Wolves and Whiskey

If nobody got drunk, the East Coast would be awful crowded by this time.

— Charles M. Russell, "Whiskey"

Sprawling over twenty million acres of Montana grasslands lies "Russell Country," named by the state tourism board after Charlie Russell, Montana's most famous western artist. Bounded to the north by the Alberta border, the Rocky Mountains on the west, and dissolving toward the south and east across the grasslands of the upper Missouri River watershed, this sector of Montana's tourist geography spans an area three times larger than New Jersey. Buttes, cutbanks, and badlands lie beneath a big sky that dominates the horizon in every direction. The Marias, Milk, Sun, and Teton Rivers spill eastward from high mountain passes, emptying to the Missouri River as it muscles a muddy course to the city of St. Louis, two thousand miles distant.

The tourism board marketers have tried to domesticate this place by hawking its wildness as a consumable product. "If freedom could be bottled and sold," they declare, "the heart of Russell Country would be a popular place to acquire it." But the earth's soul is not so easily peddled. It might be tempting to re-create the view from the glossy advertising inserts, to gaze across the frontcountry at sunset and imagine yourself as a pioneer conquering a virgin land. But the evening shadows of the Northern Rockies outrun your vision, and the breeze strikes a chill up your neck, engaging senses beyond the imperial gaze perfected by nineteenth-century landscape artists. In person, this place has a "physical ambiency," as Bob Marshall once described, an immediate and fluctuating beauty that exceeds the instantaneity of artistic representation. Wallace Stegner described the sensation as a multiplicity of shifting "circles, radii, [and] perspective exercises," an overpowering display of light and movement driven by a wind "with the smell of distance in it." Dan Flores called it "the visual equivalent of placing an ear to a seashell." The sublimity of the high plains is powerful but subtle and unexpected. When you look at it, it exerts its own forces back; it crawls inside you. Russell Country is a place defined at these sensory margins, where grand visions surrender to the tactile and prosaic.

Russell earned fame as a painter but harbored a distrust of the medium. He understood himself as a storyteller first, and his brilliance hinged on discarding the static tropes of American landscape art for uncertain illustrations of rapidity and motion. Russell's canvases quiver with energy in ways that are absent from the work of his contemporaries, many of them easterners such as Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel. Impatient wolves snort plumes of hot air as they trample circles through the snow. Horses kick with uneven gaits, and the earth shudders. In Wolves at the Wagon-Train, smoky campfires comfort a camp of plains freighters (figure 1). Three wolves watch from a distance, tails cocked in agitation, looking back at a landscape seen in reverse.

If freedom came in a bottle, Russell would know. In 1927 he fused his explorations of place, paradox, and sensory confusion into a dissolute theory of conquest: America moved west because it was drunk. During the midst of the Prohibition Era, his essay on whiskey elevated the drink as an alternative heart of America's manifest destiny. With lighthearted humor, Russell wrote of drunk men passing out in St. Louis and waking up in Montana, "dragging a boat loaded with trade goods for the Injun country." No stranger to the pains and pleasures of whiskey himself, Russell celebrated the drink as a transcendent spirit of the western experience, a "brave-maker" that withdrew men and women from their inherent cowardice. He poked fun at the eastern moralists and reformers who tried to outlaw the liquor trade in indigenous communities in the nineteenth century and who passed the Volstead Act during the twentieth, a law that "made Injuns out of all of us." Like other mind-altering substances, rather than just "dulling the senses," alcohol provided humans with the possibility of expanding their comprehension of the world around them. The liquor laws were a disavowal of more significant sources of western misery that Russell witnessed during his lifetime. It was an age of unjust conquest that destroyed the wild freedoms of the northwestern plains and created Russell Country in its place, a matrix of private property and social exploitation created to enrich its new barons of land, grass, and cattle. It was funny to imagine drunken fortitude leading Americans westward, but its true roles in the region's ongoing colonial relationships were superficial. But beyond the humor, Russell had a serious point to make: "Whiskey has been blamed for lots it didn't do." Sobriety was just another false piety of colonialism and capitalism.

Russell's observation rings true throughout the historical memory of the Northern Rocky Mountain frontcountry as well. The region's dispossession has long been linked with the whiskey trade, a transborder commerce that transformed the Blackfoot into "ragged mendicants," as the historian Hugh Dempsey described them. The whiskey trade certainly connected many historical developments to one another. The arrival of the North-West Mounted Police, the Blackfoot's acquiescence to Treaty Seven, the near eradication of bison, and even innovations in steamboat technology all relied, in some respects, on the borderland's burgeoning nineteenth-century trade in whiskey, as numerous scholars have explored. Located at the center of these and other historical transformations, the spirit has taken on a life of its own. For many historians, whiskey has become an agent of conquest more potent than official actors like Colonel Baker or Colonel McLeod. In doing so, the spirit has provided a solvent to remove human contingency from the borderland's colonial past. Although the colonization of the North American West has most often been understood as a narrative of disenchantment, where Anglo-American concepts of science and modernity replaced indigenous spiritual practices, whiskey's emergence as the region's historical deus ex machina reveals that an unacknowledged animism also pervaded the borderland's western conquest. Viewed as a historical actor itself, whiskey contravenes a long-standing humanistic metaphysics that has reserved historical agency for human actors.

For many historians, then, it seems that the Blackfoot would not have been confined to reservations nor had their land and labor subordinated by the colonial nations of Canada and the United States were it not for the pernicious influence of firewater. Although alcohol has been controversial in many other encounters between Native and non-Native people, the exotic toxin seems to have soaked Blackfoot society more deeply, drenching it with a scale of death and destitution almost on par with epidemic diseases like smallpox. Between 1870 and 1875 hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Blackfoot died through their contacts with whiskey,...