It’s Home, Home at the Saloon For Many Montana Residents – Bars Are Still the Hub of Vast State’s Small-Town Life

DEWEY, Mont. — After he shot his dog but before he murdered the jukebox, Gregory Michael Pepin explained to the bartender that he would dearly love to shoot himself. He just didn’t have the nerve.

What he did have, as he sat at the bar, was a snootful of tequila and a semiautomatic rifle with 30 bullets in the clip. The bartender, his hands trembling, poured Pepin a drink and tried to talk of happy days.

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52609-2004Jan3.html

It was going rather well, Roger Malmquist, the bartender, remembers thinking, when the jukebox suddenly started up. As the bartender tells the story, Pepin whirled on his barstool and fired four rounds into the jukebox. The music stopped. Moments later, the phone rang behind the bar. Pepin silenced it with five more bullets. Then the jukebox, wounded but not yet dead, erupted with another song. Pepin whirled again, fired two more rounds and finished it off. The bartender, trembling still, poured Pepin another drink.

When there’s big trouble in small-town Montana, as occurred here on a cold morning in late November, it’s usually at the bar. Trouble, in fact, has no place else to go. Neither does gossip, companionship or heartbreak. In Dewey, as in hundreds of dying towns and hamlets across this vast state, there is only one enterprise that is not yet boarded up, abandoned or broke.

The bar. It’s an architectural and sociological artifact that in many ways defines rural Montana, with its dwarfing expanse of plains and mountains, shrinking rural population and tradition of seeking answers to life’s persistent questions in a noisy, smoke-filled room with a view of grimy liquor bottles.

"People lead very isolated lives in this state, and the bar is the one place they can get together," said William Kittredge, the Montana author of "Hole in the Sky" and many other books about the modern West. "Bars take the place of churches for a lot of people."

There is a historical undertow in Montana that gives bars a quasi-religious, semi-sanctified status. It continues to pull on the state legislature, which bucks national trends and permits unaccompanied minors to hang out in bars (so long as they don’t drink). State lawmakers also allow drivers to have open containers of alcohol in their cars.

Montana has a more secular, rambunctious past than most of the other Upper Plains states, which were settled mainly by churchgoing sodbusters. Lutheran and Catholic farmers, egged on by wives and burdened by children in need of moral uplift, built social lives around the local church, from Sunday services and choir practice, to hayrides with the pastor and potluck dinners.

But Montana, especially the mountainous western third, was settled by men without women — miners, loggers, gamblers, adventurers, cowboys, opportunists.

"For all the obvious reasons, they needed to drink," writes Joan Melcher, in "Watering Hole," a history of Montana’s bars. "But there were countless other reasons why they frequented the saloon."

In early Montana, she writes, weddings and wakes, baptisms and elections, town meetings and book readings were all held in the bar, usually because it was the biggest and most welcoming building in town. Newcomers to town often slept on the bar floor. Later on, reporters were given saloon expense accounts — bars being the most reliable place to find news.

Drunkenness went hand in glove with family values in many Montana bars at the turn of the century. A sign in a bar in Helena counseled its patrons: "Don’t Forget to Write dear Mother. She is thinking of you. We furnish paper and envelopes free and have the best whiskey in town."

Wholesomeness in a grimy den of liquor is an enduring quality of Montana life. James Crumley, a writer of hard-boiled detective novels who lives in Missoula, said he felt it the moment he arrived in this state.

"I grew up in south Texas, where all the white people were Baptists and going to a beer joint meant you were a bum," Crumley said. "When I moved here in the ’60s, everybody was in the bars, including elementary school teachers. Nobody cared, as long as they were good with the kids at school."

The rhythms of small-town Montana bar life go something like this: Bars are often open at 8 a.m. with farmers and ranchers coming in to drink black coffee, complain about the weather and argue about things they have been arguing about for decades. Drinking usually doesn’t commence until about 3 in the afternoon. Because Montanans, especially in small towns, tend to get up early, most people go home by 9.

Here in the Big Hole Valley of southwest Montana, children often come into bars after school, especially on cold winter afternoons.

"We give ’em candy and watch out for them, until their parents get off work," said Charlie Beck, owner of the H Bar J Saloon in Wise River, about five miles from Dewey.

"Bars are an extension of the front porch," said Pat Williams, a former congressman from Montana who now teaches at the University of Montana’s Center for the Rocky Mountain West. "With the occasional lapse, they are also islands of civility."

Occasional lapses of incivility do occur, and they are why bartenders in Montana continue to keep baseball bats and pistols under the bar.

"We do have a lot of bar fights," said Jay Hansen, a deputy sheriff in Beaverhead County, which includes the Big Hole Valley. "Some turn into deaths."

Fight management is something that every Montana bartender is forced to learn.

"You got to jump into the middle of it and try to steer them outside," said Chester Pierce, owner of the Wise River Club, another bar in the Big Hole Valley. "You get a bad bar fight, and it ruins everybody’s appetite for the night."

Shootings are far from unknown.

"Almost all of these bars had a shooting in them," said Louie Rivenes, bartender for 20 years at the H Bar J.

About the time Rivenes hired on there, two carpenters got in an argument over a woman and one shot the other in the back, leaving a bullet gouge on the bar that is still visible in the H Bar J.

At the Wise River Club, a man shot his cheating wife and then himself. They both died near the pool tables. That was about 15 years ago. More recently a man was beaten to death in the parking lot outside the Wise River Club.

And here in Dewey last month, there was Gregory Pepin, his semiautomatic rifle and the bullet-riddled jukebox.

Malmquist, the bartender and co-owner of the Dewey Bar, recognized Pepin when he came in that morning looking depressed, disheveled and smelling of alcohol.

In better times, the bartender said, he had allowed Pepin to run a tab, which he always paid back.

"To be fair to him, he had behaved himself," Malmquist said. "A gal walked into the bar a few weeks ago, and she had a flat. It was dark, about 15 below. Pepin, with no gloves and just a light jacket, went out and changed the tire for her. When he came in, I gave him a couple of hot buttered rums on the house."

So, when Pepin came into the bar at 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 19, a Wednesday, the bartender said he tried to reason with him. He nodded sympathetically, he said, when Pepin moaned about how he had just shot his dog and wanted to shoot himself but didn’t have the guts.

"I talked him out of shooting the five televisions, the mirrored back-bar, the kegs, the windows and the doors," Malmquist said. "I reminded him of how he had changed that flat tire for the gal and how I tabbed him, and he started to calm down."

Then, that jukebox played, the phone rang and all hell broke loose. Malmquist said he watched in fear and disbelief as Pepin emptied his clip.

Pepin had several more clips of ammunition out in his car, and he was walking out to the parking lot to fetch them, Malmquist said, when he encountered Jackie Fisher, a special agent with the U.S. Forest Service. She’d heard a police-radio alert about the shooting.

She drew her gun and ordered Pepin to the ground, but he did not cooperate, according to Malmquist, who heard Pepin shout, "Shoot me. Shoot me."

Finally, a man who lived behind the Dewey bar tackled Pepin, and Fisher quickly cuffed him.

Pepin, 47, an unemployed handyman who recently had moved to the Big Hole Valley, is being held in the Beaverhead County jail in nearby Dillon in lieu of $50,000 bail. He has been charged with multiple felony counts of criminal endangerment and faces as many as 40 years in prison.

On the day of the shooting, the regulars at the Dewey Bar helped the owners sweep up the glass and mop the floors. By 6 p.m., the bar was back in business.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company