River of Dreams: A Journey through Milk River Country

By Liz Bryan

A picturesque, reflective journey along the route of the ancient Milk River, from southern Alberta into northern Montana.

The Milk River is a small and dreamy river, flowing lazily through some of the loneliest lands of North America, the dry plains of Alberta and Montana. Dwarfed by such giants as the Saskatchewan and Mississippi Rivers, it is indeed as meek as its name, virtually unknown to most North Americans. Yet few streams can match its incredible international journey, the magical beauty of its landscape, or the long and often sad history that suffuses every inch of its 1,200-kilometre passage.

The Milk River has always been a special place for the Indigenous Peoples of the plains, providing them with physical and spiritual sustenance. Yet the river's story also encompasses the settlement of the northwestern plains at a time of great change, when Indigenous ways of life were being systematically extinguished, first by brazen whiskey traders and later the flow of immigration and the military will of the US cavalry. As settlement prevailed, brave hopes and dreams often fell victim to injustices and anguish. With lyrical prose, stunning photography, and remarkable insight into the history and geography of the region, River of Dreams is a meditation on the beauty and significance of Milk River country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heritage House
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781772033014

Liz Bryan

Liz Bryan is a journalist, author, photographer, and co-founder of Western Living magazine. Bryan has written several books, including Pioneer Churches of Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea: An Explorer’s Guide (which was a finalist for the Lieutenant Governor's Historical Writing Competition), River of Dreams: A Journey through Milk River Country, and Stone by Stone: Exploring Ancient Sites on the Canadian Plains.

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To my late husband, Jack, who was the real photographer in the family—before the digital age made it easy. I have tried to follow in his footsteps.

CONTENTS

Beginnings

Introduction

1 River History

2 Finding the Infant River

3 Tracking the St. Mary Canal

4 Skimming the Alberta Milk

5 Following the River in Montana

6 Exploring the Hills and Uplands

7 The Whoop-Up Trail

Endings

Acknowledgements

Suggested Reading

Index

Map of the Milk River’s run through Alberta and Montana and the extent of its international watershed in Montana and two Canadian provinces.

Its place in a larger geography.

SOME LANDSCAPES ARE hard on the heart, like the blaze of first love.

I will never forget that long-ago September evening in Alberta’s Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park. I had climbed through the sandstone hoodoos to the top of the cliffs overlooking the Milk River, a wonderful viewpoint at any time of day. But I was unprepared for the transformation of that glorious sunset. Let me try to explain.

It was cold, and the wind whipped the dry grass. As the sun slipped away, the afterglow of a flaming sky turned the rocks to gold, the river to deep indigo. And, far away, the hazy blue-grey swells of the Sweet Grass Hills held the last rays of sun. It was an unsettling time of day, a time for ghosts. Vision quests took place here, and spirits of many kinds must surely linger. The light was eerie, swiftly changing the look of the land. My skin prickled. Then a meadowlark called out exultantly as if to defy the approaching dark, and a small string of deer stepped across the river where shallow pebbly fords riffled the water. They came from the south, nosing through low willows to browse among the inscrutable rocks. Did I remember to breathe as I clicked my camera, trying to record the joy of the moment?

I stayed in that loveliness as the light faded and the deer melted into the shadows. And, in a way, I have never left. The river tugs at my heart.

What is it that draws me back to the Milk River, my Milk River? If I believed in magic, I could find it here, as the Indigenous people did. They came year after year, century after century, to dream their dreams and write them on the rocks. And perhaps they lifted their eyes to the beckoning hills, where deeper mysteries waited. There is certainly a sense of sanctity in this kind and sheltered valley.

Grief and despair lived throughout Milk River country—not only among the tribes who, when the bison disappeared, lost everything, but also among the homesteaders. Come from afar, full of dreams to start new lives in a new land, they worked desperately hard on their dry and stubborn plots. But like the soil, their dreams turned to dust as crops withered and their children died. Does the land itself keep guard on all this emotion, all the memories, both good and bad? I think it does, and particularly in the uncertain hour before darkness, I can easily be affected by it, stirring memories of the hopes and heartbreaks of my own life.

This is how it all started—my long journey over many years through the country of the Milk River. That extraordinary evening in the sunset, now so long ago, inspired explorations, in books and on the land, on both sides of the United States–Canada border. What follows is an account of my travels through this beautiful area and its long, colourful history. And of the river where dreams are born.

THE MILK IS the only river in Canada that empties into the drainage basin of the Gulf of Mexico. After such a statement, one might expect applause and a wave of the Canadian flag. But how many Canadians have even heard of the Milk? It is a small and dreamy river, etching lazy meanders through some of the loneliest lands of North America: the dry plains of Southern Alberta and Northern Montana. Dwarfed by such giants as the Saskatchewan and the Mississippi, it is virtually unknown in the geography of North America. Yet few streams can match its incredible international journey, the magical beauty of its landscape, much of it still wilderness, or the long and often sad history that suffuses every stride along its 1,250-kilometre (780-mile) passage.

The Milk River’s story encompasses the settlement of the northwestern plains at a time of great change, when the old, Indigenous ways of life were fading and new immigrant ones were forged, along with brave hopes and longing, injustice and anguish. It is the story perhaps of all of us, played out on an unforgettable stage. The Milk is a river of dreams.

