December 15, 2008
Journalist and photographer
Jeri Dobrowski has been
photographing the signs along Montana's highways. The signs
have a number of connections to cowboy poetry.
Montana engineer, writer and
poet, Robert "Bob" Fletcher
(1885-1972), the author of the poem "Open
Range" (which was Cole Porter's inspiration for the song "Don't
Fence Me In") worked for
the Montana Department of Highways. He conceived and created the text for
the state's first
historical road markers. The
text of those markers was published in a 1938 book, Montana's
Historical Highway Markers, which has since been reprinted
and updated several times.
Montana folklorist Michael
Korn writes in the foreword to the 1999 edition of the book,
"In 1935, Bob Fletcher convinced the powers-that-be to place
road signs throughout Montana at points of historical
significance or interest at those places that suggested a
good story ...Fletcher's personal acquaintance with many of
the men and women who had helped build the state provided
more fuel for his ideas and supplied him with the stories
and the embroidery for the texts that were cut into the
original signs....Many Montanans and countless visitors took
their first history lessons about the state by reading Bob's
signs..."
The photos below by Jeri
Dobrowski are from Highway 12.
The sign below is at the
Highway 12 rest area, between Plevna and Miles City, and
tells of cowboy and poet D.J. O'Malley
(1867-1943)
and quotes from his poem "After
the Roundup":
Lyndel Meikle writes in Cowboy Miner Productions'
collection of O'Malley works,
Cowboy Poetry: Classic Rhymes and Prose by D. J. O'Malley, The N Bar N
Kid White:
His career as a cowboy poet began in 1889
when he penned "To the Memory of Wiley Collins" about a chuck wagon cook who was killed by lightning.
Over the next half century, he wrote many poems and stories about the men and
the work he knew, often using the pen name N Bar N Kid White. Some, such as
"When The Work's All Done This Fall,"
(which was originally called "After the Round-up") were popularized in
song...
The sign below is located
on Highway 12, on the west side of Powder River:
Jeri writes about the
photo below:
This is the turn off
from Montana Highway 12, the east side of Powder River,
near what once was Locate, Montana. The road goes to
Campbell Ranch, homesteaded by my great-grandfather Edward
Campbell and operated today by my cousin and her husband,
Cassie & Bill Erickson.
There are more photos to
come, from other areas, in future postings.
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