Bloody Dick Cabin

In the summer of 2022, Jamie was slowing down. He only took short walks, at a slow pace, and his endurance for pack playtime was limited. But he still loved to get out to explore new places, so we fit in as much of that as we could, all summer long.

One of those outings was an overnight trip to Bloody Dick Cabin on Wednesday, July 27. I had made the reservation months earlier, because this is a place I had read about, in an area I wanted to explore. But before getting into the story of Jamie's visit, a brief digression to answer the obvious question: where did the name Bloody Dick come from?

The last American mountain man?

Bloody Dick Cabin was built by the Forest Service in 1905 high in the Bitterroot Mountains to honor a man who had spent much of his life in that area. Bloody Dick, the cabin's namesake, was an unusual combination: a rugged trapper, guide, and scout who spent his life in the mountains, but also an avid reader and writer who recorded the details of that life. Historians know quite a lot about him, because of the numerous letters he wrote to friends as well as his detailed diary, much of which is preserved to this day in various historical collections.

Dick was born Richard Leigh in 1832 in England, and immigrated to the US at age 7 with his family. In his late 20s, he moved to the area of Wyoming near the Tetons, and after developing a reputation as an expert beaver trapper he became known as Beaver Dick. Years later, when he was living up in the Beaverhead Mountains in Montana, the locals often referred to him as Bloody Dick, because his favorite expression was "bloody hell."

From 1860, when he arrived in the area around the Teton Range, to his death in 1899 in Idaho, Dick was a well-known trapper, scout, and guide, widely respected by both white people and Native Americans. Numerous landmarks are named after him, including Bloody Dick Creek and Bloody Dick Peak in southwest Montana near the Idaho border.

The legend of Bloody Dick is huge, with many fascinating stories. Because of his reputation, he was often called upon to work as a scout to lead hunting expeditions, mountaineering expeditions, and geological surveys, and that work made his reputation travel even farther. In 1891, he was visited by a hunter from New York who wanted to meet Dick after hearing legend of him being "the last of the mountain men." The two discussed their experiences in the mountains and went their separate ways, and ten years later that hunter — Teddy Roosevelt – was elected the 26th President of the United States.

I've done a lot of reading about Bloody Dick, and a good place to start if you're interested is the well-written and thoroughly researched article on WyoHistory.org entited Beaver Dick Leigh, Mountain Man of the Tetons.

The story of Dick's relationship with the Shoshone tribe is fascinating. He was close friends with many Shoshone leaders, and acted as a liaison between them and the white people for decades. The photo above shows Dick and his Shoshone wife Jenny with their five children, and a few years after this photo was taken the entire family contracted smallpox from a visiting Indian woman. Dick survived, but Jenny and the children all perished. A few years after that, Dick married another Shoshone – a teenager named Susan Tadpole, who had been promised to him at birth by her father, in a show of gratitude for Dick's assistance in Susan's difficult childbirth 16 years earlier. Dick and Susan went on to have three children, and his affection and admiration for both of his Shoshone wives comes through often in his letters and diary entries.

That's a long diversion, but that's why it's called Bloody Dick Cabin! Back to Jamie's story ...

Getting there

The drive from Butte to Bloody Dick Cabin goes south on I-15 through Dillon before heading west on Highway 324 past Clark Canyon Reservoir.

Clark Canyon Reservoir was formed in the 1960s by an earth-filled dam on the Beaverhead River, to preserve water for irrigation and help with flood control. The reservoir flooded a wide shallow valley that had been the site of Camp Fortunate, where the Lewis and Clark expedition camped for five days while negotiating with the Shoshone in August 1805.

After driving past the Horse Prairie area (where Jamie and I had spent a night at a cabin in the summer of 2021), we turned on a gravel forest service road and started climbing up into the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, Montana's largest national forest. It would be 18 more miles to the cabin.

At the cabin

I rarely recorded video back then, so I was pleased to find while researching this post that have a video on my phone taken just after Jamie and I arrived at the cabin.

Although it's located far out in a wilderness area at elevation 7100 feet just below the Continental Divide, Bloody Dick Cabin isn't as primitive as some of the cabins Jamie and I had stayed at before. It has a propane stove, nice bunk beds, running water in the summer, and the exterior looked like it had been freshly painted in the last year or so.

We had dinner and took a short walk, then settled in for the night.

I had planned this trip for the new moon, so that there would be no moonlight and we could get some star photos at night. But I didn't realize that Bloody Dick Cabin is in the middle of a dense stand of tall lodgepole pine trees, so the only view of the stars is straight up through the trees. I didn't feel like driving to a more open location, so we just took one long exposure from the front porch of the cabin.

After I took a star photo, Jamie seemed to want to go out. So I let him out off-leash near the cabin, thinking he needed to do his business. But he just wanted to wander, and he repeatedly started to walk away into the woods and then I'd have to call him and make him come back.

This area of the Bitterroot Mountains is home to moose, mountain lions, black bears, grizzly bears, and even a few wolves, so I wasn't going to let him walk far. But he just seemed to want to look around and sniff around, and eventually he decided he'd seen enough and we went back in the cabin to get a little more sleep.

The drive home

We needed to get an early start on our drive home, because we were doing this trip on a work night and I hadn't taken any time off. We had left home at 4:30 the day before, right after my last meeting of the day, and now this morning I needed to be online for a team meeting I needed to run every Thursday at 10:00. So we were packed up and on the road by 6:00.

We took a different route back than the way we'd come, driving north along a forest service road to the town of Jackson, Montana, 23 miles away.

We got home in plenty of time for my meeting, and I started the meeting by showing everyone the moose photo I had taken a few hours earlier. Others on the call were in Seattle, Ottawa, New York, and Los Angeles, so none of them had moose sightings to report for that morning.