One of several deserted homesteads in the valley, this one still has some of its old yellow paint.

The forlorn graveyard at Masinasin looks southeast to the Sweet Grass Hills.

Petroglyph of a man and horse at Writing-on-Stone.

The Milk River has always been a special place to the First Peoples of the Northwest American plains, providing sustenance both physical and spiritual. In Alberta, several tribes over thousands of years sought shelter in its valley, guarded by the sacred Sweet Grass Hills billowing like great blue clouds above the Montana horizon. Here the people came for the valley’s wood and for the hunt—but also for ancient rites and ceremonies, and to scratch their thoughts and dreams and commemorations on rock bluffs along the river. These stories, these histories, enrich the landscape and remind those of us who visit the river today in such places as Writing-on-Stone that there was a time and a way of life before our own, one perhaps richer in its simplicity—and one that the tide of European settlement has almost washed away.

The bison hunters, first of the dreamers, considered the Milk River to be the international boundary between British and American territories after these foreign powers had laid claim to their ancestral lands. Tribes in Montana, often chased by the Union Cavalry, raced across the river (what they called the Medicine Line) to the safety of Canada during the time of Indigenous clearances and relocations. On both sides of the border, Indigenous people, almost annihilated by European diseases and warfare, were hustled onto reserves to clear the land for mining and settlement. The pages of their past are annotated with outrage and tragedy, yet they have survived and are slowly recovering their identities and traditional spiritual values. Every community has its traditional dances, sacred gatherings, rodeos, schools, and language. Their myths and legends have not been forgotten. The bison are being brought back, but the world the Indigenous people had known for thousands of years has changed forever.

Bison thrive on reserve lands near the Rocky Mountains.

Tipis, jingle dancers, and life-size sculptures at the entrance to the Blackfeet lands in Montana all point to a strong Indigenous presence.

The land of the Milk River sheltered other dreamers. In the thrust of the great North American empire-building era, immigrants from over-settled lands to the east and from other continents came west to seek gold, scrape out homesteads, and build dams, railways, and towns. But the climate on the arid plains was harsh. Many settlers packed up their optimism and left, leaving little behind: a few fence lines, tenuous tracks, homestead ruins, and lonely graveyards. In Montana, a railway dashing along beside the Milk and a string of false promises brought in a huge flood of hopeful settlers. Tiny towns sprung up along the tracks, today vanishing as quickly as dreams themselves. The land around the river, on both sides of the international boundary, is not unpeopled, but it is certainly lonely and often melancholy—perhaps because of the echoes of long-ago heartbreak.

THE FOUR TRIBUTARY streams of the Milk River trickle down the eastern Rocky Mountain foothills in Montana, very close to another river, the glacier-fed St. Mary, which spurts down from the Rockies and charges almost due north into the great Canadian river system that drains into Hudson Bay, following the natural tilt of the continent. But the Milk River, born close by on the lip of the oceanic divide, escapes this pull of northern drainage and flows northeast to arc across the southern belly of what is now Alberta. Just before reaching the Saskatchewan border, it makes a turn southeast through a canyon—the deepest in all the western plains—to flow back into its birth land and ultimately into the Missouri/Mississippi drainage down to the Gulf of Mexico.

As an international river flowing in and out of Canada, it has—at least on paper—an interesting multicultural history. The land surrounding it has flown several successive flags of empire from 1682 until today, a fact graphically illustrated beside the visitor centre on the southern edge of the town of Milk River, Alberta, a few miles north of the international boundary. Here, eight flags flap in the ever-present wind. In the seventeenth century, when Britain, Spain, and France were all jostling for empire in the New World, France laid claim to the mouth of the Mississippi River and all the land it drained (which included several modern American states and parts of today’s Alberta and Saskatchewan). The French fleur-de-lys was raised over the new Louisiana—a huge tract of uncharted wilderness. Later on, France seceded the region to Spain, which, in 1800, gave it back again to France, now under Napoleonic rule and a new flag. Less than three years later, the burgeoning United States bought all the French lands for the small sum of $15 million, effectively doubling the size of its territory. It was only the establishment of the forty-ninth parallel as the boundary between United States and British lands in 1818 that secured the northern Milk River watershed for Western Canada, then under the jurisdiction of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which held licence over all the lands east of the Rockies and north to Hudson Bay. The other three flags relate to the formation of the British Dominion of Canada in 1867: the Union Jack, and then the two sovereign Canadian flags, the Red Ensign and the Maple Leaf. The Indigenous people, the original occupants of the land, flew no flags and held no notion at all of land ownership. How could one own land, they puzzled, any more than one could own the sky or the water that ran in the river?

Pronghorn antelope run free on the Milk River grasslands.

The Milk River in spring flood, brown like a milky tea.

The Milk River’s historically international past implies an importance on the world stage that it never really had: most of the empires vying for its territory had no knowledge at all of this small stream flowing through what was then unknown land, peopled only by Indigenous bison hunters and a few fur traders. The river remained unnamed (in English, at any rate) until Lewis and Clark made their memorable expedition across the United States. They documented this tributary pulsing into the Missouri from the northwest and named it the Milk River because, as Meriwether Lewis noted, it was the colour of tea mixed with a little milk (the way dyed-in-the-wool English people still drink