Tag: Movies

Posted on

Montana

The 1920s begin modern times. We used electric power for lights and for new gadgets like refrigerators and Hoover vacuum cleaners. There were cars on the streets, moving pictures in the cinemas, jazz on the radio, and telephones in the home. There were airplanes in the sky. Information and people moved in new ways. 1920 looked a lot more like 2020 than it looked like 1820, or even 1890.

You can’t have electricity without copper, lots of copper. Montana had some gold, some silver–oro y plata is the state motto–and when the world began to turn on the lights, Montana brought us Anaconda Copper of Butte, Montana. Anaconda mined and smelted the copper for our copper wire, and we turned on the lights. By the 1920s, Anaconda had eaten up the other copper companies in Montana, and Anaconda Copper was not only the largest mining company in Montana, but one of the largest in the world.

Miners brought with them from Wales and Italy and Germany not only mining skills, but a history of labor organizing and unrest. Cowboys didn’t organize. Shepherds didn’t organize. Farmers did organize briefly under the Populist movement, but the Democrats coopted prairie populism with Free Silver.1 By 1900 Montana miners were unionized, and the unions were strong.

In Butte in 1914 unions in Montana began a swift decline, partly because Anacaonda ate up its competition–the union had a lot less power negotiating with a single powerful employer instead of several divided employers–and partly because of the miners’ own damned fault. The Western Federation of Miners (the “WFM”) had split from the Industrial Workers of the World (the “IWW”, the Wobblies). Insurgent miners formed the Butte Mine Workers Union as a counter to the WFM, which they believed to be in Anaconda’s pocket. While not formally affiliated, most of the leaders of the Butte Mine Workers Union were Wobblies. Anaconda Copper was pitted against the miners, who were pitted both against Anaconda and against each other.

There were gunfights in the streets of Butte. The WFM union hall was dynamited, an Anaconda Copper office was dynamited, and the governor declared martial law. By the end of the clash, the power of Butte miners’ unions was broken, and Butte, which had been a WFM shop, had become an open shop.

Union Hall of the Western Federation of Miners, Butte, Montana, June 1914, International Socialist Review, Aug. 1914, vol. 15 at 89.

It wasn’t a soft landing. In 1917, an IWW organizer, Frank Little, was lynched, at least in part because of the anti-war stance of the Wobblies. In August 1920, the Wobblies and the Metal Mine Workers called for a general strike for higher wages and an 8-hour day. The strikers shut down all of Butte’s mines. Anaconda mine guards opened fire on strikers and shot 16, killing one.2 Federal troops were brought in, union officials were arrested, and the strike fizzled. It was the last major labor conflict in Butte until 1934, when the miners reorganized under New Deal protections.

Lowe, Jet, Butte Mineyards, Berkeley Pit, documentation compiled after 1968, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Along with the end of the union conflicts, other things changed in Montana as well. In 1918 Montanans voted for statewide prohibition, two years before national prohibition. Legal operations of Butte’s red-light district, Venus Alley, were shut down–during the teens there had been as many as 1000 prostitutes licensed by Butte. Hard-rock mining is still a significant sector of Montana’s economy.3 At least three new copper mines are currently proposed, though likely Venus Alley is gone for good.

The last active mine near Butte closed in 1980. In 1982 the last madam of the Dumas Brothel, the longest operating brothel in the US, was convicted of tax evasion, and the Dumas, the last remnant of Venus Alley, closed. The EPA designated the mining area surrounding Butte as a Superfund site, the nation’s largest. The Dumas reportedly was at closing listed in the National Register of Historic Places, though it isn’t now.

Geography and Population

Montana is the fourth largest state by area, after Alaska, Texas, and California, with 147,040 square miles. Its 2024 estimated population was 1,137,233, increased by more than 14% from it’s 2010 population. Montana is growing, probably faster than its residents really want.

It’s still not very big. Its population is slightly smaller than Dallas, and slightly larger than Fort Worth. Puerto Rico has more than 2 million more people, but two fewer senators. Montana is the 43rd largest state by population, smaller than Maine but larger than Rhode Island.

Anglos make up 84.5% of Montana’s population, Blacks alone are 0.5%, Native Americans 6.2%, Asian .8%, Hispanic 4.2%, and two or more races 6.6%.

Population Density in Montana, US Census Bureau.

Montana has a population of 7.73 people per square mile, compared to 1,259 per square mile in New Jersey. Only one city, Billings, has a population greater than 100,000. Three other cities, Missoula, Great Falls, and Bozeman, have populations over 50,000. The towns (and the largest population concentration) spread north-south along the west of the state, along the front range of the Rockies. If you check the maps below, population concentrations pretty much correspond to the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, the the major trout fisheries, and the counties carried by Kamala Harris. The oddest exception for voting in Montana is in Glacier County, population 13,778, where Glacier National Park is located. Park employees and hangers on presumably vote the interest of the Park, or at least their own interest, and Harris carried Glacier County.4

Montana is one of the eight Rocky Mountain states.5 Like New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, about 60% of Montana, the area east of the Continental Divide, is prairie, part of the Great Plains. The principal mountain ranges are in Western Montana, along the Idaho border. There are more than 100 named mountain ranges in Montana, so Montana is probably a pretty good name for the state.

