Becoming | Forgotten Soldiers

Why doesn’t anyone remember the first rangers? We trace a Buffalo Soldiers expedition across the park and ask how history becomes preserved.

Yosemite’s A Buffalo Soldier Speaks Podcast: https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/historyculture/buffspodcast16-30.htm

Learn about African Americans in the National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/africanamericanheritage/index.htm

See more show notes on our website: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/photosmultimedia/headwaters-podcast.htm

Why doesn’t anyone remember the first rangers? We trace a Buffalo Soldiers expedition across the park and ask how history becomes preserved.

Yosemite’s A Buffalo Soldier Speaks Podcast: https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/historyculture/buffspodcast16-30.htm

Learn about African Americans in the National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/africanamericanheritage/index.htm

See more show notes on our website: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/photosmultimedia/headwaters-podcast.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Shelton Johnson: [slowly, poetically, with a slight southern accent] My name is Elizy Bowman, Sergeant Troop K, Ninth Cavalry. Today, the sun come up and it come up strong, burning through the treetops, [wind whooshes in the background throughout] and it lit up the world around me. And I saw the trail ahead of me, and I'm riding like we always do. And there was just the wind. Just the sound of the wind in the sky, in the sound of my horse and me [horse hoofbeats on the ground] breathing as we moved along the trail. And I started thinking that this is what freedom must feel like. Never felt freedom when I was a sharecropper growing up in South Carolina. [birds singing] Never knew about freedom when my mother and my daddy had been enslaved. Freedom was this wind. Freedom was this rain. Freedom was being pushed up into the sky by these mountains beneath my feet and the rain coming down. That was freedom. I couldn't find it in South Carolina. I couldn't find it where I enlisted in Nebraska. But now I got it. And I don't know if I could ever let it go. How do you let go of freedom when you hold it for the first time?

[Headwaters season 3 theme begins playing; starting with mandolin]

Daniel Lombardi: Welcome to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else.

[theme continues; a drumbeat, a flute line, and other instruments come in, before the music finishes]

Daniel: We're calling this season "Becoming." It's not a complete history, but a series of stories about how Glacier National Park became what it is today. [slow drumbeat playing as Daniel speaks] Landscape and history are inseparable. No history can be understood apart from the place in which it happens. And like landscapes, histories can erode, stories can disintegrate or be buried under the sediment of those that follow. This episode is about a story that has been poorly preserved and deeply buried, why that happened and why it matters. It is the story of the first Black Park Rangers and how so much of their history has been overlaid by the grains of a thousand others.

[beat finishes]

Daniel: Peri. This episode is about the Buffalo Soldiers here in Glacier.

Peri Sasnett Yes.

Daniel: Get us started.

Peri: So when I think of the Buffalo Soldiers, I think of our park service uniforms. Mm. You guys all have one, right.

Daniel: In my closet.

Michael Faist Of course, it's pretty iconic—not very breathable, but, [Peri laughs] you know, the gray shirt, green pants and sweater, and then the big flat hat.

Peri: Well, did you know that those are based on the hats worn by the Buffalo Soldiers?

Daniel: No! And just to spell that out. Buffalo Soldiers were regiments of African-American soldiers in the Army.

Peri: Right. And they were essentially the first park rangers in the years before the Park Service was formed. And we still wear their hats.

Michael: Huh, I didn't know that.

Daniel: So give us the background. How did these black regiments of Army soldiers come about?

Peri: Well, basically, segregation. After the Civil War, the army created regiments for black soldiers to serve in, and they had to be separate from the ones that white soldiers served in.

Daniel: But still, I suppose they were led by white officers, right?

Peri: Yeah. Although there is a famous exception, Charles B Young. He was a West Point grad who was acting superintendent of Sequoia National Park in 1903. And he's the first black superintendent of a park.

Daniel: Hmm. So they're—they're soldiers in the army, but they're working in the national parks because the National Park Service, it doesn't exist yet.

Peri: Right. And so there are national parks, you know, Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite,

All, together: Glacier.

Peri: But there are no park rangers yet. And that doesn't happen until 1916 when the NPS is formed.

Michael: So like, what were they doing in parks at the time?

Peri: Well, they were doing a lot of similar things to what park rangers do now. They built roads and trails. They did firefighting work. They kept out vandals and poachers, all that kind of stuff.

