We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
Three generations of Obrechts, part of the Petrie family, pose in front of the century old barn built in 1916: (l-r) Fifth generation Tyrel and wife Lindsey, fourth generation Linda and Sam and third generation Nellie and Sonny. Louie Petrie and Frances, Nellie's parents, were the second generation to work the ranch. George Petrie and his wife, Nellie, homesteaded Mutton Hollow in 1901.
Some weeks ago I found an abandoned copy of An Ornery Bunch on the "giveaway bench" where we live at the Grande Villa in Chinook. An Ornery Bunch is a book of anecdotes and tales collected by the Montana Writers' Project between 1935 and 1942. The Writers' Project was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program that kept writers and other artists employed during the Great Depression (1929-1941). With the outbreak of World War II, publishing the collected stories was set aside for the war effort. An Ornery Bunch was published in 1999 and contains about 100 examples of Montana's collected stories and tales from the Project's immense archives.
Each short anecdote (most are one to three pages in length) has the name of the person who 'collected' the story originally for the archives. Six of the nearly 100 stories in the book were collected by "W.H. Campbell of Chinook." The attributed source for one story Campbell collected was George Petrie. Petrie was described as "one of the earliest sheep ranchers of the northern Blaine District."
Shortly after I finished reading the book of anecdotes and tales of years gone by, I was scheduled to interview Nellie Obrecht for the Blaine County Museum's Oral History Project. I recalled from an earlier story I did about an old barn on the Mutton Hollow Ranch that George Petrie was Nellie's grandfather.
I asked Nellie about W.H. Campbell and she said, "Oh, that's Bill Campbell. He was a poet and musician looking for work who was hired by my grandfather as a sheepherder." I decided to see what I could learn about this talented transplant from north of the border. Here's some of what I learned about this Harvard educated sheepherder.
W.H. "Bill" Campbell came from a wealthy family in New Brunswick, Canada
Bill Campbell's family, back in Canada, owned a tool manufacturing company. He was educated at Harvard University and the family urged him to work in their New Brunswick based business. He could type and take shorthand. He was a "wonderful piano player," having once performed in the Imperial Theater (a 2500 seat performance hall) in Saint Johns, N.B. He wrote poetry. And Bill Campbell was a veteran of World War I having served honorably in the Canadian military.
I couldn't find exactly what years Campbell was employed at the Petrie ranch. James Halseth, a local collector of stories from the old days, wrote in his book Old Time Sheepmen, Sheepherders... that Campbell also worked for about a year "in the courthouse" in Chinook. In 1933 Campbell married Ruth Mord of Chinook (he was 40 years of age, she was 17). They had three children: Edith, Wilfred and Constance. The couple divorced in 1945. The youngest daughter and only surviving child, Constance, died in 2019.
Bill Campbell wrote poetry about the people and places around him
At some point George Petrie, Nellie Obrecht's grandfather, noticed that Campbell was writing lots of poetry, much of it on the backs of labels he peeled from cans in the cabin the sheepherders used for shelter when working out on the range. George Petrie collected these scraps of poetry and eventually published books (first in 1933 and then a later edition in 1992) of Campbell's poetry with snippets of the history of Mutton Hollow Ranch.
Nellie Obrecht's opinion is that Bill Campbell, like many men who were sheepherders during the heyday of sheep ranching in this area, may have had a problem with alcohol abuse. She recounted that her grandfather, father and uncle told stories about 'lost souls' who found the isolation of herding sheep a way to avoid the temptations of alcohol. One of Campbell's poems, titled "The Supreme Cure," might have been autobiographical when in the last stanza he wrote:
"You can't beat the fact for the proof is all here,
men who were dying from whiskey and beer,
have found that spring water is there on the spot,
with just now and then a wee uplift shot.
Away with your rich sanitarium grand.
Give me old Mutton Hollow, the balm of the land."
I found a couple of versions of a story about Campbell's musical ability. It was told that Campbell went in to a bar in Harlem where a female singer was trying to perform a vocal number. The piano player, a man, was not doing very well accompanying her. Someone urged Campbell to take over at the piano. The story goes he sat down at the piano, looked up at the singer and asked, "What do you want to sing?" The tale continues that for the next two or three-hours Campbell played song after song for the singer and the crowd.
Based on his personal history of moving around it was no surprise Campbell wrote a poem about his own wanderlust and, to some extent, his own demise. His poem titled "The Wanderer" describes Campbell's personal travels as a "...wanderlust victim, a restless insatiable soul, pressing onward in reckless abandon, toward a visionless mythical goal." He completed the poem with this gloomy ending: "With the burden of years I still wander, each day drawing nearer the crest, that looms in the distance out yonder, o'er that beautiful valley of rest."
Bill Campbell had the ability to write poetry about many topics. He wrote the poem "Thomas Walker" after the death of a fellow sheepherder. The story is he put a 200 word, four verse tribute to paper in a very short period of time. The end has the melancholy sound of some of his other poems about uncertainty and death: "We hope our mortal records shine like yours in golden flame. To guide us to that rest sublime, beyond all fear and pain."
W.H. "Bill" Campbell died in Great Falls in 1953.