USGS Relief Map of Montana.

Since the last glaciation, most of Montana’s rivers flow into the Missouri, which in turn flows to the Mississippi and then the Gulf of Mexico. Before the last glaciers, rivers in Montana flowed to the Red River of the North and on to Hudson Bay. Times change.

Montana rivers are among the best-known trout rivers in the world. The Yellowstone begins at Yellowstone Lake in the Park, and flows Northwest into South Dakota to join the Missouri. The Big Hole, Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin are northwest of the Park, and that’s where we’re going. The Missouri begins where the Jefferson meets the Madison, and we’ll fish both the Jefferson and the Madison.

There’s also the Bighorn and Powder, the Bitterroot, Clark Fork, and Blackfoot, and somewhere in there is the Smith. The Flathead, which I’ve spent a pleasant day fishing, is generally considered in fly-fishing literature to be a second-rate fishery. Anywhere else it would be a destination.

There was good reason to leave Montana until last. For fly fishing in the US, only Alaska has a reputation to match. It’s too bad our planning got knocked out of whack by that whole New Jersey thing.6

Montana Natural Resource Information System, Mountain Ranges and Major Rivers.

Trout

The online Montana state field guide to native and non-native trout provides a good identification photo of native and non-native Montana trout, the trout’s current range, their native range (which is often very different), and whether the fish’s survival in Montana is threatened. Arctic grayling, bull trout, Rocky Mountain cutthroats, westslope cutthroats, and lake trout are all native, and are all species of concern in their native Montana habitat. Westslope cutthroats are the most widely distributed native trout in the Northwest, from the West Slope of Montana across the Rockies into Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, all the way to the Pacific.

Brown trout and brook trout are non-native, though both are widely distributed throughout Montana. Rainbow trout (including Columbia River redband trout), are native to a tiny section of far northwest Montana, in the Kootenay drainage. Instead of draining east to the Gulf, the Kootenay drains west to the Pacific, so rainbows native to the Pacific Coast make it to the Kootenay. In addition to the Kootenay rainbows, rainbow trout have been introduced throughout the state.

The state of Montana has led other states to end hatchery stocking programs where there are healthy populations of wild fish, so even where fish caught are non-native browns or rainbows, they are almost certainly wild.

Because it is such an important destination fishery, when something does happen to Montana fish, it makes national news among fly fishers, even people like me who rarely go to Montana. There was the introduction of whirling disease back in the 90s, and in the past years there are reported declines of large trout in the Madison River system. Crowding on Montana rivers is also a big issue, probably because of people like me going to Montana. If it’s any consolation, most of the places I fish here in Texas are also pretty crowded.

Politics.

When the Montana Territory was formed in 1864, the state was oddly populated by unregenerate Confederate sympathizers. The first name proposed for Virginia City, Montana, was Verina, named after the wife of Jefferson Davis. A judge refused to register the name, and named it Virginia City instead. Well into statehood,7 Montana politics would be dominated first by the state’s Democrats–aligned with Southern interests–and then by Anaconda Copper.

2024 Montana election results by county, Wikipedia.

Its recent history has been a mixed bag of Democratic and Republican leadership, though currently the state is dominated by Republicans. The State has had a Democratic Governor as recently as 2021, and John Tester was a Democratic US senator until defeated in 2024.

Donald Trump carried 58.39% of the Montana vote in the 2024 presidential election, an increase from 56.92% in 2020 and 56.17% in 2016. As noted above, voting patterns tended to follow population concentrations, and even in population sparse Montana the larger the population the more likely the area is to vote Democratic.

A River Runs Through It

Every fly fisher knows “A River Runs Through It,” and if not the novella then at least the movie. The 1976 story by Norman Maclean is mostly set in Missoula, Montana, and on the Blackfoot River. The movie was produced and directed by Robert Redford and released in 1992, and it made fly fishing great again. The movie is true to the book, and both are based on the lives of Norman Maclean and his brother, Paul. The movie’s popularity probably wasn’t hurt by Brad Pitt as Paul in one of his first major roles.

He looks so young.

Generally people say that the book is extraordinarily well-written, and the blurb on the cover of my current copy–from a review in the Chicago Tribune–says that the book is as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway. I suspect that the reviewer, whoever it may have been, is suggesting that the book is excellent nature writing, but Thoreau most of the time and Hemingway at his best are American transcendentalists, and are writing about the power of nature to move the observer into a better place. Hemingway’s characters are always closest to tranquility when they’re on a river, and we should all aspire to receiving from nature like Thoreau.

Maclean on the other hand is focused not on the landscape but on his characters, and while they inhabit the natural setting (and the movie has the advantage of the book by showing the rivers au natural), there’s nothing spiritually or psychologically transcendent in it. The closest Maclean gets is when Norman describes younger brother Paul as an artist with the fly rod. There is a long interior dialogue early in the book where Norman plans his cast, and it is all about how he will approach the fish. Hemingway at his best would have described the finning of the fish, the darkness of the water, the light on the angler. Thoreau might have described the beauty of the fish and how it belongs in the natural world.

