A Friendly Harvest

Volume four number four, two thousand eight

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winter

From Dirt to Fuel: Montana Farmers Look to New, Intriguing Crops

Hutterite Colonies Come Together for Harvest Festival Does Santa live in Belt?

Robin Selvig: Architect of a Basketball Dynasty Stopping by Drummond Fiction by Pete Fromm Art by Annick Smith

A Friendly

Harvest

STORY BY SCOT T MCMILLION

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY DEIRDRE EITEL

The inaugural Hutterite Harvest Festival brings Hi-Line residents and their Hutterite neighbors together for a day of fun

A Hutterite boy gets a hit during an afternoon softball tournament during the Harvest Festival in September.

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ut on the prairie between Malta and Saco, halfway

between the Missouri River and the Canadian border, out where the hot water bubbles from the ground, a man and his preacher bent over a horseshoe pit and had a discussion. The preacher maintained his shoe had fallen close enough to the pin to score a point. His opponent disagreed, but only briefly. “Okay,” he conceded. “We’ll go with the Lord on that one.” Then they both grinned. And the horseshoes sailed. Welcome to the first annual Hutterite Harvest Festival. Take the black pants and suspenders from the men, take the long dresses and headscarves from the women, take those things away and the event looked a lot like any other church picnic: a full day of horseshoes and softball, fried chicken and roast pork, with plenty of beer. Teenagers flirted. The little kids squabbled some and giggled a lot. The older people visited, with the men talking crops and rain and the price of gas while the women spoke of kids and relatives and recipes. “It’s their day. They get to do what they want,” said Roger Ereaux, who organized the event as a way for businesses along the Hi-Line to show their appreciation for their Hutterite neighbors. “It’s kind of like a fair.” Ereaux owns the Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs, a decidedly down-at-the-heels establishment that grabbed a flicker of fame in 1999 when folks fried up three tons of beef to make the world’s biggest hamburger. But on a breezy Saturday early in September, Ereaux was aiming for a different kind of attention. I’m not so sure he pulled it off, but I liked his idea. With roughly 50 colonies in Montana, Hutterites are part of the culture and economy of this state, particularly on the prairies. Unlike the Amish, who are distant theological cousins, Hutterites embrace most practical aspects of modern technology. They drive, they use computers, they talk on cell phones. And they spend a lot of money, buying everything from insurance to lumber to tractor parts. As Ereaux explained it to me, the businesses wanted to give something back to the Clockwise from top right: Carrieann Hofer, 8, from the Loring colony near Harlem keeps an eye colonies, even if it was just some free swimon the activites. David Hofer, 16, lines up a toss in a game of horseshoes. He said he enjoyed looking at the cute girls from the other colonies as well as playing in the horseshoe tournament. ming. Sharon Hofer discusses balls and strikes with the pitcher during the softball tournament. So he organized the festival as a way for Kevin Hover, center, and Matthew Tschetter drove down from Alberta, Canada, to flirt with the Hi-Line businesses to show their appreciagirls at the Harvest Festival. Hofer cousins Matthew, 6, and Sophia and Aubrey, 2, from left, tion. He cadged donations from businesses spend some time outside the bath house of the once grand Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs.

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Clockwise: Children were treated to a full day of swimming in the hot springs at the Harvest Festival. An old Lutheran church sits on the grounds of Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs. Roger Ereaux, owner of Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs for 20 years, organized the Harvest Festival as a way for local businesses to thank the Hutterites for contributing to the communities along the HiLine. A variety of vegetables, eggs and baked goods were on sale at the festival for town folk to purchase.

and invited five Hutterite colonies, offering $1,000 in prize money for competitions in softball, horseshoes and tug-of-war. (The colonies competed hard, but they decided to split the money evenly.) Though the day was pretty disorganized and the ropepulling contest never happened, everybody seemed to have a good time. I know I did. I even made some new friends. Like most Montanans, I’d seen Hutterites around. They’re easy to spot, with their distinctive clothing and German accents, which turn almost every vowel into a dipthong, where words like “lost” come out as “lowest,” and “hog” comes out “hoe-aag.” But I never gave them a lot of thought, beyond appreciating the vegetables and chickens they sell at roadside stands. They seemed to me stoic and shy, maybe a little standoffish, but pleasant enough. At Sleeping Buffalo, I got a look at how they deal with each other, in part because there weren’t many people like me hanging around. I learned that, like people in any group, some of them cuss when they’re angry. When something sucks, they say it sucks. Some overdrink. They get competitive when the game is close. They crack wise: women joke about the helplessness of their husbands 14

and men joke about women drivers. Most of them don’t swim too well. Most of them vote and follow politics. They pay taxes. Except for their distinctive clothes and accents, they look and act a lot like any other bunch of prairie farmers, which is what they are, and there are worse ways to live. But Hutterites aren’t the same as most people. They live communally, in colonies based on deep religious faith, and all major assets belong to the colony. None of them have much to call their own. Preachers have a lot of authority. Women don’t. Most people leave school when they turn 15 and they’re a little leery about the temptations of the world. Family and faith are crucial. Not everybody is cut out for this kind of life. The Hutterites know this. “It’s the best life for us, but you’ve got to start out when you’re just this high,” Mike Hofer told me, leveling his palm at knee level. “You couldn’t do it at your age.” With the exception of some mission work in Nigeria, the

Hutterites don’t proselytize. They tend to stick to their own kind. And because they are different, Hutterites have been persecuted in the past. Founder Jacob Hutter was burned at the stake in 1536, and bigots shoved his followers from one European country to another until the 1870s, when they emigrated to the North American prairies. As pacifists, they won’t serve in the armed forces and, during World War I, two Hutterite men died of neglect and abuse in a military prison in Fort Leavenworth. As late as the 1950s, South Dakota law banned Hutterite colonies from buying more land, and Alberta had a similar law until 1973. And in 1998, near Shelby, Mont., somebody burned a colony’s barn and poisoned a well, acts that authorities treated as hate crimes. And that’s why I liked Ereaux’s idea of a Hutterite festival, one where everybody is invited. Even today, there are plenty of rumors and cheap stereotypes about Hutterites. “I don’t even like to speak about it,” said Will Hauk, one of the handful of non-Hutterites at the event. He’s been a friend of the East Malta Colony for years, he said, and liked the idea of the festival: It might help bring people together. Granted, Sleeping Buffalo is a long way from almost everything, and watching Hutterites throw horseshoes isn’t everybody’s idea of a good time. But it might be your best chance to get to know some fellow Montanans. Like everybody else, Hutterites have warts as well as virtues. Some folks are nicer than others. Some are better looking. Some are funnier. They run the gamut. They’re people. M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY

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