Daniel: But outside of those park ranger duties, I'm sure they had other missions, right?

Peri: Right. But back in those early days, this is post-Civil War. The racial climate back East isn't great. So for the most part, they were sent on assignments out west.

Michael: Okay. So the thought was like less people, less prejudice, I guess.

Peri: Right. Yeah, for the most part. But that doesn't mean it wasn't complicated. And so in addition to being proto-park rangers, a lot of their assignments were in the Indian Wars in the late 1800s. So they're fighting against indigenous people who are resisting being confined to reservations.

Michael: Hmm. So, I mean, there's just a lot more to this story than meets the eye.

Peri: Right. They also did peacetime and exploratory missions, too, including spending some time here in Glacier.

Michael: Really?

Peri: Yeah, they were here in 1910 fighting fires during the Big Burn. [drumbeat begins] And they were also part of a couple early expeditions before this was even a park, including the Ahern expedition.

[drumbeat ends]

Peri: One of the best surviving accounts of this expedition is from GE Culver, the geologists they brought along who starts his report by describing the group.

Culver Report: [a voice actor reads these excerpts in a formal, deep, gravelly voice] The party consisted of two mountaineers, two prospectors, two Indian guides, a squad of soldiers, black as Ebony and the writer. All were mounted and well-armed. 30 days rations were carried.

Daniel So, Culver. This guy is your—your main source for this story. He was the team's scientist, and he kept a record of the trip that you're looking at.

Peri: Yeah, he recorded kind of the broad strokes of the adventure, but it's like 2 pages of adventure and 15 pages of geology. But through his writing and his sketches of the mountains, you can start to reconstruct where they went and why. I had an actor read some excerpts from the report.

Culver Report: The object of the expedition was to find, if possible, a pass over the main range, farther north than any then known, to map the course of the streams and the principal Indian trails.

Peri: So roughly they went up the east side trying to find a past over the mountains. They tried Many Glacier with no luck, and then kept trying further north.

Daniel: I'm not surprised they had trouble finding a pass in the mountains here. They're glacially carved, they're famously steep.

Peri: Yeah. So this expedition of about 15 people travels several hundred miles across the park and in a big loop around northwest Montana over 57 days.

Daniel: Yeah, I don't think I've ever backpacked more than maybe a couple of nights at a time.

Peri: Yeah, me neither. So while it would have been quite an adventure to retrace their whole journey, I decided to just follow their footsteps where they crossed the continental divide—probably the most challenging day of their trip. And today it's called Ahern Pass.

[footsteps; yellow-rumped warblers and swainson’s thrushes singing]

Peri: [in the field, out of breath] It takes a solid day of hiking to get to Ahern pass, if not a couple days. And I'm heading out with Michael and Gaby to see it for myself. [birds continue to sing] If you want to figure out what you don't know, go hiking without any cell service. As soon as you can't look something up, you realize how little you understand. And as I hike, I'm realizing how little I know about the soldiers themselves. Why aren't there any firsthand accounts from them? What did they think of this place?

[bird sounds and footsteps fade out]

Shelton Johnson: My name is Shelton Johnson, and I currently work as the community engagement specialist for Yosemite National Park.

Peri: Shelton is one of the most renowned and respected rangers in the Park Service. He appeared in Ken Burns's National Parks documentary, and he's one of the foremost experts on this history. He's studied, portrayed and written about Buffalo Soldiers for decades, including the first person narrative that began this story, which was a clip from his podcast series, A Buffalo Soldier Speaks.

Peri: [to Shelton] And so based on your research, can you can you speculate like what their experience was like? Like, what did they think of the landscape? What did they—

Shelton: No I think that they felt what most people feel, it's a universal sentiment, if you will, to be impressed by a landscape that is literally overwhelming. That happened in Yosemite, it happened in Yellowstone, it certainly would have happened in Glacier National Park, because the landscape itself sparks that sense of wonder. And I think that's a human trait that is universal.

[wind whooshing]

Culver Report: The morning when we looked out of our tents, the fog was slowly drifting away and glimpses of the lofty peaks could be had through rifts in the fog. The effect was quite striking.

Peri: This was one of the earliest mapping expeditions of the region, long before the park existed. They climbed peaks, made camp and spent weeks in this rugged mountain ecosystem. It's the sort of trip that people take today to get away from it all, to escape everyday life.

