Mythic Montana: The Last and the Best

Michael Sexson | Regents Professor of Literature, Montana State University

My name is Michael Sexson. I’m a Professor of English at Montana State University where I’ve been teaching literature since 1966.

My special interest in literature is mythology, traditional stories that all cultures have to explain, to console, to orient us meaningfully within the great scheme of things through the use of imaginative techniques typically associated with hyperbole or exaggeration, and other tropes having to do with amplification and expansion of what is historically obvious.

Because of its commitment to these imaginative strategies, myth is often dismissed as, at best, misinformation. Or at worst, deliberate lies. Understood this way we might say that the notion that the sky is bigger in Montana is a ”myth,” because when measured it is exactly the same size as the sky in Nebraska. Or the New Yorker magazine’s description as, “the home of sociopathic antinomians,” is a myth, because really we’re just folks like everybody else.

Now while it’s important to show how myths tend to override the facts, and we have legions of historians whose job is to precisely remind us of that, it’s also important to show myths are stories that aim at truths that can’t be expressed without going beyond the facts. Mythology is primarily concerned with the great issues and concerns of the world and its inhabitants.

Those primary issues and concerns may be summed up in three words: beginnings, middles, and ends.

Anyone who has taken a class in mythology will recall how much attention is paid to beginnings: stories of origins, of the world, of the people, of food sources, significant institutions, and ceremonies, how these things came about, and why it is very important to pay strict attention to these stories. Over and over again we hear in myth about once upon a time. To use one example only from the Blackfoot creation legends, Old Man came from the south, he created the mountains and the prairies as he passed along. And over and over again in these stories we hear in a thousand different ways of how the world of the beginnings, the perfect world, the first best place, was lost due to ignorance or a sin or mere negligence, and of how this yearning, this nostalgia—a word which strictly means a desire to return home—for this first best place, burns in our hearts.

Myths of the middle are typically stories of heroes who are exemplary human beings deliberately imagined as better, bigger, stronger, wiser figures who act out their bigger-than-life drama on the battle field of life.

And then there are the myths of the end. In myth, the end is a bang and not a whimper. We hear of great battles between good and evil, of the clash of titans at the end of time, of catastrophes and disasters on a cosmic scale, of apotheosis and redemptions and transcendencies, and we hear of a veil being lifted to reveal the world as it always was. That’s the strict meaning of the word, apocalypse, which means to remove the veil.

That’s mythology. Beginnings, middles, and ends told in exciting, colorful language that transfixes us, takes us completely to another world of experience and of truth.

By contrast, imagine the historian whose job is to stick to the facts talking about beginnings, middles, and ends. Inserting the human individual, the historian would tell us about the facts of life, of how babies are born, not brought by storks or found in cabbage patches. We’d hear in the middle not about gigantic heroes, but about economic problems of families in the middle class. And at the end we would hear about the wearing out of the mechanisms, the stopping of the clock.

No apotheosis. No redemption. No transcendence. Not a bang, but a whimper.

Compared with myth, it’s pretty dismal stuff. In Shakespeare’s words, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

In the contest between the historian and the mythologist, the mythologist being the keeper of legends, there is seldom little doubt about who would win out in the public sphere. In a great piece of dialogue from John Ford’s movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a person gives the correct information about a shooting to the newspaper man to print and says, “You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?” Mr. Scott replies, “No sir, this is the West. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

We don’t live by facts. We live by myths. It’s important to know the myths we live by, and realize that they are myths and not facts, and to have a bevy of historians to remind us of the disconnect between those things.

I once heard an old man at a local coffee shop proclaim that, “Of all the 58 states, the best is Montana.”

I think he was right. Montana is the best of the 58, because it is the most mythological. It is the most mythological because it pays profound attention to at least two of the three great concerns of myth: the perfections of the beginning and the power of the end. Which is to say, Montana is the best because it was the first and the last.

Some years ago an anthology of literature came out featuring Montana writers titled, The Last Best Place. That title since has taken on a life of its own, going beyond a slogan to that of a credo, if not a manifesto. We’re not only the best place, we’re the last of the best places.

Now it seems to me that if that title had been the best place, it would have disappeared from our communal conscious. But to add the word “last” brings together an imaginative collision of mythic forces: the alpha, the omega, the beginning, the end. Montana is the best because it appropriates that aspect of American mythology, which in turn has appropriated that aspect of world mythology that sees the place where we live as completely new, as Adam must have seen the world on the first morning of creation: pristine, undefiled, unpolluted, virginal, innocent. And to use two fancy words, largely because they also happen to be lovely words, prelapsarian and antediluvian. That is, before the fall, before the flood.

And this I would argue is the great myth of Montana, the myth of the prelapsarian and the antediluvian. It is the myth to live by if we are to maintain a sustainable environment for ourselves and our ancestors.

You thought I was going to say descendants.

It is this myth that led John Steinbeck to say to his dog Charlie that for other states he had a lot of admiration, but for Montana he had love. Read the whole passage, strictly mythology. It is this myth, the one of the prelapsarian, the antediluvian, that led Joseph Howard to use the homely phrase, “high, wide, and handsome.” And it is this myth that led Norman Maclean to talk about a place, through which, a river runs. A river that is the same one Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about as:

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover!

A river that is simultaneously a local stream in the historic real state of Montana, and also a river that runs through Eden in the book of Genesis.

So the best place and the first place are the same.

The second myth is that of the last.

The note of apocalypse that figures in the phrase “The Last Best Place,” a mythic warning that, “this is it folks,” there are no other states left that embody the great myth of the perfections of the beginning. This is the last one and when it’s gone it’s the Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, the end of everything.

None of this of course is historically true. I used to be the chair of the Montana Committee for the Humanities, and I would occasionally meet with the chairs of all the other states’ humanities councils, and I remember the uproar that would occur when I referred to Montana as the “Last Best Place.”

“That’s wrong,” I was told. “Really it’s Delaware!”

So those are the two great myths of Montana, I believe, the prelapsarian and the apocalyptic. And if we live by their truths we may indeed create a sustainable environment, to use non-mythological language.

Now there are other competing and conflicting myths that are sometimes very powerful in this state. And if I had time I would go into them.

One is the very potent myth of self-reliance that is sometimes called rugged individualism. When benign, this myth is underwritten by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who quite deliberately mystifies and transcendentalizes the notion. When less benign, which is a pleasant way to say malignant, the myth is underwritten by someone like Ayn Rand, who adds to the mythic mixture elements of mammon, of greed, and of a contempt for altruism and sentimentality.

I personally find this a very disturbing shift.

There is also the great myth of pragmatism that we’ve inherited in this state. Again in its benign form, articulated by the American philosopher William James, and in its malignant form by the bumper sticker which reads, “The Wilderness: A Land of No Use.”

I would be very sad to see these malignant myths take over and turn our state, Montana, into the one thing it has always resisted becoming—predictable.

It sounds as if I’ve been uncharitable to historians in these remarks, but let me hasten to add in these concluding words that it is the historian who has the often unrewarding job of reminding us of the unpleasant facts we ignore when we live out our myths. And those facts, when related to the pristine and unpolluted world of the beginning, have to deal with the very harsh reality that we always come late, to any place.

We are cursed, all of us, to be belated that there is always someone else here before us who, in the service of the great myth, if we are benign, we ignore, but if we are expedient, we exterminate.

So let there always be that historian whose function is to remind us of the dark side of myth.