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7th Cavalry died fighting Sioux and Cheyenne Indians fewer than two hundred miles southeast from Radersburg, was a recent memory. White settlers still talked about it, as they talked about Chief Joseph’s dramatic 1877 attempt to lead his band of Nez Pierce to refuge in the nearby Bitterroot Mountains. Many of the white cattlemen held the Native Americans in contempt and, fearing attacks, demanded protection from the U.S. military, which established posts throughout the territory. By 1883 the buffalo had disappeared, wiped out by a combination of overhunting and disease introduced by cattle. The Indians, once dependent on the buffalo herds, moved onto reservations, but the vast reservations often had to cede portions of land to provide right-of-way to the builders of the Great Northern–Northern Pacific Railway. 18
    David managed to grow up without racial bigotry, and in his time at the legislature befriended fellow representative Frank Linderman, a hunter and trapper turned newspaperman and author who became fascinated with the stories told to him by Flathead, Cree, Crow, and Chippewa tribesmen he befriended. His well-known Indian Why Stories , a collection of tales with illustrations by Charles Russell, helped teach the white man something of the red man’s traditions. Linderman was one of the non-Indians who joined with Indians pushing for a home for landless Crees and Chippe-was. In his thirties David Franklin Williams joined that effort, which resulted in the 1911 formation of the Rocky Boy Reservation near Havre, at the abandoned Fort Assiniboine. This reservation was and still is owned by its occupants, not the U.S. government ( BB , 8).
    Della and David attended Radersburg’s one-room grammar school on the hill, a wood-frame building that also housed the Methodist church. The town had only this one church—Della used to play the organ there—but supported three saloons (one run by a woman), a liquor shop, and a brewery. Although many prospectors of gold and silver had moved on to what they hoped would be richer claims in other parts of the country, mining of some sort (for silver, lead, zinc, and iron ore after the gold had played out) continued in Radersburg into the early twentieth century, and despite the civilizing presence of the church, the school, a general store, and three lodges, frontier unruliness—the whoops that go with whiskey, high-stakes poker games, fancy ladies, and bucking broncos—lingered. The tiny town, once the Jefferson County seat, had its own jail and sheriff by the 1880s. Before that, a murderer or some other unfortunate transgressor might be found dangling from a rope extended from a beef scaffold. During the gold rush, robbery and claim jumping were common crimes. Nearby mining camps had been named Hog-Em, Cheat-Em, and Rob-Em. Although crime diminished by the 1880s, drinking, gambling, and disputes over claims continued to disrupt everyday life. Ranchers still had reason to complain about horse thieves and cattle rustlers. Gun toting was the rule, not the exception. The itinerant Methodist preacher, known as Brother Van (William Wesley Van Orsdel), had his work cut out for him. He rode into town on a white horse, always boarding with a different local family, which received him warmly. Brother Van enjoyed celebrity status in Radersburg and its environs. “The women were crazy about him,” Della recalled. 19
    Social life in this rough but no longer booming gold-rush town revolved around dancing parties where a pistol-packing chaperone would expel anyone carrying liquor or a six-shooter. Group dances—square and circle—were favored, though couples might venture a Highland waltz or two-step. The women at the dances pinned up their long hair, donning floor-length skirts with pinched-in waists, bustles, and blouses with high collars and puffy sleeves. Their men put on freshly laundered blue jeans, pressed shirts, and polished boots. The dances could last all night, because the