Shelton: The difference would be that they lived and operated in a virulently racist time period. When you're part of an expedition, there's a certain level of interdependence and respect that has to be there in order for it to function properly, for—in order for everyone to benefit from that association.

Peri: If you've ever been camping or backpacking with a group, you can understand this sort of teamwork. [fire crackling in the background] You figure out who carries what, who sets up the tent, who cooks the food.

Culver Report: [fire crackling continues; sounds of fat sizzling in a pan] A few ducks, grouse and ptarmigan paid our cookhouse a visit, as did numerous fine trout of large game. We secured one big horn and six mountain goats. The young of the latter are very fine eating -- the old bucks taste of musk.

[subtle, pensive music begins to play]

Shelton: So and as you get to know people, you see beyond to a great degree, ethnicity, you see beyond gender. But be that as it may, they were still, quote unquote, colored soldiers of that time.

Peri: America's prejudices followed them everywhere, even into the wilderness.

Shelton: If you did something that was done very well, you did that in spite of your race. If you failed at a task, you failed at that task because of your race. But race was always part of that dynamic. You were viewed fully through the lens of race and through the lens of class. And there was no—really, there wasn't an escape from it. At any point.

Peri: At one point, the group reached a dead end, a high-walled mountain basin where they met a group of Stoney Indians, also called the Nakoda People. Ahern loaned their chief his rifle and the chief gave them directions. [music ends] And this wasn't the first time they'd encountered Indigenous people on the expedition. By one account they shared a third of their rations along the way with Blackfeet people. But elsewhere, regiments of Buffalo Soldiers had been fighting wars against tribal nations, most famously in the Southwest, fighting the Apache.

Peri: [to Shelton] I have often wondered what the Buffalo Soldiers thought of interacting with the Indigenous people. Would they have felt like a solidarity with another oppressed people?

[same spare, pensive music from before begins again]

Shelton: When you read a lot of the colored newspapers of that time period, there was certainly a sentiment that why should we aid and abet the theft of a land from another group of people who are not that dissimilar from ourselves? Dissimilar certainly in terms of culture, but in terms of the racial attitudes of the time, they were all cast into the same box. But at the same time, there were African-Americans who felt that by enlisting in the United States Army and potentially sacrificing their life, it was almost like we have done this for you, for this nation. And so it was an investment, an investment in the future by—by potentially sacrificing yourself for a nation that did not recognize the fullness of your humanity, perhaps the fullness of that humanity would be recognized for your children.

[music ends]

Peri: While this expedition was a peaceful one, it was still dangerous. Following the advice of the Stoney Indians, the party set out to climb the rocky mountain pass ahead of them: Ahern Pass. Here's Lieutenant Ahern's report from that day.

Ahern's Report: [out of breath, sounds weary; horse footsteps and the sounds of men talking in the background; wind whooshing] August 22nd. As I led the pack train out this morning, I felt extremely anxious, as there were several places on the trail where a misstep meant certain death. At one place, we climbed a narrow and very steep rock, 15 feet high, in which we had to cut steps. We led our most troublesome animals over this. My feelings were indescribable when I started up this rock, not knowing what the horse would do. The ledge was about 18 inches wide. On the lower side was a fall of 1900 feet.

Peri: I can only imagine riding a horse through this kind of terrain. But Shelton doesn't have to. He's done reenactments of Buffalo Soldier patrols in Yosemite, on horseback, in full uniform with saddles and gear of the period.

Peri: [to Shelton] Why did you choose to-- to wear the uniform, to ride on horseback? Why was that important to you? And what did you learn from it?

Shelton: I chose that pathway because I wanted to not just see the history from the outside looking in the way that you look through a window at a world that's that there's a partition between you and that world. I wanted to put myself into the history, and the best way to do that would be to do what they did, and to wear the uniform that they wore, to ride a saddle that they might have ridden. And when you're on a horse and you look straight down, all you see is the horse. The horse is blocking the view of the ground beneath your feet. And when you're 12 feet above the ground and you look over, you just see an abyss, if you're going on the trail along a canyon wall. You can talk about it, but it's better if you live it. And if you live it, then you really feel it. And if you feel it, then that's you. You've become the past that you're interpreting. And that's what I wanted. That's why I did that. And it did deepen my—my experience and deepened my perception of this entire history.

