Who’s Treading Now?
The year was 2017, the month was August. America was 241 years old, and totems of its racist past were crumbling.
One of the Northwest’s largest tributes to Confederate soldiers — an 8-foot-high marble fountain erected in Helena, Montana, in 1916 — was about to come down, too. To protest its removal, a small group of Montanans rallied at the fountain, waving signs and flags: Confederate flags, but also the bright-yellow, unmistakable Gadsden flag, the Revolutionary War banner with a coiled rattlesnake at its center atop the words “Don’t Tread on Me.”
“Tyranny … you’re watching it unfold right here,” one man told reporters.
That summer, Confederate monuments were falling across the country after a woman was killed by a white supremacist at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Charlottesville demonstrators, too, waved banners: Confederate, Nazi and, again, the Gadsden flag. Afterward, the Montana state Legislature’s eight-person American Indian Caucus authored a letter urging removal of the Helena fountain. “Public property in Montana should not be used to promote Nazism, fascism, totalitarianism, separatism, or racism,” they wrote.
According to the Helena protesters, removing the fountain meant rewriting history. State Rep. Shane Morigeau, one of the letter’s authors, spoke out against that idea. Morigeau — a Democrat who
