Memoir by early Montana game warden highlights dangers, oddities

It was a stormy day in November 1957 when the shot was fired from a close-by ridge as Tierney drove up the West Fork of Careless Creek within the Massive Snowy Mountains.

“It didn’t take me many seconds to appreciate what had occurred,” Tierney wrote in his e book, “Cry of the Hunted,” printed in 1990. “I damned close to tore the door deal with off getting out, and I drug my rifle together with me. I lay within the mud and snow down by the rear wheel the place I may search for the ridge within the route the shot had been fired from.”

No different pictures had been fired. Tierney by no means conclusively recognized who had shot at him. A headline within the Nice Falls Tribune learn, “Recreation Warden Misses Loss of life.”

By 1957, Tierney was a veteran sport warden for the Montana Fish and Recreation Division, now often known as the Montana Division of Fish, Wildlife & Parks. He was employed in April 1944, serving nearly 29 years earlier than retiring.

Tierney utilized for the job after an damage resulted in his honorary discharge from the Military Air Corps throughout World Struggle II. After returning to Montana, the concept of continuous his life as a farmer/rancher didn’t attraction to him, Tierney wrote.

“I recall having moved ten occasions by the point I used to be eighteen along with being farmed out 5 or 6 occasions to be nearer to high school.”

With an curiosity in wildlife and regulation enforcement, he determined to use for a warden job.

His memoir recounts particulars from his work throughout an early period of wildlife regulation enforcement in Montana, in addition to humorous insights into rising up in a rural state throughout the Nice Despair. Along with his nation upbringing, Gene was good at regarding landowners within the locations the place he was posted as a warden, which included Helena, Purple Lodge, Polson and Harlowton.

“He beloved his job,” stated Invoice Tierney, Gene’s oldest baby and a longtime Billings resident. “He beloved to be within the open air.”

That’s mirrored within the foreword, the place Gene wrote: “I capitalize Massive Recreation Season as a result of in Montana it symbolizes and instructions the identical respect as if the phrases Father’s Day had been used.”

Regardless of his father’s busy schedule, since wardens had been anticipated to be on-call on daily basis all day, Invoice stated his father taught him the right way to hunt, shoot and ranch. Some nights, Gene introduced Invoice alongside as he sat on a hilltop at evening scouring the encircling land for unlawful spotlighting hunters.

“So I bought just a few evening adventures,” Invoice stated. “I assumed it was sort of boring on the time.”

But he was “all ears” when Gene and his fellow Fish and Recreation staff gathered and instructed tales. Invoice additionally bought excused from faculty every now and then to go along with crews as they planted hatchery fish in streams.

Likewise, Invoice’s son Curtis realized his outside expertise and ethics from his grandfather.

“He was an enormous in my life,” stated Curtis, an artwork supplier in Bozeman. “We shared a number of the identical pursuits.”

These pursuits included looking, the capturing sports activities, and a “nice ardour” for Montana, and exploring the state “with a army precision.” Gene was additionally a collector, filling a small house subsequent to his home alongside the Musselshell River along with his firearms assortment, arrowheads and pictures. Curtis referred to as it his “massive man cave.”

“It was only a dream for any child,” Curtis stated, noting he would spend hours listening to his grandfather speak about gadgets in his collections.

Gene’s e book begins out on a humorous word.

“A few previous timers instructed me that as an alternative of being born, I crawled out from beneath a rock close to Shawmut, Montana, on a chilly day in October.”

Rising up, Gene recounts a Montana removed from being tame. Characters like trapper Rattlesnake Jack, clothed in animal skins, nonetheless roamed the countryside, together with bootleggers and plagues of grasshoppers.

“Instances had been tough and the timid and weak had been now not round,” because the Nice Despair deepened, he famous. So those that remained had a considerably ornery humorousness. One teen loved placing burrs beneath saddle blankets. One other would depart carcasses of skinned skunks in mail packing containers. Maybe the worst had been two kids who starved a feral cat, fed it hamburger laced with cod liver oil and turned it free within the closed cloak room throughout a dance on the native faculty home.

Invoice laughed on the recollection of his father’s acquaintances’ youthful mayhem.

“You simply need to put your self again in that point,” he stated.

Gene even had his personal run-in with a warden whereas dwelling in Candy Grass County. He was strolling down a street with a restrict of three pheasants on opening morning when the warden pulled up in his car.

