If you don’t know his sister, you might be able to catch the former hunting guide in the Buckhorn Bar on any given day. Nursing a beer, Jimmy Lee likes to point out which one of the antler-covered rafters is his, holding elk racks from spikes to huge bulls that he pulled from the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area during his 40-plus year career. Augusta is the nearest town to the fabled backcountry, whose rocky, snow-covered crags form the westward backdrop to this community of about 350 people.
He also proudly shares that his transactions only come in the form of cash or trades. No credit cards for him.
“Never wrote a check in my life,” he pronounces. “Never had a checking account.”
That’s a good thing, since Augusta doesn’t have a bank. Or a hospital. Or a police force. Or a mayor, although white-haired Elizabeth Restemayer says she’s known as the town’s “Queen” occasionally, and even has an email address starting with “queene.”
“I used to work in Washington state and a bunch of kids called me the queen, so the name just stuck,” Restemayer said, smiling. She first lived in Augusta in 1961, then left for 20 years to make enough money to retire and return in 2003.
Restemayer is at the Senior/Youth Center on Main Street on a chilly December day for the 11 a.m. monthly Lewis and Clark County meeting. The county commissioners drive 80 miles up from Helena for the meetings, even though Choteau, the Teton County seat, is only about 20 minutes away, and Great Falls, in Cascade County, is but an hour away. That’s just the way the boundaries were laid out decades ago, and for people in Augusta, they don’t mind keeping the government at arms’ length.
“People drive to Helena if they need stuff like license tabs or plates, but if you can’t get over there, our deputy will do that for you when he’s running errands there. It’s great,” Restemayer said, adding that the newly assigned deputy and his family are fitting in well with the closeknit community. “He’s wonderful, with two little girls and his lovely wife teaches yoga.”
Augusta was founded in 1883 by Phil Manix, who secured a piece of ground along a Blackfoot Indian travois trail for a general mercantile store. It later became a stage and freight route, and today mainly is a ranching community that also caters to tourists on their way to Glacier National Park or who come out for the world-renowned hunting along the Rocky Mountain Front.
The store is still open, and visitors can purchase rifles and jewelry, fishing lures and hair dye, cat food and Crown Royal whiskey, among hundreds of other items.
Next door, the Buckhorn Bar menu mentions that “Augusta offers the best of cow-town life and a world of wide open spaces to explore.”
Those wide-open spaces are connected via a web of roads, most of them gravel, and they twist, turn and degrade annually from temperatures that range from minus 40 to 100-plus degrees. So this commission meeting, as many of them are, is focused almost solely on roads. They mean a lot to people where trips are measured in hours, not miles, and the town is abuzz with the ribbon-cutting ceremony set for noon. While turnout at the monthly commission meetings is pretty good — about 10 attend regularly — they’ve got 20 or 30 here today.
“The road is a biggest deal in this whole town,” says Ole Olson, who’s rocking in the senior center kitchen while his wife, Teresa, and Donna Mantha are preparing spaghetti and green salad, which will be served after the meeting and also delivered to folks who can’t make it to the center.
Mick Johnson with the Montana Department of Transportation thanks all for their patience when 1 1/2 miles of Highway 287, which runs through Augusta on Main Street, was torn up and redone with almost $2 million in federal stimulus spending. DOT installed curbs and gutters, and new streetlights — twice, after the community demanded the originals be returned in exchange for American-made lights.
He notes that the last two “megaloads” of heavy truck equipment bound for Canada were expected to pass through town in a few days during the wee hours. But the procession was to be accompanied by an ambulance to avoid the trouble they had last time, when an ill woman was stuck behind the loads while on her way to the hospital emergency room in Helena.
“They’ve hired an ambulance and EMT in case there’s an incident behind them that requires medical attention,” Johnson said. “They will be the last two loads coming from Washington to the pulp plant in Canada.”
He’s thanked by Jordan Taillon, owner of the Bunkhouse Inn since 1994, and Tammy Dellwo, the president of the chamber of commerce and owner of the Buckhorn Bar, which has been in her husband’s family for generations. The women are thrilled with how MDT and Helena Sand and Gravel worked with the community, even postponing road work until after the fabled August Rodeo.
“Their flaggers would give directions on the easiest way to get through town and they tried their best to minimize accessibility issues to the point of marking some things to come back later to fix, like agreeing today, just from a request by Elizabeth, to move the crosswalk by the general store,” Taillon said.
That just what people do in Augusta — they see a problem and try to figure it out by themselves. They take care of their own, like those working in the senior-center kitchen, and the others who quietly donate money or goods to people like “Turkey” Bob Kormann, who’s lived here about 35 years. He suffered a head injury a while back, but that doesn’t stop the gray-haired, wide-grinned man wearing an Army jacket from talking turkey. He says he was “running away from the cops” somewhere back east and was on his way to Idaho when he couldn’t quite make it over Roger’s Pass. He’s lived here ever since, selling his turkeys to the locals.
The commission meeting wraps up after fewer than 45 minutes, because they talked about most everything the government needed to be involved in last month. Then at noon, everyone files outdoors to Main Street, where Taillon and Dellwo have found a big red ribbon to stretch across state highway for today’s ceremony.
The ribbon is strung and speeches are made without anyone needing to step aside to let traffic pass. The group cheers and mills about awhile longer, chatting before they return to their work as volunteers, bar and store owners, innkeepers and ranchers.
Dellwo, who grew up in Augusta, said that as a child she never dreamed she’d live here all her life. She expected to go to New York and see the world, but then she met the cute bartender at the Buckhorn and married him. They raised three children and Dellwo said that while many youth leave, Augusta’s population remains pretty much the same and many of them eventually return for the same reasons she stayed. Her two sons live in Augusta; her daughter is in Helena.
“People do a lot of ice fishing, we’re right on the Rocky Mountain Front, there’s tons of hiking right in your backyard,” says Dellwo.
Restemayer adds that Augusta is a comfortable place to live. It’s a tough place to make a living, but a good place to call home.
“We don’t have a whole lot of anything, but it’s a real comfortable place to be,” she said. “We have a good school and kids are safe here.”
Reporter Eve Byron:
447-4076 or eve.byron@helenair.com
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