https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utica,_Montana


I was doing some family research, and stumbled across this.

There have a sign there that says " Utica is a little slice of heaven. Please don't drive like Hell through it."

I often hunt near there.

The church parking lot used to be the last of the cell service going south. Now we get service even when in the hills hunting.

viking;
Good evening to you sir, I hope the last day of the year had been good to you.

This is what I thought of immediately when you posted.



Thanks from a fan of CM Russell.

Happy New Year.

Dwayne

Apparently I had ancestors that lived around that place way way back.

I think the ox and yoke bar is for sale if you would like to return to the homeland?

We lived in another small (but larger) town nine miles from Utica during the late 1980s. We often attended events in Utica, including yard sales and visits to the Oxen Yoke Inn. Once went to a Halloween dance there where everybody was wearing old-timey western clothes, and Eileen started taking photos. One of our local friends, a woman from our little town, pulled Eileen aside a whispered not to take photos, since not everybody was there with their spouse....

Unlike most of Montana these days, that area is shrinking in population. Hobson, the town we lived in, had a population of over 250 back then, but the 2020 census says its now 179. It was a great place to live in several ways, with excellent hunting and fishing, but we were renting and a few years later decided to buy a house. Turned out every available house for sale had been for sale when we moved there four years earlier. Didn't look like a good investment, so we moved to a "big" town of about 1500 a 2-hour drive away....

My buddy's dad has a really nice "cabin" in the Little Belts above Utica a ways. IIRC they've got some old tiny "cabin" that CM Russel spent time in, in the corner of their lot and on some historical register. I was only there once and it was probably 15yrs ago so the details are getting a little fuzzy. I do however recall going through both Utica and Hobson.

And here I sit in Utica, N.Y. wishing I were in Utica, Montana. Visited there some years back and brought the Bar there a six pack of Utica Club Beer made not six miles from me. Love Montana!

By the way, that's Charlie himself leaning on the hitching rail. Just saying.

The name Utica must have an interesting story behind it but all I could find was ancient ruins in Tunisia. Going to have a look on the map & found no less than 10 states that had a Utica.
The funny part is that other than NY & Mi. all had low to very low populations.

Oh well, just more useless info crowding important stuff out of my p brain.

The story behind the Russell cabin is interesting. Apparently Charlie built it just tall enough so he could set up an easel and sit down and paint--but couldn't stand up in it. This was because he was making very little money, and wanted to paint rather than put up more logs.

In fact when we lived in Hobson more than one of the old-timers said many parents of single daughters were worried they'd marry that "worthless" Russell guy, since due to his short cabin (and some other stuff) he was considered extremely lazy.

C. M. Russell was a pretty good writer, too. I read "Savage Santa" every Christmas Eve, and enjoy it every time.

I worked with an elderly lady from that area, that when she was a little girl she remembers looking through a stack of old paintings that were left in the bunkhouse at the ranch. She remembered that her family said that a hired hand painted them before he left….

She said the paintings got wet and were ruined before being thrown out…

Not sure what her maiden name was but she was from the area.