Memoir by early Montana game warden highlights dangers, oddities

BILLINGS — The bullet penetrated the windshield of the automobile inches from Gene Tierney’s head and showered his face with shards of glass.

It was a stormy day in November 1957 when the shot was fired from a close-by ridge as Tierney was driving up the West Fork of Careless Creek in Montana’s Big Snowy Mountains.

“It didn’t take me many seconds to realize what had happened,” Tierney wrote in his 1990 ebook Cry of the Hunted. with me. I used to be mendacity within the mud and snow by the rear wheel the place I might lookup the ridge within the course the shot had been fired.”

No extra pictures had been fired. Tierney by no means positively recognized who shot him. A headline within the Great Falls Tribune learn: “Game Warden Misses Death”.

Employed

By 1957, Tierney was an skilled game warden for the Montana Fish and Game Department, now referred to as the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks. He was enlisted in April 1944 and served virtually 29 years earlier than retiring.

Tierney utilized for the place after an damage led to his honorable discharge from the Army Air Corps throughout World War II. After returning to Montana, Tierney wrote that he did not like the concept of ​​persevering with his life as a farmer/rancher.

“I remember moving 10 times by the time I was 18 and also being outsourced 5 or 6 times to be closer to school.”

Because he was involved in wildlife and legislation enforcement, he determined to use for a job as a warden.

household

His memoir particulars his work throughout an early period of wildlife legislation enforcement in Montana, in addition to humorous insights into rising up in a rural state in the course of the Great Depression. With a rural upbringing, Gene was good at coping with landowners within the locations he served as overseer, together with Helena, Red Lodge, Polson and Harlowton.

“He loved his job,” mentioned Bill Tierney, Gene’s oldest baby and longtime Billings resident. “He loved being outside.”

This is mirrored within the foreword, the place Gene wrote, “I capitalize Big Game Season because in Montana it symbolizes the same respect and demands as if the words Father’s Day were used.”

Despite his father’s busy schedule, since wardens had been anticipated to be on name all day every single day, Bill mentioned his father taught him the way to hunt, shoot, and ranch. Some nights Gene would take Bill with him as he sat on a hilltop at evening and scoured the encircling countryside for unlawful searchlight hunters.

“So I went on some nighttime adventures,” Bill mentioned. “I found it kind of boring at the time.”

Still, he was “all ears” when Gene and his colleagues at Fish and Game obtained collectively and shared tales. Bill was additionally sometimes given break day from faculty to go along with the crews after they had been planting fry in streams.

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

“He was a giant in my life,” mentioned Curtis, an artwork supplier in Bozeman. “We had many common interests.”

These pursuits included searching, goal taking pictures, a “great passion” for Montana, and exploring the state “with military precision.” Gene was additionally a collector and stuffed a small home subsequent to his residence on the Musselshell River along with his assortment of firearms, arrowheads and pictures. Curtis known as it his “Big Man Cave”.

“It was just a dream for every kid,” Curtis mentioned, noting that he spent hours listening to his grandfather discuss gadgets in his collections.

humor

Gene’s ebook begins on a humorous observe.

“Some old hands told me that instead of being born, I crawled out from under a rock near Shawmut, Montana, on a cold October day.”

Growing up, Gene tells of a Montana that was something however tame. Characters like trapper Rattlesnake Jack, wearing animal skins, nonetheless roamed the countryside, together with smugglers and plagues of locusts.

“Times were tough and the shy and weak were gone,” he famous because the Great Depression deepened. So those that stayed had a barely obnoxious humorousness. One teen loved placing burrs beneath saddle pads. Another left carcasses of skinned skunks in mailboxes. Perhaps worst of all had been two youngsters who starved a feral cat, fed its hamburger cod liver oil, after which let it unfastened within the closed dressing room throughout a dance on the native schoolhouse.

Bill laughed on the reminiscence of the youthful chaos of his father’s acquaintances.

“You just want to go back to that time,” he mentioned.

