"Gopher" hunting in Montana

[timmy]

Thanks for your kind words regarding my story of the unsuccessful elk hunt.

The other story that came to mind is more like a collection of stories, and it regards my much loved pastime of shooting "gophers." Out in Montana, there are local names for various creatures that don't match what those creatures are called in other areas of the country. For instance, in Montana, a raven (Corvus corax) is called a crow, even though in other areas of the country, the name "crow" denotes a smaller bird, Corvus brachyrhynchos.

(As a matter of trivial digression, a group of crows is called a "murder" and a group of ravens is called an "unkindness." I always wanted to say that...)

Anyhow, Western Montana has (had?) vast numbers of the Columbian Ground Squirrel (Spermophilus columbianus). In Montana, these are called "gophers," even though a gopher is a different animal. These ground squirrels (I'll have to call them "gophers" from here on, because otherwise I'll get confused) live in colonies like the more famous prairie dog, but they are much smaller. A small colony of them will eat as much grass as a cow, and because of this and because cows and horses occasionally will get their legs broken by stumbling in a burrow, ranchers don't care for them very much.

They are found all over Southwestern Montana in grassy "parks" (large areas free of trees) and it was my passion to go hunt them. Toward the end of the 80s, when we left Montana, it was quite common for ranchers to poison them and the hunting opportunities began to decline, along with the buying up of land by dudes in small parcels. If I recall correctly, Montana's land tax code called parcels of land that were over 20 acres to be taxed as agricultural land, and if a home was erected on the parcel, only the acre the home was on was taxed as residential. This was to keep the countryside from being filled with homes, but dudes would buy up 20 acre + parcels (usually called "ranchettes") to take advantage of this tax law.

It was because of this law that a friend of mine located a large, open park in an area now called Pintlar Meadows. I found a picture on the web from a real estate sales company here:

http://www.loopnet.com/Attachments/0/6/ ... 9236__.jpg

that is somewhere around this area. If you were to travel from Elkhorn Hot Springs by Coolidge and to the town of Wise River on the Big Hole River, going a little west on the highway and then turning north on Mill Creek Road would take you to this area.

My friend was a surveyor and was the one who laid out the lines for dividing all of this area up into ranchettes, and he found the place absolutely lousy with gophers. Turning off of Mill Creek Road and going a mile or two toward Seymour Lake would bring one to the north side of a huge open park, maybe about 9 square miles. Smack in the middle of this park was a log cabin ranch house, a barn, and several outbuildings that were all broken down and abandoned, though the walls were still standing. At the far south side of this park, a creek ran along through some trees and slightly marshy open area. The whole setting was so quiet that, after one got past the old ranch house, the water in the creek was pretty audible if there wasn't too much wind.

I have an old Harley Davidson KH -- a 1956 (it is like the one in this link: http://www.motorcyclemuseum.org/classics/bike.asp?id=21, tho it looks pretty ragged. I rebuilt the engine and in runs pretty good -- I rode it all over Western Montana and that's certainly another story...) and I used to take my Marlin M39, put it in a gun sleeve, tie a piece of rope around the muzzle and stock, and sling it over my shoulder. I had an old army surplus backpack in which I'd throw a brick (500 rounds of .22), a handgun of some sort (usually a .38 Special, a 1911 .45 ACP, or my Ruger .45 Colt), some ammo for the handgun, and a water bottle or two. On the Harley I'd jump and I'd be off to this area, about a 50 mile ride. There were no cities and only a few small towns on the way, so there would be very little traffic. It was sure that I'd do this on the 4th of July, because the kids and my Wife wanted to go to the city parade and I hated parades -- they were nothing but big drunks in that place.

There was one spot at the southeast corner of the park where there was a little cabin on a small flat, separated from the park by a ridge. All around the cabin were many gophers. I'd take a book and settle down in a spot and begin to shoot. After a number of shots, the gophers would go to ground. That was time to pick up the book and begin to read. You can see from the picture that there were mountains. There was also the sound of the creek and maybe some wind in the trees, and an occasional bumblebee or horsefly would go by -- because it was so quiet, they were very obvious, though normally they couldn't be seen.

I'd just get engrossed in the book, because you never shoot the first gopher that comes up -- you wait until the whole town is up again, and then resume shooting. The little things are quite smart. For instance, sometimes you won't see a one out -- check out the sky and you will likely see a hawk flying about.