[music begins to play, starting with strings plucking]

Peri: To deepen my experience and perception of this history, I have to live it. I wanted to go to Ahern Pass.

[a drumbeat layers over it, then an excerpt from an old scratchy interview with the words “the Indians called us Buffalo boys.” Music ends]

[footsteps, white-crowned sparrow singing]

Peri: [in the field, out of breath] Hello.

Michael: Hi. Where are we?

Peri: [in the field, out of breath] We're almost at Ahern Pass. Very class. But not quite.

Michael: Well, how are you feeling right now?

Peri: [in the field, out of breath] Tired. Hot. Bit out of breath. [birds singing] Pretty excited about the view.

Peri: It's been a long hike, but since I'm being recorded, I'm trying to act like I'm not too out of breath.

Michael: Look around. What do you see?

[wind in the background]

Peri: [in the field] I see a snow field, this flat, grassy pass... [gasps] Sheep! [laughing] There's like, oh my God there's like a dozen of them! Are those little baby sheeps? [gasps] I love them.

Peri: We finally made it to Ahern Pass. The mountains on either side are towering and impenetrable, but the pass itself is a low point between them. A small meadow full of wildflowers and tiny trees with a view down to Helen Lake and the plains beyond. There's even a trail up here now on the west side, but that's not the side the Buffalo Soldiers came up.

Michael: How steep do you think it is down to Helen?

Peri: [in the field] I don't know. Let's take a peek over the edge if we can…not fall off of it.

[white-crowned sparrow sings; rocks start to clatter underfoot

Peri: Their route? Basically a cliff.

[rocks clattering; loud wind noise rumbles in the background]

Peri: [in the field] This is very steep. Aaaaah! Michael! Don't get so close to the edge.

Gaby Eseverri: Oh, my God. Oh!

Peri: I know!

Gaby: No way. [laughing]

[raven caws, wind continues blowing]

Peri: I— [laughing] I'm flabbergasted at trying to take up here. This is absurd.

Gaby: That's a lot steeper than I expected.

[swelling string music begins]

Peri: [in the field] Yes. I thought there would be these sort of grassy green slopes with beargrass, and that can be tough to traverse. And there was maybe one rock ledge that they had to climb over or something, and that's what they cut steps into. But this is just a vertical cliff.

[a beat layers into the music]

Michael: It's major bighorn habitat.

Peri: Glaciers carved this valley, leaving behind a steep rock wall below the pass. It's perfect for cliff dwelling bighorn sheep, but a terrifying place to take a horse. The slope rises sharply from the lake, turning into a network of ledges covered in crumbling rock that clatters loose at the slightest nudge. Ahern Glacier looms to the north, and the landscape feels alive—the geology and active force.

Peri: [in the field] We're looking down at Helen Lake, and I see Elizabeth Lake in the distance and—

Ahern's Report: Ahern Pass is 2000 feet above the lake at its foot and the summit wall on either side of the pass was estimated to be at least 1500 feet more. The entire force had worked two days in making a trail from the foot of the tall a slope to the summit of the pass. The ascent is very steep and was made with difficulty.

Peri: [in the field, with wind in the background] I did not imagine it would look like this.

[calmer, more pensive music begins to play]

Gaby: Well knowing that they had horses and stuff, I definitely imagined it to be a bit more gradual. Yeah.

Peri: [in the field] Like if I looked at this like could I get down this or up this, I'd be like, “um, I don't know if I really want to do that. I would definitely need a helmet.”

Gaby: I don't know that this is the most hopeful way to get across.

Peri: [in the field] No, I'd be like, maybe let's try Canada instead. [both laughing] How about Logan Pass? [more reflectively] It definitely gives me a newfound respect for what they were doing here and their skill to navigate a place like this.

[foosteps; white-crowned sparrows singing]

Peri: [in the field] Because they still had hundreds of miles of journeying left in this expedition. But I think this was probably the toughest point.

Gaby: It makes me feel like really reflective because this was... 1890? 1890.

[birds twittering]

Peri: [in the field] Yeah. 20 years before the park was even established. So in a way, their presence probably hastened or contributed to the eventual formation of the park. But yeah, it was 132 years ago. And so, I mean, it's pretty cool to know that they walked right through this spot.

[wind whooshing; raven caws]

Peri: Visiting Ahern Pass was the first time I felt close to this story that so far I've only read about. Retracing their steps feels like another way of reaching out, in the same way that Shelton has tried to understand the Buffalo Soldiers by writing and performing from their perspective.

