Andrew Garcia saw the curtains close on the Western frontier while he was still playing his part. He recorded his wildest days on thousands of pages stashed away in old dynamite boxes at his ranch near present-day Alberton. Unlike other mountain men and women of the frontier, he could read and write, leaving us with more than just hand-me-down tales.
Garcia was born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, and at 23 he made his way north to Montana as a packer and herder at Fort Ellis in Bozeman. It was there he met a raging alcoholic trapper named Beaver Tom. Garcia saw no need for drink, and he didn’t know how to gamble, which, as he wrote, was the only thing to do in the West on your time off. As a result, Garcia had saved quite a bit of his Army salary. Beaver Tom was an experienced trapper who needed someone to bankroll his trapping habit. He talked Garcia into venturing east into Montana’s Musselshell country to trap and trade. The year was 1878, and so began Garcia’s autobiography, Tough Trip Through Paradise.
The book is a colorful, no-holds-barred romp through the last of Montana’s frontier. It recounts Garcia’s time trading with, running from, chasing, and marrying into the last free Native American tribes in Montana. But before he can actually trap or trade, Garica must work, and I mean work, to keep Beaver Tom from drowning himself in whiskey. In one passage, Tom had gone on a three-day bender, replacing food with whiskey. After Garcia watched Tom crawl around on all fours and toss imaginary rattlesnakes out of camp, he decided to sober the man up. In a skillet, Garcia boiled up a tonic with a few heaping scoops of old bear grease Tom used to lubricate his rifle, pepper and whiskey. He made Tom drink the concoction while threatening to smash in his head if he didn’t. Just as entertaining are snippets of Garcia’s everyday frontier wisdom such as, “They say in case of fire, it is always good to go to bed wearing your pants.”
By all accounts, Garcia didn’t necessarily want to see his tales in print. His family wasn’t keen on his previous Native American wives, nor was Gladys, his bride at the time. Yet in 1928, at the urging of a historian, he sat down to write of his time on Montana’s frontier. Thankfully for us, his tales are still around today.
