Hell Creek, Montana: America’s Key to the Prehistoric Past

By Allen M. Jones, 5-24-05

Comes down to it, the literature of the West is a literature of landscape. Any regional book worth its boards and binding inevitably considers, on some level, a particular stretch of horizon. Topography as metaphor, deserts within and without, that sort of thing. While John Updike could hail from anywhere (husbands cheat on their wives in Phoenix, too) and Philip Roth would still be exploring ethnic identity from Seattle, if you took the Big Sky out of Montana, all you’d have left would be cloud cover. A River Runs Through It without the Big Blackfoot would be marsh. Seems like every Western author has his or her prefered place. Willa Cather to Edward Abbey, Mari Sandoz to Wallace Stegner, take away where they are and you’ve taken away who they are.

Speaking for myself, if it weren’t for Montana’s Missouri River Breaks, I’d be rudderless, professionally adrift. Hardscrabble desert and gumbo buttes, a scattering of famous fossils, a handful of militiamen, it's a wonder more books haven't been written about the region. Scratch at the history and here’s Lewis and Clark, Barnum Brown, a rush of optimistic homesteaders, a slow leakage of talented youth, Greyhound tickets to any-damn-place-but-here. Scratch deeper still and here’s an inland sea, fossilized shells on the lakeshore, a series of excavated, Cretaceous thighbones the size of truck beds.

Paleontologist Lowell Dingus’ heartfelt paean to the Breaks, Hell Creek, Montana: America’s Key to the Prehistoric Past is an unapologetic exercise in landscape-love, a modest exploration of the Breaks’ treasured geography. Taking as its starting point Dingus’ own digging experiences in this “paleontological Mecca," the narrative begins with the equivalent of a five minute Hamlet (fourteen brief pages of geological history) before taking a series of chapter-long digressions in social history. There’s the inevitable discussion of Lewis and Clark, an awkward summation of Custer and the Indian wars, a nice little riff on buffalo hunting, and finally three, all-too-short chapters of regional paleontology. (The final pages, including a faux-journalism discussion of the Freemen, are, frankly and unfortunately, dismissable.)

In a chapter entitled, “The Resurrection of Tyrannosaurus," Dingus pays an extended tribute to Barnum Brown, the famous first-discoverer of T-Rex. One digger to another, Dingus is starry-eyed and sympathetic, taking real care to describe Brown’s experiences in the Breaks. Beginning with his most famous exploration at the head end of Hell Creek, Dingus quotes an August 12, 1902 letter from Brown back to his employer in New York: “Quarry No. 1 contains (several bones) of a large Carnivorous Dinosaur not described by Marsh...I have never seen anything like it from the Cretaceous. These bones are imbedded in flint-like blue sandstone concretions and require a great deal of labor to extricate." This, of course, was the world’s first Tyrannosaurus.

As opposed to his dutiful, clumsy chapters on Custer, et al (IE: “Both the Native Americans and the U.S. Army experienced moments of savage victory and humiliating defeat in the Great Sioux War.") the portrait of Brown and his digging – the familiar way Dingus dwells on the difficulties of excavation and transportation (“Most of September and the first week of October involved building boxes for the bone-filled casts and packing the specimens in the crates.") – enlivens the text. “Fortunately, both [of Brown’s two T-Rex] skeletons survived, but I have a closer affinity to the second. For that was the specimen that my staff remounted during the renovation of the fossil halls in the 1990s." You’ve realized, by this point, that Dingus’ narrative authority – the only real reason you’re compelled to keep reading – arises from his background in paleontology. And indeed, when he’s writing about the fossil record, the stones and bones of Hell Creek, he is self-assured, confident. His social history, however, has about it an air of obligation, a whiff of pedestrian research (Stephen Ambrose and Dayton Duncan are both quoted as primary sources). While you have to admire Dingus’ ambition – his attempt to explore a common landscape through divergent disciplines – you can’t help but wish that he’d spent more time within his area of expertise.

Apropos, his highest notes are hit in Chapter 7, “Following in the Footsteps." He writes, “Flat out, the best fossil collector I have ever worked with, and the heir to Barnum Brown’s legacy, is Harley Garbani." Turns out Garbani, in addition to being a kind of mentor to Dingus, uncovered Hell Creek’s third T-Rex specimen. “At that time [1965] the only two known specimens that were anywhere near complete had been found by Barnum Brown in the first decade of the 1900s, so it had been more than fifty years since a meaningful bundle of bones from the beast had been uncovered." Dingus goes on to admiringly describe Garbani’s methods of research. “Rather than wandering off blindly through the breaks, Harley decided to hedge his bet by unleashing his formidable talents for both drinking and socializing on the unsuspecting inhabitants of Jordan...In his pocket he always carried some isolated claws and tooth fragments of Tyrannosaurus." One of his contacts, a rancher named Lester Engdahl, eventually led him to his career-making T-Rex find. “On July 27, 1966, [Harley] spied an enormous toe bone protruding out of a dark gray mudstone as he swung down a ravine below a small livestock pond...It was broken in half, and he could immediately see that the bone was essentially hollow inside...hollow bones are a diagnostic evolutionary feature of meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods."

Despite a prose style that’s occasionally as clunky as an old Edsel, an often misguided brevity (where’s Jack Horner in all this, for instance; a famous paleontologist, and an inveterate Breaks digger, Horner shows not a whisker in Dingus’ book – one suspects professional jealousy, academic infighting), you’d have to say that Hell Creek, Montana is finally worthwhile. In its careful and caring portraits of paleontologists, the juxtaposition of local ranchers against the very bones of their ground, its honest enthusiasm for the history of a region, it’s a valuable addition to Montana’s literature of place.


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