[wind whooshing; pensive music begins to play]

Shelton: [reading as Elizy Bowman; his Buffalo Soldier character from the opening of the episode] But around here I noticed these rocks got a tendency to remember everything that's ever happened to them. This place got a tendency to remember everything that has ever happened to it... [music fades out]

Peri: [in the field] It's easy to think of the backcountry here as a place where, you know, you go to get away from people. But like—I don't know, it's been really cool to think about all the people that have been here before me and all the stories that this landscape contains.

Shelton: [reading as Elizy Bowman; music resumes and swells] And we call that an echo. We call that something over your shoulder that makes you pull back and look quick to see if you can catch it. But nothing that ever comes through this place is ever forgotten. And you ain't got to lie down in the bedroll for too many nights before you realize that it's all being remembered and it's all being held on.... [music ends]

Peri: In a way it feels... less lonely to be out here, when you think of all the other people who've—who've come here before me.

[wind whooshes; raven caws]

Shelton: [reading as Elizy Bowman; music resumes] So I'm wondering this. Will this place remember me? Will it remember my shadow cast on the earth? Will it remember the sound of my horse as it moved through that canyon? Will that be remembered?

[music ends as we hear the sounds of winds and ravens]

Peri: Every place has a history, and history has a place too. But most people have never been to Ahern Pass, and most people don't know this story. If history can be eroded, some rocks are harder than others, more resistant to wearing away. Some layers of history become bedrock—common knowledge that we all share. Or they crystallize into something easily found, like when a place is named for a person: like George Patrick Ahern, the expedition leader. A peak, a creek, a glacier and, of course, a pass are all named for him, the white leader of this diverse group that mapped this section of the park. His story might not be common knowledge, but his biography isn't hard to find either.

Peri: [to Shelton] Can you tell that story and talk about, you know, how you talked about expanding the frame?

Shelton: Yeah. And that's the photograph of—of Theodore Roosevelt next to John Muir in May of 1903 at Glacier Point. And then I discovered through my research that in 1903, Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks were protected by the Ninth Regiment of Cavalry, one of the Buffalo Soldier regiments. And so since the official escort for Theodore Roosevelt at that time for President Roosevelt were these African-American troops that belonged to the Ninth Cavalry—they're there! And yet there's no there's no photographic evidence of them being there. And so when I give my performance and I share that story, I talk about how a soldier might be standing there and being within 10 or 15 feet of the president. And they get kind of moved, "Oh no, no, could you guys move back. Could you move over there? You're in the picture." The picture is a focus on Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir. The picture is not supposed to capture the African-American soldiers who are there, who are actually protecting the park all summer long. And so the question then becomes, who also throughout history, who are the folks that have been pushed away to the boundaries, to the frontier of that light that tries to capture a moment in time? And frequently it's women. And frequently, it's people of color. And that's how history is lost.

Peri: [to Shelton] What I like about kind of how you tell the story is that you don't need to rewrite history. You're expanding the frame. You're expanding our understanding of what happened in these moments that we think we already know about.

Shelton: Yeah, that's what it really is. It's—if you look at it from the point of view of a tapestry, the threads, those colorful threads of ethnicity were always there. It's just that the perception that we have of that tapestry has literally been put into black and white, and the black part's not there, the red part's not there. The all these other colors that were always present weren't there. [music begins to play] And if that became an established the template for our perception of who was in the West at that time, then we we've been gifted with a distortion.

[repetition of the music and sample of “the Indians called us Buffalo boys” to mark transition]

Peri: I was also curious about some of the structural reasons that this kind of distortion might happen again and again. I reached out to Anthony Wood, a historian who has focused on Black history in Montana. I started by asking him why stories about people of color like the Buffalo Soldiers, and especially the ones on this expedition can be so hard to find in history.

Peri: [to Anthony] And because that's one of the things I've been wondering about with the Buffalo Soldiers is like, we don't really have many of those primary sources. So it’s like, what existed in the first place and what is preserved over time or not?

Anthony Wood: Mm hmm. So in this particular case, I'm fairly confident saying there is a high, high likelihood that everyone involved was probably literate. There are obviously a handful of black soldiers from these divisions that were very eloquent writers and really and more so excellent storytellers. But those are those are stories that certainly were existing. The primary sources, the letters of this is what we did today, even if they were short, certainly existed at one point, probably on a fairly large scale.

