More houses, stores, streets. Banks. A newspaper. A fort to protect the good people of Missoula from the Indians who have not yet been swept away. In August 1877, more than seven hundred Nez Perce cross the mountains from Idaho with their horses and livestock and dogs, retreating from the U.S. Army, looking for a place where they will be left alone, a place that no longer exists.
They camp on a riverbank, are awakened by soldiers shooting into their tipis. The soldiers try to burn the tipis, have trouble getting the fires going, keep trying. Though most of the band scatters, some children have been hidden inside, under blankets, and are burned alive. The warriors regroup, attack. The soldiers retreat. In the night, the band moves on, toward what will be Yellowstone. They will try to reach Canada, Sitting Bull’s camp there, but most won’t make it. Most are sent to Fort Leavenworth.
In 1883, the bleeding end of the Northern Pacific Railroad arrives in Missoula from the west, has to be pushed and pulled sixty more miles to meet tracks en route from the Great Lakes, not the first transcontinental line but still pretty good, still pretty epic, still pretty helpful as far as settling the wilderness. Ulysses S. Grant binds the continent to itself with a golden spike.
More men arrive in Missoula, rough men, lonely men, thirsty men. Want a drink, boys? Want a girl? Try West Front Street, follow the red light. Madam Mary Gleim, fat and fearsome, owns half the place, maybe more. She’ll get you a girl from Chicago, a girl from China, a girl from France （ask for French Emma）。 She can get you Chinamen, too, if it’s workers you need. If your workers want opium, she’ll get that.
Missoula gets a telephone exchange and electricity, becomes a new official city in a new official state （Montana, b. 1889）。 A farmer in his field scratches his head over the lonely boulder that seems to have fallen from the sky.
A train crosses the plains. Wallace Graves, hungry for mountains he’s never seen, is heading west from New York. He gets off in Butte, tries Butte for a while, a bronco of a town, a Babel town, where men from far-flung places go into the copper mines together, come out, take their wages to the saloon or to the girls of Venus Alley. Fights in the streets every day, every night: miner versus miner, drunk versus drunk, Irish versus Italian versus Bohunk versus Swede, union men versus scabs.
Wallace paints the jumbled structures of the mines, the gray figures walking with their tin pails, the headframe and machine buildings of the Neversweat mine and its seven slender smokestacks like cigarillos stuck in the ground. But it is not quite right for Wallace, this city. He boards a westbound train, disembarks in Missoula, stays.
In 1911, Wallace goes with most everyone in town to a field near the fort to watch a pilot named Eugene Ely swoop up out of the bowl of mountains in his Curtiss biplane, breaching the ghostly surface of the forgotten ancient lake. Ely buzzes the crowd, dips his wings. A group of Cree have pitched their tipis nearby. They sit on horseback, watching the machine.
“What a world,” Wallace Graves remarks to his lady friend, holding his hat to his head as he looks up.
A train crosses the plains. Addison Graves looks through the portraits of his children once again, holding them carefully by the corners so as not to smudge.
Wallace goes out to fetch his brother for breakfast and finds the cottage empty, nothing changed inside except the crates pried open. He finds his old paintings, sees they are not as good as he remembered. He chastises his younger self for his florid brushwork, his trite composition. The children are in the main house, back from the dawn ride he doesn’t know they’d taken because he does not trouble himself with how they spend their time. They are washed and combed （combed! of their own doing!） and sitting upright at Berit’s breakfast table, waiting to meet their father.
“He’s gone,” Wallace says without preamble, coming inside. “No note or anything.”
Berit, at the stove, says, “What do you mean he is gone? Gone where?”
“Just gone.”
“And his things? They are gone?”
“He didn’t have any things.” Wallace remembers the cardboard portfolio. Addison had taken that, at least.
Jamie bolts from the table, pounds up the stairs.
“Is he coming back?” Marian asks, rigid with seriousness.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe he went for a walk.”
“To be honest I think probably not. Are you upset?”
She considers. “I thought he’d want to meet us. But it would have been worse if he’d met us and then left.”
“I don’t know about worse.”