Maclean doesn’t really tell us much about the fish, or the water. There are bigger fish and smaller fish, fish caught on dry flies and fish caught with bait. What Maclean describes are Norman’s inner thoughts and preparations to make a difficult cast. Nothing wrong with that, and I suspect lots of fly fishers love the book because it is repleat with tales of roll casts and Bunyon Bug Nos. 2. It’s also easy to read, but what it is best at is not describing the Blackfoot River but the characters of Paul and Norman. It has a natural setting, sholy, but–and this is an important difference–the setting is background, a happy accident, not an agent.

Of course plenty of the book’s readers would tell me I’m spouting nonsense.

I will, however, not budge in my argument that there is nothing good about the fly cast in the movie poster. If I ever actually made that cast (and I don’t think it’s physically possible), it would immediately tumble from the sky onto my head and shoulders. Come to think of it, I must have made that exact cast from time to time, and I immediately wore the result. `

It didn’t need the help, but “A River Runs Through It” certainly reminded fly fishers that the trout fishing was great in Montana.

  1. Just like 2025, in the 1890s cheap money was seen as a cure to financial ills. Then it was increasing the money supply by adding silver, not it’s increasing money availability with low interest rates. Or maybe BitCoin. ↩︎
  2. It’s always mentioned that the Anaconda guards fired on fleeing strikers, and the miners were shot in the back. ↩︎
  3. Butte’s population peaked in 1920 at 60,000, and may have been as high as 100,000. The current population estimate is 36,134. At its height, from 1904 to 1917, Butte’s redlight district is estimated to have been second in size only to San Francisco. Licensed prostitution continued in Deer Lodge for a while after Butte was shut down, but it didn’t last long. The economy of Deer Lodge is said to have never recovered. Deer Lodge is the site of the Montana State Prison, and those two enterprises are probably both somehow related to mining. ↩︎
  4. As did Biden and Clinton before her. ↩︎
  5. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. ↩︎
  6. We still have not fished in New Jersey. ↩︎
  7. 1889. ↩︎
Posted on

Road Trip Part Two, Wyoming to South Dakota, June 15-18, 2025 (47)

It’s 346 miles from Thermopolis, Wyoming, to Rapid City, South Dakota, with detours for the Crazy Horse Monument and Mount Rushmore, and also for cheese enchiladas in Gillette, Wyoming.

The cheese enchiladas were at Los Compadres Mexican Restaurant, and they were perfectly decent Tex-Mex, that glorious bastardization of borderland Texas and Mexico that is a Texan’s comfort and joy and Diana Kennedy’s horror.1 It’s a commonplace that you should never trust Tex-Mex north of Dallas, which is actually too far north for my taste, but I liked the Los Compadres enchiladas, even as far north as Wyoming, and there was a patio where Roo could stand guard while we ate. I even got to practice my Spanish, at least as far as buen día.2

In South Dakota we fished two days in the Black Hills on Rapid Creek. We fished with David Gamet of Dakota Angler in Rapid City. David was great to fish with, younger than us, but not young enough that we felt like we were being bossed around by our children. He had grown up in the Black Hills, and there was no doubt about his bona fides.

There were rainbow trout and brown trout, but unlike in Wyoming, the browns and rainbows didn’t displace native cutthroat. One of the peculiarities of the Black Hills is their geographic isolation, with the prairies of South Dakota to the right and the prairies of Wyoming to the left, and without connecting trout rivers for trout to migrate. Illegal European immigrants3 had to bring in the trout, and before that there were none.

There are now trout in New Zealand and South Africa, India, Tasmania, and Australia, none of which held trout until the English came with their craze for trout fishing. All of those trout were invasive species brought along as part of the English diaspora–I’m thinking that anyone of English heritage (or Scots or Irish) shouldn’t complain too loudly about immigration. Just follow the trout. And the pheasants. And you can add South Dakota to the list of places where neither trout nor pheasants were but now are.

Having myself inherited the English craze for fly fishing, the Black Hills are a delightful place to fish for trout. The water is too small for drift boats, so you have to work a bit, but for small water the trout seemed uniformly decent-sized–not as big as Wyoming, but close enough, and in memory growing ever larger. Rapid Creek is shallow riffles punctuated by deep holes, and the challenge is to find water deep enough to hold fish, and then cast from a place where the trout can’t see you.

But you need to see the trout. We would sneak up on the deeper, greener water, peer into the pool while David said there, there, look there . . . And then if I was lucky I would see a fish, and then another, and then another, no more than a darker space in the deeper water, holding in place while I watched until it would gently drift a few inches to one side or the other to feed.

Looking at the photos, I’m surprised again at how shallow the water was. In the deepest pools it might have been waste deep. It made the discovery of such good fish so startling. Honestly though, even without the excuse of a fly rod, it was fun just to walk into the water. There is something so childlike about it, like petting a dog, riding a bicycle, watching a cloud . . . In the movie, A River Runs Through It, in the last scene, the old man is on the river threading a fly onto the leader, and you know exactly what he is thinking–this is me, after all that history, I am still the child whose father believed in the Presbyterian God and fly fishing, and it’s not memory, at least not merely memory. While standing in the water that old man knows that at least somewhere inside he is still that child.