Peri: [to Anthony] So then what affects whether those are preserved over time or not? Like whether we have those today?

Anthony: Right well, there's—there's the very practical matter of whether or not families, a lot of working class, you know, people did not keep papers in the same way that wealthier upper class people did. But it's also probably something else. I think that by the time you get into the 20th century, the narratives, the stories that have been taken up and carried about what types of people went out and, you know, "conquered the untamable wilderness" and so on. And the, the role that soldiers often played in this is a very racialized one, and it's predominantly the figure of a white, hyper masculine, you know, man who's, who's going out and is—

Peri: [to Anthony] The mountain man

Anthony: The mountain man.

Peri: [to Anthony] And so you're kind of saying that, like, if people had these letters, maybe they were their parents or their grandparents from when they were in the Buffalo Soldiers out in the West. That wouldn't seem like it would fit into the narrative. It wouldn't seem like something important that maybe they should preserve that it wasn't part of that history.

Anthony: Right, yeah.

Peri: So one way that some histories erode away is when the keepers of those stories don't recognize their importance. Sometimes, because the stories don't fit into the dominant narrative. Anthony has studied the Black community of historic Helena, Montana. But since there are so few firsthand accounts from early Black Montanans, he's often looked to other sources, like Black-owned newspapers.

Anthony: In my case, I spent a lot of time working with and relying on the three Black newspapers in town, two of which were incredibly useful. But they also gave a window into a type of social history, the everyday lives, which I'm also really fascinated with, that just does not exist anywhere else outside of one person's perspective and, you know, maybe a journal or a diary. And that's these the sections of the paper that are like the community notes, or the they sometimes in Butte, the Butte newspaper, they call them the dope book, [Peri laughs] or they just do funny, sometimes serious, sometimes just newsy briefs. You know, this person when hiking today, you know, they caught this many fish or they, you know, this person went over and had, you know, lunch in Helena.

Peri: But these black newspapers were only in print for a limited amount of time.

Anthony: One year, you know, it’s eight months in 1894, one year in 1902, and then from 1906 to 1912.

Peri: [to Anthony] Wow, that's very limited.

Anthony: It narrows my scope to what I study, certainly.

Peri: So for all the rest of those years outside the handful that those black newspapers operated, often the sources you end up with are from white writers, white journalists—white expedition leaders.

Anthony: If you were to read them and try and reconstruct what life looks like for a daily Black Montanan, those sources just simply can't speak to it. The topography of, of the source world, it's not neutral. It's—it's has, you know, real and perceptible biases to it.

Peri: Anthony uses landscape as a way to explain these aspects of studying history, especially the ideas of sedimentation and erosion.

Anthony: Landscape is the dominant metaphor for the study of race in the United States. We think about, we say the racial landscape, and it's just an assumed metaphor.

Peri: [to Anthony] So how does that fit for you into the historical record? How do you apply those terms?

Anthony: So the way I apply the idea of erosion and sedimentation is to focus on the way that stories are told or not told. A story that is, you know, left aside and not told, we can think about it as being eroded. It sets us into certain ways of thinking about the past and about thinking about what really matters, you know, who really belongs, who's really at home in this place. Is this something that exists because it fits the pattern or fits the channel where the water is flowing most easily?

Peri: Every time we tell our national story, some things are being added, while others are being forgotten—covered over by other stories, fresher in our memories, ones we choose to tell instead.

Anthony: Erosion can take place in multiple speeds and durations. It can be fast and enormous, like a flood that just rips everything out and you get, you know, the scablands of Eastern Shore, Washington

Peri: [to Anthony] Like a building is demolished

Anthony: Or it can be slow and glacial. And it can just take a very long time and you can just an imperceptible change over such a long a generation or more.

Peri: [to Anthony] Like a story that's not told, that's not passed on and slowly forgotten.

Anthony: Yeah. And the way I'm experiencing this landscape right now is both as something that is in the past and changing in the present. And the way that is changing in the present is because of the past.

Peri: When I looked out from Ahern Pass, I saw U-shaped valleys carved by glaciers during the last ice age. But the glaciers followed those paths because rivers and streams already flowed there. Today the glaciers are gone, but Ahern Creek flows down the valley those glaciers left behind. Everything in geology, and I'd argue in history, is shaped by what came before.