Another fun game was to go out with a friend who had an old Chevy pickup with a manual 4 speed truck transmission. In the USA, these transmissions have a very low gear (called the "granny gear") used for pulling farm or construction equipment around at very slow speeds. At first, we would get in the back and shoot over the cab of the truck, but bouncing through the park, we couldn't hit anything. We found it much better to ride in the truck until we came upon a nice, active town and just open the door and get out. The truck, in granny gear, would wander off, lurching about from bump to bump, while we walked along shooting. When the shooting was done, it was easy to catch up to the truck, even though it had wandered off driverless. The park was so open and free of obstacles that there was never any danger of doing this.

My Wife would sometimes get irritated with my wandering off to my gopher hunting on a Saturday without the family (we had 4 small kids then, two boys and two girls. All of them have now been married for over 10 years.) So, one time I took the family with me. My Wife set up a picnic lunch and took a book to read, and we went out to the ranch house to have our picnic. Afterwards, I wandered off shooting, but I could always hear what was going on. At one point, I heard my older son (probably 7 at the time) telling my Wife he had to go to the bathroom, but it wasn't the sort of problem that was easily taken care of. Other things were said, but I could make out him insisting that he "knew how to." I moved further away, knowing that there were going to be problems. My son went into the ruins of the ranch house and got everything right except for the squatting part. On the way home, he was very insulted that his older sister and the other two made him sit on the other side of the truck box...

Sometimes I would go out and spend all day. I took friends, family, whoever wanted to go. To be out all day could get a little tedious -- I can recall going to bed after a session and, after closing my eyes, still seeing those gophers standing up by their holes in my mind. Anyhow, I would always take a handgun and when I got bored with shooting with the .22, I'd start up with the handgun I had brought.

I am a very keen aficionado of the 1911, but the problem was that they throw brass every which way. Empty .45 ACP brass actually has a mind of its own and is very sneaky: it hides under sagebrush and rocks and is a real problem to find. We didn't have a lot of money for my shooting and I'd make up all my ammunition. That way, I could shoot my handguns about as cheaply as a .22. I'd dig up the bullets from the embankment behind the targets at the gun club range and cast my own bullets. .45 ACP brass was usually readily available in the gutters on the edge of the roof covering the shooting positions -- it was the first thing to check when I arrived. So about a penny per primer and a penny for some Bullseye or Unique was about the same cost as shooting a .22.

That's why I soon left the 1911 for the range and why I bought the two Colt .38 Specials I had shown to you earlier -- I actually got them to shoot gophers with.

Hitting a gopher with a handgun is a bit of a challenge. One generally does well to get within 25 yards of a gopher. In my younger days, I could keep 10 rounds of .45 ACP in the black at 25 yards, but the bull of a 25 yard centerfire pistol target is a lot bigger than a gopher, for sure. Gophers are also very hard to kill and anchor where you hit them. The next part of the story is true as can be, I guarantee you, but I doubt that you will believe it.

I was out with my Dad and Brother once, and this time I had my Ruger .45 Colt. I was pretty close to a gopher who was standing on the mound above his hole -- a great shot. I was able to slowly crouch down and take a rest on a rock. The gopher was about 20 yards off and with a two handed hold on a firm rest, I was sure I could take him. I touched off the bus-like slug and sent it on its way, and quickly jumped up to see my trophy -- only, there wasn't any. I could clearly see the prominent furrow that the 230 grain slug left in the dirt beyond the hole. It was right on line with where the gopher was standing. But, there was no gopher. I was sure that an encounter with such a large bullet would anchor a gopher, but though I searched and searched, he was nowhere to be seen.

Finally, I looked down the burrow and at the edge of my vision, I saw a tail. Getting a couple of sticks, I managed to get hold of the tail and I pulled the gopher out. I had hit him alright -- dead center in the neck. There were two strips of fur and hide that held his head on his shoulders, and the bullet had removed the rest. But still, he had made it that far down the hole, and there was no way he could have fallen in that position as far as I could see. Thank goodness he didn't charge me!

