We returned the snowmobile to our storage unit and the trailer to friend Dave on Saturday. Season over. Despite the lack of much good snow, it was a good return season for us, and we are already looking forward to 2016. It will be much easier to get things going next year, after only a year's absence and storage.
We will stay in Missoula another week or more, getting some improvement work done on the Bigfoot and more sorting/selling/donating from our storage unit. There probably won't be much news. In view of this, I offer below a brief article on the derivation of the term "Big Sky Country," (not Guthrie's novel, The Big Sky) from The Hellroarin' Encyclopaedia of Montana History and Culture, which I had the honor of founding and editing some years ago. The discovery of the term's origin was made by historian and friend and also Park Ranger Lyndel Meikle.
Schlobigsky, Vladislav Polish
priest and explorer, b. 1751, Warsawa, d. circa 1810.
Little is known of Schlobigsky’s early years, except that he
became a black robe priest of the Russian Orthodox Church in his
early twenties. Difficulties with church authorities sent him further
and further east until he appeared as priest to the settlement at
Russian River, in what is now California, in the 1790s. Expelled from
his position there, amid rumors of improper advances toward
seal-skin traders and altar boys, he journeyed further east to
befriend and minister to a variety of Native Nations in what is now
Montana. Little is known of his interactions with these peoples,
except that he was very likely the first European to set foot in what is now Montana. (For discussion of whether or not Poland, or for that
matter, Russia, is part of Europe, see Norman Davies, Europe: A
History, pp. 1-847.) Blackfoot interpreters, unable to pronounce
the Polish “Schlo-”, shortened his name to “Bigsky,” whence Montana became known among later explorers as “Bigsky
country.”
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| Vladimir Schlobigsky (center) and friends |
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