town and had now done this piece. The crowd applauded for a job well done.
As the people began to disperse I noticed several brick masons on their knees, arranging red paving bricks on the ground around the base of the statue. The woman next to me explained that the individuals and businesses whose names had been inscribed on the bricks had made monetary donations to help pay for the statue.
"May I buy you lunch?" I said to the woman, who looked at me in surprise, as though I had overstepped my bounds, being a stranger and all. "Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me more about Shep."
I gave her my brightest, friendliest, most disarming smile, then added, "Do you think there's a story here?"
"The New York Times, the London Times, and Reader's Digest did," she said, with a sense of pride in her voice. "oh, yes, and Ripley's 'Believe It or Not,' the Associated Press, and United Press International news services were among the many that wrote about Shep. Even Paul Harvey devoted a radio show to the subject of this dog."
"Guess maybe I better check it out."
"I'll share some information with you, but I don't want to see my name in some article, so I'd just as soon not tell you who I am," the woman declared.
I agreed. But in past interviews I have been extra suspicious of information from people who withheld their names. I also knew that during the process of the interview as people became more relaxed, they often changed their mind about withholding identity. I guessed this might be the case with this nice lady.
We found a corner table in the nearest cafe and ordered hamburgers and colas. I put my camera on the floor, out of sight, so she wouldn't worry that I was going to take her picture. Then I opened my notebook.
"Which newspaper do you write for?" she asked.
"None. I'm a producer-writer, here doing some research on Lewis and Clark."
"So you want to tell Shep's story," she said.
"I might. That thousand-pound statue out there and all those bricks suggest a powerful story."
"The big question is where to start," she said, smiling at me for the first time. She seemed confident I wouldn't be disappointed.
"Start at the beginning," I said.
"Shep was born on the Fourth of July, 1927, near the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation at Eagle Butte, South Dakota," she began. Stopping, she reached into her handbag and retrieved a rectangular-shaped item--a well-worn book, hardbound in black leather.
"This is my father's journal," she explained. "He knew the dog well and wrote about him. Each time there is new information about Shep, I try to add it to the journal."
"Back to the beginning," I said. "Shep was born on the Fourth of July. What happened next?"
"He was a sheep dog, but big, probably a cross between a border collie and a larger shepherd. One story says that when Shep was born, they were about to drown the pups so the mother could go back to work, but a sheepherder showed up, saying he'd take one of the pups with him on the train to a sheep camp in Montana. Shep was the one he picked. The herder's name was Joseph-'Joe'-Jacobson. A year earlier in 1926, after suffering a permanent leg injury in South Dakota, Joe had come to Montana and found employment at the Mountain Meadow Sheep Company near Fort Benton. Times were hard and finding work wasn't easy. A man had to pretty much take what he could get, especially if he had a disability.
"Joe took the puppy to the sheep camp, where for the next nine years they tended sheep. It was here where one of the greatest bonds ever known between dog and man was formed."
She paused, then opened the jornal, glanced at some of the early pages, and continued telling me the following story.
"Sometime during the summer of 1935, high in the Mountain Meadow Sheep Camp there was a terrible storm..."