Gene even had his personal encounter with a warden whereas residing in Sweet Grass County. He was strolling down a avenue with a most of three pheasants on opening morning when the keeper pulled up in his car.

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

Despite his success with pheasants, Gene wrote that in his youth “there were no deer on the prairie and in the pine-hill country.”

“I was six years old before I saw my first antelope while living in what is now the heart of antelope country,” he added.

challenges

By the time Gene grew to become Warden, game populations had slowly began to rise once more, thanks partly to enforcement by officers like himself, simply in time for a renewed onslaught of hunters and anglers after World War II. Still, he known as the bag limits and seasons on the time “arbitrary.”

“It became almost fatal for the (mule deer) since they were practically hunted in Montana,” Gene wrote. In liberalized seasons every hunter might take as much as six deer.

His superiors did not need the wardens to upset the folks they cited, Gene famous. Lawmakers would typically drop infractions for associates. The first biologists employed had been secretive and distant. At least one sports activities membership did not care about wildlife conservation, the ebook claims.

Still, Montana was one of many first to take state management of wildlife when the 1872 huge game season was licensed. The first game wardens had been appointed in 1889, simply two years earlier than the company was fashioned. Eight game wardens had been initially employed to patrol the huge state. By the top of his profession, Gene was answerable for boating and tenting legal guidelines along with imposing searching and fishing legal guidelines, Bill mentioned.

issues with the automobile

In the early Fifties, the division made its first state autos accessible to Wardens, which had been infamous for his or her bumpy, swaying dealing with, poor heaters that just about chilled drivers in winter, and quarter-inch gaps in some panels that allowed snow and mud leaked, earned the nickname “Sherman tanks” weighed inside. The autos had been so poorly constructed that it was not unusual for them to actually collapse on the highway. A guard restrained his with seat belts to make it to Helena and commerce within the deteriorating torso.

In one incident, Gene recalled, he and a henchman tied and tied up a mule deer buck that had grow to be too pleasant on a ranch and was feeding in his spouse’s yard. As Gene drove down the highway to maneuver the animal, it broke freed from its restraints and commenced thrashing about in the back of the staff.

“Once the deer realized it was loose and able to stand up, it was like a mad squirrel in a cage,” Gene wrote. “I pulled over, got out, slammed the door and watched the buck rip through the Suburban’s interior.”

He couldn’t free the animal till the lasso he had left across the deer’s neck might be minimize off by way of a lowered window. After the deer was free, Gene examined the harm to his spare clothes and Suburban’s upholstery. Despite steam cleansing and repainting the inside of the car, the odor of the deer remained.

Speaking of wildlife and autos, Gene writes about working at wildlife management stations and discovering bloated animals in suitcases virtually twice their regular dimension as a result of they hadn’t been cleaned.

“We found illegal fish and birds in everything from a vehicle’s hubcaps to suitcases made to look like a lady’s luggage,” he wrote.

The finish

As Gene famous on the finish of the ebook, one factor hasn’t modified for game wardens through the years.

“You are exposing yourself to a situation not required of any other peace officer in the state. Roughly half of the people you screen for various reasons (and half of those you need to issue a ticket for) are armed with everything from a .22 caliber handgun to a .300 H&H rifle.”

But the writer confessed that after leaving the troupe it had left a void in his life that was tough to fill. So he labored as an undersheriff in Wheatland County earlier than being compelled to resign as a consequence of unwell well being. He then started hand portray black and white images he had taken of the agricultural panorama.

Bill remembered his father as a multi-talent and attributed it to his rural upbringing when folks needed to make do with what they’d.

Later, Gene even constructed speedboats for seaplanes and repaired firearms.

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

“I realized that part of the Wild West was quickly disappearing,” he mentioned.

The painted images had been a means of preserving an period that noticed Gene disappear in Montana, as did his ebook.

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

“I like to think that I helped contribute to the wildlife heritage of Montana,” he concluded in Cry of the Hunted.

Bill mentioned when he reread his father’s ebook, it reminded him of plenty of household historical past that he had forgotten.