I was not the only fanatic about gopher shooting. My Mom and Dad lived in Ennis, and there were old retired guys around there who did nothing but shoot gophers. Sometimes, the ranchers would even buy the ammo for them. If you drove down the road and saw an old duffer (well, that's what I thought then, but I guess I'm one now myself) or two sitting in a car on the shoulder or in a field, you could bet that they were out shooting gophers. I had heard from my Dad that it was not unknown for these guys to wear out a Ruger 10/22 at this work.

Mom and Dad made many friends there and there was a wealthy couple who owned the store in town who had a very large and fancy home up on the ridge to the west of Ennis, by the golf course. This guy had had his lungs damaged when he was young from smoke inhalation in a forest fire, and when he got old, the high altitude of Ennis would bother him, even though he was on oxygen. So they would stay for short times and spend most of their time in a house they had in Arizona.

One year, they asked Mom and Dad to stay in this house. It was very nice, with a indoor hot tub room and satellite TV dish -- a big deal in 1985 for us! So we would go down and spend the weekend with them and go to church there. Because of where the house was, it was often windy -- I mean, really windy! So the rich people had put large panes of thick plate glass -- the kind you find in large store windows -- round the deck in the front of the house and in an "L" shape around the back door. Evidently, they lost quite a few screen doors from having the wind pull them open and rip them away.

Now, this house was located on the golf course and all around, it was thick with gophers. My Brother had bought a Browning .22 Auto and so he gave Dad his old Mossberg bolt, which was fitted with a scope. One day, Dad was sitting out by the back door looking for a gopher to shoot through the scope. (I should say here that my Dad was on the 7th Inf. Regimental target team before WW2 -- he was a superb shot with rifle and handgun.) He found a nice fat one and squeezed off a round. Looking through the scope, he was shocked to see that the gopher hadn't even budged. He decided to fire again, but when he pulled his face away from the stock a little bit, he saw the star in the big sheet of plate glass by the back door. He'd shot right into it!

Well, Mom and Dad were really worried -- they didn't want the rich people to find out that Dad had shot one of their plate glass screens, so they called a glass company. When the piece arrived from Bozeman, the guy drove up to the house to put it in. Dad came out to meet him and as soon as the window guy saw the damaged pane, he said, "Oh, I see we have a piece of gopher glass here!"

It was my gopher shooting that caused me to want to set up a long barreled 38 Special on an old Colt Official Police, something I'd still like to do. I've also thought about using one of the Mosin Nagant actions I have for building up a .22 Hornet or .218 Bee gopher gun. But now, I have been thinking more about the fabled huge prairie dog towns of West Texas, and they may need a bit more power than a Hornet or Bee can deliver. The thing is, you want something that you can shoot a lot for this.

Before I left Montana, I fitted my Ruger #1 with a 12x Weaver AO scope to use for rockchucks (some call them marmots). This sort of shooting was normally 200 yards or more, sometimes quite a bit more. The long ranges made a bigger bullet a good thing, and the rockchucks were pretty large animals -- bigger than a housecat sometimes. They are like a giant gopher, I guess. I did some work tuning up my #1, free floating the barrel from the fore end and dialing up a nice load, for which I settled on a 130 gr Sierra boat tail on top of 59gr of 4831 (IIRC). Talking about cartridge OAL, the throat on the Ruger was cut so long that I could not seat the boat tail bullet out far enough to touch the rifling.

But after all that, I only went out once before we moved, and that was enough to find out that I had some things to learn about rockchuck shooting. That's a pastime I look to picking up once I can leave these flat lands and get back to the mountains, where I belong.

The thing I like about varmint shooting is that you can do a lot of it -- there's a lot of shooting. For me, the key is to have something that is fairly inexpensive to shoot and yet accurate enough in the shooter's hands to do the job.

Even though all of this took place over 20 years ago, I can still mentally picture the places and the scenes of doing this quite well. It was a very relaxing thing to be out in such a beautiful place, a place that was so peaceful and undisturbed by hordes of people. Sadly, those kinds of places are getting harder and harder to find in the mountains. I hope that when the chance comes to go back, there will still be some hidden pockets left for me.

One thing I'm very interested in now is having a few of my South Asian friends come and visit us, when we do move. All of the friends I've made have not ventured out of the city. One fellow I worked with grew up in Chicago after moving to the USA, and now is in Dallas. He has never driven out of the City! I do look forward very much to taking my friends to see ancient Native American pueblos. Maybe they will be more interested in the casinos, but whatever I can do to lure them out to paradise, that's OK. I can take them to places where they would expect to see Jackie Shroff dancing with Madhuri!

