P a g e 3 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r around the state and interviewing witnesses so that he could paint what might someday be regarded as historical documents. Through his art, he archived great battles, like the Battle of Little Big Horn, when Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux warriors decimated General Custer and his men. Later in his career, he painted the final days of life in what we now remember as the wild west; scenes of trappers, cowboys and mostly white settlers as well as of the American Indians of the region living in the mountains and valleys of Montana as they had for centuries before we took it away from them in the name of progress and the “Great Westward March.” Most of those paintings now hang on museum walls since Grandfather sold them so that he and grandmother could go on their own adventures. Their first “world tour” also happened around the time that they moved out of the brick house and we moved in; quite an undertaking. Everything was taken out, renovated, freshened up, and our things were moved in. We happily lived there through my high school and college years. But, as bad luck sometimes makes its presence known, we were eventually forced to sell the ranch and leave the family house for good. Mom was the last of our family to stay in the brick house. She wanted to be alone and to say goodbye. As she reminds me, there were no people left on the ranch, the cattle had been sold, and the house was empty with the exception of a mattress and a couple boxes of trash. Mom recalls that the house was really noisy that last night. She confessed that she thought “Jesse was mad at” her, at us; which is a funny thing for her to confess since she didn’t really believe in ghosts. The next morning, mom made her final cup of coffee from the narrow, little kitchen at the front of the house, wiped away her tears and went to load the trash into the truck when she noticed something quite unexpected. On top of the trash lay open a dusty, old leather book originally intended as a ledger for tracking financial transactions. It was open to a page with a poem that read that in tough times when people may slander you or you may feel like you hadn’t done all that you could, remember that family will stand behind you. There is an important part of Jesse’s talks with grandfather that I didn’t mention before. I didn’t want to spoil the fun. The book mom found carefully placed on the trash and opened to just the poem she needed on that most difficult morning was Jesse’s. It had first belonged to Jesse and Margaret’s mother, who began filling it with poetry and cut outs of favorite recipes and other little tidbits. It was later passed on to Jesse, who continued to chronicle her inner life and love of the ranch. Mom took the book that she had never seen before and presented it to dad, who also had never laid eyes on it before that day. He called grandfather, who traveled post-haste to the house, because he didn’t believe mom’s story could possibly be true. Fig. 2 Biography of the Life and Work of E.S. Paxon By His Grandson
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