Agates and Ashes

There are few streets in Terry, Mont. They sound like regular streets: Spring Street, Park Street, Jane Street. When you leave town, they let you know: Bad Route Road, Old Highway Road, Badlands Road.
The regular streets map out neat squares. The wild gravel roads follow the contours of the earth. They cut through the rough badlands, jagged and colorful like torn construction paper. They wind along the ribbon of green cottonwoods hemming the Yellowstone River.
The average daily commute of a Terry resident is 14.2 miles, according to the state of Montana. Some of them work in retail, others, in service. Not many though: Terry has one hotel, one restaurant, one grocery store, and there are only five beds in Prairie County Hospital.
The hospital and the hotel are white. In the winter, they blend into the surrounding landscape. Sometimes, snow makes that 14.2 miles impassable.
“I drive 16 miles to get here,” Ruth Frank, Prairie County Museum board member, says. “That’s why we close after Labor Day—no one comes in winter, and when it snows, no one could.”
In one room of the museum, burned into boards, Frank can point out her husband’s brand, her son’s brand, and two of her grandsons’ brands. Two brands are identical: one grandson uses his grandfather’s cattle brand. Ranch, or farm, or fish—that’s what people out here do.
“Lots of people come for the agates,” she says, picking up a stone pulled from the Yellowstone. The agates are clear, colored like sand paintings, spotty, or almost black. They vary like the colors in the bluffs. When she says lots of people, she says, she means a few, from here and there.
But lots of people do come to Terry for another reason: old photos.
There are lots of old photos in the Prairie County Museum. “Just about the whole population of Prairie County could fit in one of these old photos today,” Frank says. In her hand she has a panoramic photo of the townfolks, all lined up in front of the old school house. It’s from 1924.
There are fewer than 1200 people in Prairie County. Frank says they began leaving after the Great Depression, when times were tough. She says times never really got better.
The photos that attract the tourists show a tough time. But they are older than the Great Depression.
One day in the 1970s, Donna Lucey found a trunk of photos in a Terry basement. The photos dated between 1894 and 1928. They showed people building cabins, and stacks of wool. They showed women holding coyote puppies, and homesteaders standing proudly in front of their shacks. They showed the frightening forms nature could carve from rock. One of them showed the photographer herself, standing on the back of a white horse.
Evelyn Cameron came to the area in the 1800s. “She loved it so much here that she convinced [husband] Ewan to move from England,” says Frank. “See how rough her skin became from the sun and wind? She was a very modern lady. They nearly ran her out on rails when she came into town wearing bloomers!”
The Cameron’s polo pony fortunes met with bad luck, and Lady Cameron picked up a camera as a way to make ends meet, according to Lucey’s book, “Photographing Montana 1894-1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron.” Cameron’s photographs show a desolate country. Tough women hold wild dogs; men dress their finest for her lens. Mostly, though, they show her love for Montana.
Frank loves Montana too, enough that she stuck through the hard times. But many aren’t as tough as Frank. The median resident age in Terry is 53. Compared to the rest of the state, Terry’s median household income is $30,700, below the state median of $43,531. The median house value is significantly below average: $42,500 in Terry, to $170,000 for the state.
Frank recognizes there isn’t a lot to keep young people here. There’s only one television station, and one FM radio station. “We have the drive-in theater,” she says, but she knows it’s not enough.
The Prairie County Museum is full. Every room in the three-story bank building is full, even the vaults. Next door, the gallery walls are covered in Lady Cameron’s photographs. When the young people leave, the old residents find they have no one to pass their treasures on to. If anything benefits from the young people leaving Terry, it’s the museum.
Despite the rutted roads and their forbidding names, the young people leave. Their grandmother’s teapot and their grandfather’s hat hang on this wall.
Frank picks up another photograph—this one is new. It’s a school portrait from 2004, grades seven and eight. Thirty small faces smile in front of Terry Elementary.
“If it wasn’t in color, you couldn’t even tell it was new, could you?” Frank says.
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