Because David knew the water so well fishing with him felt like cheating–he knew where the holes were already, and would lead us from place to place, often circling around the stream to approach as stealthily as possible. It’s another commonplace that if you can see the trout they can see you, too, and that seeing you will put them down. David picked our flies, of course–what do we know of trout flies?–but it was basically the same trico nymph formulation that we had used in Wyoming. Like Wyoming, we were told the bigger surface hatches of larger mayflies happened in May, not June, and that May was when we could expect to successfully fish dry flies. Now mind, I’m still not convinced that hatches exist, and that they’re not a ruse to dupe gullible Texans, but I would love to fish dry flies with David during a Black Hills mayfly hatch. I might even catch a fish.

We fished a full day the first day and a half day the second. The second day we considered fishing Spearfish Creek in Spearfish Canyon, but stuck to a different part of Rapid Creek because it was a long drive to Spearfish. We were fishing through the morning into the heart of the day both days, but on our full day we quit early because of the water temperature. It’s hard to catch fish once the water approaches 70°, and the lower oxygenation of warm water makes it hard for the trout to survive if they’re caught. This was June, and I had planned the trip for when I thought the water would still be cold. Maybe we’re just more conscious of water temperatures than we used to be, or maybe water keeps getting warmer earlier and earlier.

One of our favorite discoveries was the Driftless Region, the geological anomaly where Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin come together, and where for some reason the glaciers failed to flatten the landscape. The Driftless is on roughly the same longitude as the Black Hills, and a few hundred miles east. It’s surrounded by farmland, not mountains. Like the Black Hills, the trout streams are small, and both places involve walking and wading, not boats. The fish that we caught in the Driftless were smaller.

But both places, the Driftless and the Black Hills, have pretty, manageable water. They are similar sized regions open for exploration, and both have trout. I am not much of a trout fisherman, but trout are such great fish for a fly rod. While we fished in South Dakota, I kept comparing the Driftless and the Black Hills, and I finally decided that I liked fishing in South Dakota and the Driftless as much as any of the places I’ve fished.

I will say that while the scenery probably has the edge in the Black Hills, the cheese is better in Wisconsin.

  1. Diana Kennedy (1923-2022) was the leading authority writing in English on interior Mexican food, and wrote nine cookbooks which are as much anthropology as cookery. She famously despised Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex as foreign goop, but later writers properly consider them authentic borderland cuisines of greater Mexico. After his success with the Gulf of Mexico, President Trump will presumably redesignate Tex-Mex as Tex-American, and Ms. Kennedy will smile from heaven. ↩︎
  2. Writing this, I finally looked up the difference between buen día (which is singular, but that’s not the difference), and buenos días (which is plural, but that’s not the difference). “Buen día” is more formal and means “good day.” It can be used any time during the morning, afternoon, or evening. “Buenos días” literally means “good days,” but is used as “good morning.” It’s more common than buen día, but is only used in the morning. Buenos días for the morning, buenas tardes for the afternoon, and buenas noches for the evening and night. Buen día is for any occassion when the sun shines. ↩︎
  3. See the description of South Dakota. The US violated its 1868 treaty with the Sioux in 1874 by sending Custer to explore the Black Hills. After reports of gold leaked from the Custer expedition, the Black Hills were illegally flooded by prospectors with gold fever. The US then wrongfully took possession of the area in violation of its earlier treaty. See United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980). ↩︎

Posted on

Georgia

Scarlett O’Hara’s Bosom and Early Georgia History, in Order of Personal Significance

I figured that if we were going to Georgia I should re-read Gone with the Wind. I hadn’t read it since I was 12, and when I was 12 I liked it, or at least I liked having read it. All that Southern splendor was mighty fine, plus there was that movie poster featuring Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom. What Southern almost-adolescent boy could ignore the drama inherent in Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom? I had a copy of that poster on my wall, and I suspect it was years before I noticed that Clark Gable had a moustache.

My notion before our trip was to determine whether Gone with the Wind was anything more than a Lost Cause romance. After all, no book except the Bible has sold more American copies than Gone with the Wind. It won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, so somebody once thought it was important literature. The movie won the 1939 Oscar for best picture, and adjusted for inflation, it’s still the highest grossing movie ever.

I downloaded a free copy of the novel on Audible, but I couldn’t listen past the second chapter. What my 12-year old self admired, my 67-year old self found dreadful. Lost Cause propaganda? Who knows–I never got that far. These characters were all of them idiots. They were annoying and unlikeable and inane. Maybe Margaret Mitchell intended that they be annoying and unlikeable, but I don’t think they were supposed to be boring. I was unmoved by the set-up, despised the dialogue, and found Scarlett, cleavage or no, to be a ninny. I wanted to waste no more of my life with Mammy or the twins or Ashley or Melanie. I didn’t give a damn about Scarlett, or for that matter about Rhett.

So I can’t really tell you anything about Gone with the Wind, except I’d advise don’t bother. It had its moment, but that was when I was 12.

Still, that’s the best movie poster bosom ever. It’s Stereophonic.