“I didn’t brag to him that this was my second journey house that morning with birds,” Gene wrote.

Regardless of his success with pheasant, Gene wrote that when he was younger “deer had been nonexistent within the prairie and pine hills nation.”

“I used to be six years previous earlier than I noticed my first antelope after I was dwelling in what’s now often known as the center of the antelope nation,” he added.

By the point Gene grew to become a warden, nevertheless, sport populations had slowly climbed again, thanks partially to enforcement by officers like him, simply in time for a brand new onslaught of hunters and anglers following World Struggle II. Nonetheless, he referred to as the bag limits and seasons at the moment “haphazard.”

“It did turn into nearly deadly to the (mule deer) as they had been virtually hunted out in Montana,” Gene wrote. Throughout liberalized seasons, each hunter may kill as much as six deer.

His superiors didn’t need wardens to anger the folks they had been citing, Gene famous. Legislators would normally have violations dropped for pals. The primary biologists employed had been secretive and stand-offish. At the very least one sporting membership cared nothing for wildlife preservation, the e book claims.

But Montana was an early adapter of state management over wildlife, with the massive sport seasons authorized in 1872. The primary sport wardens had been appointed in 1889, simply two years earlier than the company was shaped. Eight sport wardens had been initially employed to patrol the huge state. By the top of his profession, moreover imposing looking and fishing guidelines, Gene was additionally liable for boating and tenting legal guidelines, Invoice stated.

Within the early Nineteen Fifties, the division issued wardens their first state autos, nicknamed “Sherman tanks” due to their tough, swaying experience, poor heaters that almost left the drivers hypothermic in winter, and quarter-inch gaps in some panels permitting snow and dirt to billow inside. The autos had been so poorly constructed that it wasn’t uncommon for them to actually disintegrate taking place the street. One warden held his along with seatbelt straps to make it to Helena and commerce within the deteriorating hulk.

In a single incident Gene recalled, he and a employed hand roped and tied up a mule deer buck that had turn into too pleasant at a ranch house and was feeding on the spouse’s backyard. As Gene drove down the street to relocate the animal, it broke free from its bonds and commenced thrashing round at the back of the rig.

“When the deer realized it was free and will rise up, he was similar to a mad squirrel in a cage,” Gene wrote. “I finished, bought out, slammed the door and stood by watching the buck tear up the within of the suburban.”

He couldn’t free the animal till the lasso he had left across the deer’s neck may very well be minimize off via a rolled down window. After the deer was free, Gene inspected the harm to his spare clothes and the Suburban’s upholstery. Regardless of steam cleansing and repainting the inside of the car, he stated the odor of the deer lingered.

Talking of wildlife and autos, Gene writes about working at sport test stations and discovering bloated animals in trunks nearly twice their regular measurement as a result of they hadn’t been cleaned.

“We’ve got discovered unlawful fish and birds in all the pieces from the hub caps on a car to suitcases trying like a girl’s baggage,” he wrote.

As Gene famous close to the top of the e book, one factor hasn’t modified for sport wardens throughout all of those years.

“You might be exposing your self to a state of affairs that’s not required of every other peace officer within the state. Roughly one half of the folks you test for any variety of causes (and half of that it’s important to write a ticket to) are armed with all the pieces from a .22 caliber pistol to a .300 H&H Magnum rifle.”

But the writer confessed, after retiring from the power, it left a void in his life that was onerous to fill. So he labored as undersheriff in Wheatland County earlier than being pressured to resign by poor well being. He then took up hand-painting black and white images he had taken of the agricultural countryside.

Invoice recalled his father as somebody who was multi-talented, attributing it to his rural upbringing when people needed to make do with what that they had. Gene even constructed hydroplane racing boats later in life, together with repairing firearms.

In a 1983 Billings Gazette article, Gene defined to reporter Christene Meyers his reasoning behind the paintings.

“I noticed that a part of the Outdated West was quickly disappearing,” he stated.

The painted images had been one approach to protect an period Gene noticed slipping away in Montana, as does his e book.

Eugene William Tierney Sr. died on Oct. 2, 1990, on the age of 68.

“I prefer to assume I helped contribute one thing to the Wildlife Heritage of Montana,” he concluded in “Cry of the Hunted.”

Invoice stated when he reread his father’s e book, it reminded him of a number of household historical past he had forgotten.

The e book will be bought on the Higher Musselshell Museum in Harlowton.