[snIPer]

Timmy, that is a lovely write up. thanks for taking the time to pen it down. would sure like to hear more of your hunting tales - with pics if possible
/s/

[penpusher]

Timmy,

I really enjoyed reading that.Thanks for posting it.

[dev]

Man you can really wind a tale well. Such a pleasure to read and I appreciate the hard work put in. I really like your talk easy style of writing, very nice technique.

Thank you,

Dev

Bozeman Montana is the setting of 'Zen and the art of motocycle maintenance', you aren't better known as Robert Pirsig are you?

[Sakobav]

Timmy

Thanks for posting a big fan of big mountain country. Worked in Idaho, Eastern Washington state its great country up there.

Best

[sudhaiob]

Timmy
you are a very good raconteur of nature yarns. on a serious side why don' you submit your articles to some out door magazines. i am sure it would be well received. keep them coming.
regs
sudhaiob

[nagarifle]

once again a good campfire story. did you ever get to a place called kelspel? or something sounds like that. near the candid an border, close the international pass, st mary or ann i can not rember. been some time back when i was in those parts.

never did ghoper liky but did run a few over in Calgary near Medicain Hat area.

i do rember the roadside hamburger joint, for a doller you could get a great big burger forget the green stuff, so big(like everything else in the Big sky country) needed a fork and knife to cut into small bits. man what a state Montana is.

Timmy keep the story coming some pics would be good. thank you

[timmy]

Nagarifle: Yes, my wife had "important" relatives who lived in Kalispell. That's to the southwest side of Glacier National Park. They also had a summer home on the northeast corner of Flathead Lake.

Somewhere out of West Glacier, on the way to Columbia Falls, my Dad used to visit a fly-tying shop (Dad was an avid fly fisherman in the days before it was fashionable) that was owned by a colorful fellow named "Crazy" Otto Schneider. Crazy Otto's place was noteworthy for its deer and elk antlers, which lined the edges of the lawn, the sidewalk, and the eves of the building. Inside, the walls were covered with mounted heads of all sorts of critters, many of them with pork pie hats, sunglasses, cigarets hanging out of their mouths, and other such nonsense. Crazy Otto was a real character. He had an old gray 4 door Desoto for the early 50s. Inside the car on the passenger side, he had a life-sized wooden Native American, which he used to duck behind and grunt at women walking by on the streets of Kalispell to see their reactions.

As you may know, rodents like gophers and chipmunks and mice will gnaw on antlers to get the calcium. But Crazy Otto never ran out of antlers, because he was great friends and drinking buddies with the Native Americans who lived all around. They would collect them from the forests for him. One time, when I was a kid of about 10 years old, Otto asked my Dad if he would take some magazines over to Babb (on the east side of Glacier Park) for some women friends of his. He gave Dad a huge stack of boxing and wrestling magazines, of which Otto's Native American girlfriends were apparently quite fond. We went to a bar in Babb and my Dad went in to drop them off, but beg as I might, he wouldn't let me go in with him.

Only once, when I was about 12, was I in the Banff-Lake Louise area. I don't recall a lot about it, except the Lake and the Hotel on the Lake, and the Columbia Ice Fields. It always fascinated me that those ice fields were supposed to be a 3-way continental divide, where waters drained to the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Arctic Oceans.

Anyway, I am thinking about a couple of stories, one having to do with a deer hunt in Eastern Montana, and the other a camping trip to Utah.

[nagarifle]

Thanks Timmy for sharing, i do remember seeing a wooden dummy in Kalispell, not sure if that was near the outlaw inn or some where near by. not many characters like crazy otto are left these days.

been to few places in the state but the Big sky country is the best in my book. look forward to reading more of the same.

[penpusher]

Timmy,

Not many people can put down in words their experiences.Rarer still are people whose writings I wish to read.I am looking forward to read what you have to write next.

[Pran]

Thanks for the great write-up Timmy. Enjoyed reading every bit of it. Looking forward to read your deer hunt stories as well.

Pran

[mundaire]

Excellent read Timmy, thank you for putting this up

Cheers!
Abhijeet