I did read a good book about Georgia, Georgia, a Short History, by Christopher Meyers and David Williams, and there was some interesting stuff to learn.

Georgia was the youngest of the Thirteen Colonies, founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732 as a second chance for British debtors and a buffer against Spanish Florida. Settlers were from England’s poorest, and Oglethorpe prohibited hard liquor, slaves, and lawyers. Land was to be owned by the colony. Each immigrant’s tract was limited to 50 acres.

That bit of social engineering lasted roughly 20 years. There was no debt forgiveness, so not only were the English urban debtors–who had likely never farmed–expected to farm successfully on small tracts in difficult coastal soil, they were expected to repay their English debts from their unsuccessful farming. Many of the debtors skipped out to northern climes, leaving both Georgia and their debts. By the 1750s there was private ownership of large tracts–up to 500 acres–by slave owners. There were probably lawyers, too.

James Oglethorpe, glam rocker and failed reformer.

What was supposed to be an agrarian yeoman farmer utopia became a utopia for wealthy planters. Before the cotton gin, the planters–the large-tract slave-owning landowners–were confined to rice farms near the coast, but with cotton production Georgia became part of the Cotton Kingdom. The Trail of Tears and railroads opened upland Georgia to white settlement, and large landowners brought slaves and cotton to the upper Coastal Plain and the Piedmont to fill the void.

Georgia also achieved land fraud on a massive scale. After the Revolution, counties and the state sold land to new settlers and speculators, but they got into the habit of selling more land than there was actually dirt. The worst offender, Montgomery County, issued land warrants for 7,436,995 acres of land, which was 7,029,315 more acres of land than Montgomery County actually contained. By 1796, Georgia county officials had issued warrants for 29 million acres. Georgia then contained only 9 million acres.

The State Assembly was good at land sales, too, and in exchange for bribes (which in addition to money included nifty stuff like land, guns, and slaves) sold 50 million acres of Indian land for about a penny an acre–a ridiculous price for land that they had no right to sell. The sales were rescinded by the next Assembly, but were then found valid by the Supreme Court under the Contract Clause. The U.S. Congress ended up buying out the purchasers for $4.25 million. No Georgian should ever complain about federal buy-outs. Their’s was one of the first, and in inflation-adjusted dollars probably rivals anything that came later.

No state’s early American history was as governed by class hierarchy as Georgia’s, and how you see Georgia’s early history really does depend on where you stand. If you look at Georgia from the planters’ eyes, by the 1850s it was an economic dynamo powering a thriving economy. In 1860 Georgia’s per capita wealth was nearly double that of New York, which is pretty impressive, but on the other hand only six percent of white Georgians controlled about half the state’s wealth, which is pretty one-sided.

A lot of plain white folk saw Georgia differently from the planter class, particularly in the northern mountain portion of the state where there were few slaves, and in the southern Pine Barrens which couldn’t support big agriculture. In Georgia cities, slaves devalued free labor, and other than the rice and cotton planters, Georgia agriculture was largely small-parcel subsistence farming. In 1860, Georgia’s slaves were valued at about $400 million, about half the state’s wealth, but only about 37% of the white population owned any slaves, and planters were a sliver of that 37%.

Carrying Cotton to the Gin, Harper’s New Monthly, March, 1854.

And Georgia slaves like as not saw Georgia differently from their owners. When Georgians voted to secede and join the Confederacy, the measure passed by about 1000 votes, 42,744 to 41,717–but remember, these voters could only be white male property-owners. Slaves, who were 44% of the roughly one million Georgians, had no votes, and while one can never be certain, I’d bet good money that the slaves would have voted en masse to stay in the Union. Lincoln may not have planned to free the slaves, but apparently slaves throughout the South were convinced–along with the secessionists–that freedom was Lincoln’s plan.

Among plain white Georgians, the Civil War was increasingly seen as a rich man’s war fought by poor men, and throughout the war there were large numbers of deserters, draft dodgers, and even Union volunteers. In Georgia there were food riots, draft rebellions, and the formation of an active and vocal Peace Society. The cotton class may have seen the War as necessary and righteous, but to support the war effort they kept planting cotton instead of corn, hence the food riots. Wealthy planters were largely exempt from the draft and generally weren’t doing the actual fighting. Whatever else can be said about the South, the Confederacy was badly managed on the home front. By the end of the War, it’s estimated that nearly half of the Confederate army had deserted.

18,250 Georgian Confederates died in the Civil war, roughly a fifth of those who served. Georgia was also a battlefield from Chickamauga in 1863 in northwest Georgia to Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Georgia Geography

Pamela W. Gore, Geographic Regions of Georgia, from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

By area, Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, and 24th overall. It divides into five geographic regions. The Coastal Plain is in the south, and the southeastern border of the Coastal Plain is the Atlantic Ocean. The Piedmont is north of the Coastal Plain, above the fall line where rivers tend to rapids and the sedimentary rock of the Coastal Plain gives way to the harder crystalline rocks of the uplands. Generally the Piedmont soils are richer than the soils of the Coastal Plain, and Georgia’s southern Coastal Plain, the Wiregrass Region, is one of Georgia’s poorest regions. The exception for richer Coastal Plain soils is the rich black soil immediately below the Piedmont, the Black Belt that stretches from Georgia through Alabama to the Mississippi Delta. Along with the Delta became the Black Belt became the cotton-producing heartland for the South. The Black Belt was named first for the color of its soil, but the identification took on a new meaning because of the concentration of slaves. Big cotton thrived on black soil and slavery.