Anthony: It's happening in the moment that you're studying it. It's happening, you know, in the 1890s. Then it happens again.

Peri: [to Anthony] It’s like the sands are always shifting. Yeah.

Anthony: So how do you study that?

Peri: [to Anthony] I'm a geologist, so I love it.

Anthony: I'm glad that. Yeah. I wonder if that was why...

Peri: [to Anthony] I love thinking about geology this way too. It's like people think about geology as something that happened in the past, but it's still happening all the time.

Anthony: Exactly.

[a drumbeat plays, marking a transition]

Peri: So many of these choices happened in the past -- what sources or places that people and institutions choose to preserve, which stories are told or not told. So what are the consequences of forgetting them?

Shelton: The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. That's the—that's the William Faulkner quote that I've often used, it lives on into the present. And that is one of the problems that we have today is that we do not fully see the challenges and the inequities that exist in the past, which is why so many people do not understand the anger that exists today that you see and hear in the newspapers among people of color, among African-Americans in particular, but also among Native Americans, is rooted in the inequities of the past. But the past isn't—it's still here. It's still happening today. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a modern day Black Lives Matter movement. It's rooted in the perception that what happened in the past is continuing into the present.

Peri: And these choices about how we represent history not only affect how we view the past and understand the present, but they're still being made every day.

Peri: [to Shelton] You've spent probably the better part of your career telling these stories, specifically the Buffalo Soldier story, these stories that we don't otherwise get to hear. Yes. Why is that? Why have you devoted your career to that?

Shelton: Well, because of the cultural perception that is literally held by African-Americans today. African-Americans in general feel that, “oh, national parks, that's not something that we do. That's something white folks do. We don't do that.” And they have that—they have that perception because of what we just talked about, because they've not read in a history book about the role of African-Americans in the trans-Mississippi West going all the way back to Lewis and Clark. I mean, that is that is our Odyssey. That's our Homer and that's our Virgil. It starts out with Lewis and Clark in 1803. The fact that there was a person of color that was part of that expedition, specifically an enslaved person, Clark's manservant, who became invaluable to the success of that expedition—that's something that should be shared at every classroom and every school in the United States, because then all children would grow up with this vision that is inclusive rather than a vision that is exclusive.

Carolyn Finney: It matters who tells the story. This is the question of representation, but it's also a question of history.

Peri: This is Dr. Carolyn Finney.

Carolyn: I call myself a storyteller, in part because I stand at the intersection of the arts, education, and lived experience to talk about issues of race, place, belonging, the environment, justice—all the good stuff and a few things that are hard.

Peri: I wanted to talk to one more person to bring this story into the present day. For eight years, Carolyn served on the National Park System Advisory Board, and she's the author of the book Black Faces White Spaces. There's a quote in her book that says, "the power of representation lies in its ability to shape today's reality through the reality of the past." Dr. Finney explained that if you exclude the histories of certain people from national parks, then you're less likely to see those people in national parks.

Carolyn: And so I can't talk about the past without talking about the present. There could be 100 reasons within, you know, for reasons why the Buffalo Soldier story took so long to come to light.

Peri: [to Carolyn] Yeah. Yeah.

Carolyn: Part of it is going to be Jim Crow. Part of it is going to be we're living in a country where and I'm only talking about Black folks here, that Black folks weren't seen as fully human, you know, until sometime in the last 50 years. You know, but not just Black people. All kinds of people from all walks of life have been challenged in terms of their skin color, their gender, you know, where they live, how much money they have in their pockets, their religious beliefs. I mean, we're still doing that today, and that's going to matter. So I—when I look at the history of Buffalo Soldiers or any group of people and wonder why it's taken this long for them to get there, I understand, you know, the first question I ask is, well, who was doing the telling? Mm hmm. Representation is important. If you leave a whole lot of stuff out, then I'm only getting part of the story. Mm hmm. And somewhere that means I am only partially who I can become.

Peri: [to Carolyn] What do you think the role of national parks and public lands is in interpreting history and in exploring this relationship of people to place and landscape and land and environment?

Carolyn: Well, you know, public lands? For whom? That's why I say, that's really, you know—and I always tell people, it's not like you crossed over into a public land and suddenly there was no racism.

Peri: [to Carolyn] Mm hmm.