Abbasi786786, Majority Black Counties Based on the 2020 Census, from Wikipedia.

In Georgia’s far north, the three remaining regions seem to this outsider divided by terrain but otherwise lumped together, and it’s in North Georgia where Appalachia begins. The Appalachian trail starts northward in North Georgia, from Springer Mountain, elevation 3,780 feet, and James Dickey set Deliverance on a made-up river in North Georgia. We will trout fish in North Georgia, somewhat close to Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest mountain at 4,784 feet. I’ll take a guitar in case we run into any banjo players, but I’ll be damned if I do any canoeing.

Georgia is water rich. It has 14 major river basins, with more than 44,000 miles of perennial rivers. Its rivers tend to have great names: the Suwanee, the Ocmulgee, the Coosa, the Llappoosa, the Chattahoochee . . . Plus Georgia has about 100 miles of Atlantic coastline. The combination of elevation, coast, and rivers makes Georgia rich fishing. In the north there are native Appalachian brook trout and imported brown and rainbow trout. There are imported stripers in lakes, and redfish along the coast. There are ten species of black bass, including great river bass like the redeye, and bass unique to Georgia like Bartram’s.

We’re going trout fishing instead of bass fishing because we’re going to Atlanta for a wedding, and our friend Shelley (who will also be at the wedding) likes to fish for trout. Still, there’s always a chance of catching a bass in those northern Georgia rivers. I hope I catch a bass. Well, come to think of it, I hope I catch anything at all.

Population

At 21,029,227, Georgia is the 8th largest state by population, bracketed by Ohio at number 7 and North Carolina at number 9. It is one of the fastest growing states since World War II, and us Houstonians see Atlanta as our Southern mirror. Anglos are 50.4% of the Georgia population, African Americans 33.1%, and Hispanics 10.5%. Everybody else is a smidgeon. Most of the population growth is in Georgia’s Piedmont, which is the industrial heart of the state.

Other than the whole slavery thing, the birth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow segregation, Georgia’s civil rights history had some positives. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgians were leaders in the Civil Rights movement throughout the South. Savannah desegregated early, but despite active movements Albany and Atlanta were slow. In 1971, then-governor Jimmy Carter declared a new era of Civil Rights in Georgia, but particularly in the rural areas of the state Jimmy probably jumped the gun.

Valdosta, Georgia Klan Rally, 1922, Georgia State Archives.

Politics

Is any state’s recent presidential politics more interesting than Georgia’s? I don’t pretend to understand what happened in 2020, but I have no doubt that there was no theft of the Georgia election. I’ve officiated over local elections, and massive voter fraud would not be easy. Oh sure, some lone soul might vote twice, or not be registered, but everything in American elections makes massive fraud almost impossible. It certainly couldn’t be accomplished by the efforts of a handful of people. It would take a whole dance card of conspiracy, and people, being what they are, would never be able to hide it. They can’t keep their mouth shut. If there had been massive fraud in Georgia, somebody involved would have bragged about their part over beers, at Thanksgiving dinner, or in their tell-all best seller. Instead as evidence of election interference we have a phone recording of a sitting President urging a governor to manufacture votes.

When you look at how the actual vote went, Georgia’s voting patterns are just like the rest of the country. Urban areas voted Democratic, and outside of the Black Belt, the rural countryside voted Republican. Trump substantially increased his vote totals from 2016, 2,089,104 votes in 2016 to 2,461,854 in 2020, but the Democrats did even better, 1,877,963 to 2,473,633. Democrats mostly carried majorities in the urban areas (as they had in 2016), but more total voters in rural areas also voted Democratic. F’rinstance, Atlanta’s urban Fulton County turned out substantially more Democratic voters in 2020 than in 2016 (529,931 to 334,053), but that trend was true in every Georgia County, even in counties where Trump otherwise had a majority. In the numerous rural counties Donald Trump carried, his margins shrank. Throughout the state voters who would not turn out in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton turned out in 2020 to vote for Joe Biden, or maybe to vote against Donald Trump.

From Wikipedia, AdamG2016, Georgia Presidential Election Results 2020.

Where We’ll Fish

Our plan doesn’t involve voting. We’ll fly into Atlanta and do wedding things for three days, then drive north with our friends the Marmons to Ellijay to fish a half day for trout. We’re taking waders and boots and 5-weights. The next day the Marmons head back to Houston, and Kris and I will head south out of Georgia’s Valley and Ridge, through the Piedmont, down to Savannah on the Coastal Plain to fish in saltwater for redfish. I may not catch any fish, but I will see a lot of Georgia. We fly back to Houston from Savannah.

Posted on

Indiana Packing List

I liked Indiana. I liked the friendliness of the people and gentleness of the landscape. I guess in winter it’s probably miserable, but I always wanted to live in a place where I could wear more sweaters. Maybe I’m a Midwesterner at heart.

Walking on a trail through Turkey Run State Park, there were three young African American girls, maybe 16, sitting together on a bench by the river. One of them announced to us and her friends that we were beautiful–I guess she figured that old people walking about was a beautiful thing. I asked her if she always sat by the river and charmed passersby? And I figure that was about right, because she was completely charming. She took our picture, and she did a good job, both at charming and photography.

I liked Indiana.

Gear

We took a rod each, 7 weights, with floating lines and 7 1/2′ 10-pound leaders. The rods would have been too heavy for trout anywhere but Alaska, and were heavy for the smallmouth bass we caught, but they worked, they were fine. Everything in Indiana was fine except the donuts.

We didn’t take waders or boots. We waded in shorts and water shoes.

We fished small poppers and streamers, streamers and poppers. Then we fished more poppers and streamers.

The Turkey Run Inn and Cabins

We decided to fish Sugar Creek because it’s short, small, has a good reputation for smallmouth, and runs through two nearly-adjacent state parks, Shades and Turkey Run. We figured we’d have plenty of river access, and there was the bonus that Turkey Run Inn and Cabins is located at Turkey Run State Park.

With all those running turkeys, I’d have been disappointed if we hadn’t seen some wild turkeys. We did.

Turkey Run is about 70 miles west of Indianapolis, and in the earliest days of cars apparently 70 miles was about as far as you could expect to travel in one day. The Inn was built for early adventuring motorists as an out, overnight and then home. The Indianapolis 500 first ran in 1916, and one of its founders, Arthur Newby, was instrumental in the purchase of the park that same year. Of the $40,000 price tag, The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Association gave $5,000. Newby personally gave another $5,000.

The Inn opened in 1919, and it’s very popular with Hoosiers. The Inn and park together feel like a resort. Outside your bedroom door you have this lovely bit of land in which to go a’wandering, and it’s all very pretty. It’s not as expensive as a resort, and maybe the rooms aren’t quite as big nor the restaurant quite as ambitious, but during the busy times of the year it’s probably harder to get a reservation.

It’s like a lot of Indiana. It’s nice.

Restaurants

We ate at some good places in Indiana. On our first day, on the way from the Indianapolis airport to Turkey Run, we took a side trip to Shapiro’s Deli, founded 1905. It’s classic Jewish deli food, with the addition of rhubarb pie. I’ve decided everything is better with rhubarb pie.

We should have split a reuben. Ordering two was hubris.

The first night at Turkey Creek Inn we ate at the Inn restaurant, The Narrows, and it was fine. The second night we ate at Blue Cactus Tacos and Tequila Bar in Crawfordsville, Indiana, population 16,385. It was in a strip mall. I had the tacos huitlacoche, made with huitlacoche corn fungus and queso fresco on homemade tortillas. I can’t remember ever having a bad taco, but I’ve probably had some uninteresting tacos. These tacos were interesting.

I’d go back to try the chorizo and potato tacos. I’d go back to try the squash blossom tacos and even the cactus tacos. I don’t care that Lyle Lovett said never eat Mexican food north of Dallas (and in my mind the notion that Dallas might have decent Mexican food is really stretching it), but in a small Indiana country town those were some interesting tacos. The margaritas were good too.

Our last night we stayed near the airport in Indianapolis and had dinner with a college friend, Andy, and his wife Lorraine. Andy and I were friends at the University of Texas 40+ years ago, dang close to 50, and I ate my first bagel at one of Andy’s cousin’s home in Memphis. I hadn’t seen him since college.

The bagels were imported from New York, frozen, and I’m getting all nostalgic remembering how once upon a time bagels were exotic anywhere south or west of New York City.

Andy and Lorraine have lived in Indianapolis for a while . . . 30 years maybe? And he said two things that stuck, that he’d lost his Texas accent, and that he’s now from Indianapolis. It was clearly their home, with all the good things that word can hold. He and Lorraine were proud of their city, and it was such good fortune to see Indianapolis through them.

We ate at Bluebeard, in Indianapolis’s little slice of Bohemia. Thank goodness we had to catch a fish in Indiana, because otherwise I’d have missed seeing Andy. And I would have missed eating huitlacoche tacos in a strip mall in Crawfordsville.

Donuts

Disappointing. I can’t recommend Indiana for its donuts. Maybe we never got to the right place.

Columbus, Indiana

We had set aside a second day to fish, but since the water was low and we’d caught fish already we diverted to Columbus, Indiana, population 50,474, home of Cummins Inc. Cummins makes lots and lots and lots of diesel engines.

It’s hard to explain Columbus, Indiana, except that it might have been nothing but another company town. It’s not. Back in the 40s, the future Cummins CEO, J. Irwin Miller, proposed a modern building for his family church, First Christian Church, and Eliel Saarinen was invited to be the architect. Saarinen was reportedly reluctant, but Miller’s mother chaired the building committee, and she wrote to Saarinen that she didn’t want a church that paraded its cost, she wanted a church where the poorest woman in Columbus would feel welcome. Saarinen took the bait. After that first church Columbus went nuts for modern architecture.