Carolyn: And people carry those beliefs with them, whether they work in a park or are visiting a park or not, right? The public lands are for everyone is a really nice sentiment. [sighs, chuckles]

Peri: [to Carolyn] Yeah.

[haunting violin music begins to play]

Carolyn: Who—who are you talking about? You know, who's claiming that? Where is that? You know, I think I understand the common good, the idea of land being for the public, this is for all of us. And I think it sits on a complicated history of blood, you know, sweat and tears for real. You know, and I think the only way that public lands can really serve us all is that we engage that blood, sweat and tears as part of the story. This is where our redemption lies. For me, the beauty of public lands is that we can actually find redemption and who we've been and who we are right now. The public lands give us that opportunity.

Peri: To keep these histories from eroding, we need to do the work of preserving them.

Shelton: You know, I think when I look at the Buffalo Soldier story from the inside out, what becomes obvious to me, what becomes perceivable to me is that there are so many stories involving women, involving other people of color, other communities that are not told or not heeded. And those stories can have a profound impact on how we see ourselves and how we see our own country.

[music begins to play]

Peri: [to Carolyn] I think in parks like this, the history is often left out of the landscape. A big, beautiful park like glacier that people think of for the mountains and the rivers and the bears. All of those things are part of the story and so are people. And so are the history.

Carolyn: Yes. Yeah.

Shelton: Those all those stories need to be told because we are not the America we think we are. We're still on the road to becoming the nation that we think we already are. We're not there yet. And people who feel that we are there yet do not understand the fullness of our history.

Carolyn: That should actually that in and of itself should make us recognize and revere the idea of public lands so much more. Not avoid the telling of that history because it you know, it's not a pretty telling. That should make—it cost people something for us to be able to call a piece of land public. And we as a public have a responsibility and an accountability to that idea of public lands. That's the conversation I want to have around public lands.

[haunting violin music begins again]

Shelton: And that is what's powerful about telling these stories. It makes American history reveals American history to be much deeper than we give it credit for being. And the anything that results in a deepening of light, a deepening of sound, a deepening of color, which results in a clearer vision of who we are as human beings, who we are as Americans.

[music builds, then fades to play softly under the credits]

Daniel: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park with support from our partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy. This season of headquarters was made by Daniel Lombardi, Peri Sasnett, Michael Faist and Gary Eseverri. Frank Waln wrote and performed our music, and Eric Carlson created this season's cover art. Extra special thanks this episode to Shelton Johnson, Carolyn Finney, Anthony Wood, Daniel Brewster and the Black Park Ranger Experience. Also thank you to Ed Whittle, Tim Stephenson, and Frank Gerard. We could not have made season three without Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, Sierra Mandelko, Brent Rowley, Darren Lewis, and the Glacier National Park Archives team, and we relied on so many great resources from the Montana Historical Society, so thanks to them too. Thanks for listening.

[drumbeat begins]

Lacy Next time on Headwaters:

Peri: The history of homesteading and allotment in northwest Montana.

Jim Muhn: Everybody thinks it’s so simple, but it gets so complicated.

Lois Walker: There were strong personalities, and they disagreed about a lot of stuff, but in the winter, you get along.

Sam Resurrection (read by Frank Waln): To William Howard Taft, June 1910. There is 1,353 Flathead that don’t want to be open.

Peri: That’s next time, on Headwaters.

[music ends]

Peri: So Andrew.

Andrew Smith: Yes.

Peri: Headwaters couldn't happen without the support of the Glacier Conservancy. But you guys also help with so many other projects in the park.

Andrew: Yeah. One I wanted to talk about today is the project to build an accessible trail around Swiftcurrent Lake. Swiftcurrent Lake is right in front of the Many Glacier Hotel—it's probably one of the most popular trails in the Many Glacier valley.

Peri: I've hiked it many times!

Andrew: Yeah it's really beautiful. And we're working on a long term partnership over the next few years with the MCC, the Montana Conservation Corps, to make a wheelchair accessible trail all the way around so that people with mobility impairments can enjoy that lake and that beautiful area just like the rest of us.

Peri: That sounds like a great project.

Andrew: Yeah, we think the national parks should be available to everyone, so we're really excited to make it happen.

Peri: And if people want to learn more, how can they do that?

Andrew: They should visit our website, and they can find us at glacier.org