Under Miller, the Cummins Foundation paid for the architectural design of public buildings. The town library was designed by I.M. Pei (though not with money from the Cummins Foundation). Outside it’s certainly a welcoming space–it’s even got its own Henry Moore statue–but inside it’s one of the most appealing, user-friendly libraries imaginable. And the list just goes on and on. First Baptist Church was designed by Harry Weese. Mabel McDowell School was designed by John Carl Warnecke. Fire Station no. 4 was designed by Robert Venturi.

There are buildings by Kevin Roche, Cesar Pelli, Myron Goldsmith, and Richard Meir. There are six buildings in Columbus designated as National Historic Landmarks. There must be 40 buildings in Columbus that are worth seeing. I think that even the local Shell gas stations were all designed by Pritzker Prize winners. Listing Columbus’s architects is a little like saying that the statue of the soldier on the courthouse lawn was sculpted by Michelangelo, or maybe Henry Moore.

Here’s a roundup of Columbus’s fire stations.

Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church must be one of the most striking buildings in the world. Not Columbus. Not Indiana. Not the Midwest. The todo del mundo, the whole pie, the world. And it may not even be the best building in Columbus, Indiana. The town takes your breath.

All this architectural splendor might have been a meaningless gimmick, but it binds the city together. You look at those public spaces and think of the hundreds of ways, good or indifferent, that a foundation could have spent its money, that a community could have invested its treasure, and you know that this money and this effort by this town was well spent. Ok, I reckon some of those roofs may leak, and the maintenance costs are probably higher than anybody expected, but you know that Cummins loves its town, and that the residents are proud of their town. I could have spent days in Columbus.

I’d go to that church. I’d use that library.

J. Irwin Miller was also instrumental in founding the National Council of Churches, and was its president from 1960-63. He led its push for passage of the Civil Rights Act. I miss Rockefeller Republicans.

Books

Kurt Vonnegut is from Indianapolis. So it goes.

Playlist

Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 are from Indiana. I remember hearing the Jackson 5’s version of “Rockin’ Robin” as a child and thinking how peculiar, and that’s pretty much my verdict on Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5. I’m not a fan, and my favorite song by Jackson was perhaps “Ben” (1972), possibly because it so embraced the peculiar. I forgot to put it on the play list.

John Mellencamp, David Lee Roth of Van Halen, and John Hiatt are all from Indiana. For our honeymoon (1984) we drove from Houston to New Mexico with cassette tapes of “Swordfishtrombones” by Tom Waits and “Riding with the King” by John Hiatt, both 1983. We must have listened to those two tapes a hundred times. I still love them.

I don’t know how they got our names
But yesterday this letter came
Mr. and Mrs. Permanent Dweller, your lucky number is

You may already be a winner 

John Hyatt, You May Already be a Winner, 1983.

I highly advise a road trip with “Swordfishtrombones” and “Riding with the King“. Based solely on the one experience I also highly recommend honeymoons.

Wes Montgomery, the great jazz guitarist, was from Indiana, and you can’t be any sort of guitarist without marveling at Wes Montgomery. Freddie Hubbard was from Indiana, and I kept looking forward to his version of “Misty” coming up again on the playlist.

Unknown photographer, Cole Porter and Betty Shevlin Smith, c. 1920. Wikimedia Commons.

Cole Porter was from Indiana, and there were thousands of Cole Porter covers to choose from. When I was a senior in high school, our senior play was Anything Goes, and I sang “Let’s Misbehave” in a duet with Julie Johnson. Me? I was terrible, but Julie was great, so I don’t remember it with too much queasiness. It left a soft spot for Cole Porter.

In addition to all that good stuff, Indiana University at Bloomington is our best public university music school. It’s most famous graduate is probably Joshua Bell, so of course he was on the playlist.

Movies

lndiana is the setting of two of my favorite sports movies, Breaking Away (1979) and Hoosiers (1986). Neither is about baseball. Neither is about fly fishing. Everybody I guess has seen Hoosiers, but having now been to Indiana it’s hard to see how it could have been set anywhere else. I guess that name, Hoosiers, is kind of a giveaway.

Breaking Away doesn’t seem much remembered anymore, but it’s such a fine movie. It so resonates to drive Indiana backroads and highways while channelling the movie’s bike rides–I also once owned a Masi Volumetrica with a Campi Record C groupo, and rode that bike thousands of miles all the while imagining my place on the Tour. I included Schubert’s Italian Symphony in the playlist just to get that rush of Indiana bike-riding exhilaration that Breaking Away evokes. If I were going to come up with a 50-state roadtrip playlist, the first movement of the Italian Symphony might be my entry for Indiana. Ok, that or “Riding with the King.” Ok, those or “Let’s Misbehave.”

Guitar

I played the guitar a lot in Indiana. After dinner there wasn’t much to do at the Turkey Run Inn and Cabins but sit outside on the lawn, drink beer, admire people’s dogs, and play the guitar. But then really, who needs better? I was working on the second Alemande movement of the first Bach Cello Suite. I can play it ok, but I can never remember it. Maybe my memory will get better as I age. I already know I can’t get more beautiful.