field trips

by Marcia E. Williams

Returning to graduate school in 2021, I joined my creative writing classmates on a field trip to Fort Missoula during a perfect mid-September evening. We straggled behind our guide, under blue Montana skies with wispy clouds, over a background chatter of birds, commotion from nearby soccer games, and our own footsteps. The chucka-chucka-chucka of rotating sprinklers splatted us with cold water. My notes bled ink; those pages buckled from their splashing.

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Established in 1877 for what was then called Missoula Mills, Fort Missoula ostensibly protected the settlement from Native American incursions but more realistically attracted settlers and their attendant trade. Missoula streets today are named after the men who orchestrated this.

Three structures remain from the original Fort: a root cellar, a brick munitions storehouse, and a shotgun-style log cabin duplex that served as non-commissioned officers' quarters.                        

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This was my first field trip in over fifty years. My prior one had been during elementary school in New Rochelle, New York, within commuting distance to New York City, when our class jostled onto a school bus for a trip to see a movie. In that pre-GPS, pre-cell phone era, the bus driver became lost, mandating multiple stops for him to park, leave the bus, and call frantically for directions. We could have visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, or untold other cultural sites. Instead, we saw Dr. Doolittle, the 1967 movie musical starring Rex Harrison that wasn't even bad enough to become a cult classic.

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During World War II Fort Missoula held 1000 Italian men as prisoners of war. Three barracks used to house POWs and interned men during WWII remain. The only discharge of a firearm during the Fort's history was during the Olive Oil Riot when the Italian POWs learned that due to supply problems, they would no longer receive olive oil to cook with. A kerfuffle ensued, and in climbing down from a guard tower, one of the US soldiers accidentally shot himself in the foot.

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In his essay, Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa, David Sedaris writes of a fifth-grade field trip taken by his partner Hugh in which the class visited an Ethiopian slaughterhouse.

In July/August 2021, Atlantic magazine, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes of a fifth-grade field trip her Rochester, New York, class took to the Eastman Museum. At the tour's end, the docent gave each child a copy of George Eastman's suicide letter, "My work is done. Why wait?"

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The 25th Infantry Division of Black soldiers was stationed at Fort Missoula. Besides testing the use of bicycles in the military, this was one of the first divisions sent to the Spanish American War. Purportedly beloved in Missoula—as evidenced by their band being invited to perform in parades—that Infantry Division was, on its return from Cuba, sent to Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican border. Accusations of shooting two white men led to the dishonorable discharge of the entire division by President Teddy Roosevelt, with whose Rough Riders they had served in Cuba. This form of discharge denied these servicemen pensions, but by the time the accusations were proved false and the pensions reinstated, only one soldier remained alive. He refused to claim his.

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In Tennessee in the mid-1990s I knew an elderly woman who had grown up in Nashville and told me of a field trip she'd taken, likely in the 1920s. Her class, possibly also fifth-grade, visited the penitentiary where they were shown the electric chair.

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After Pearl Harbor, the Issei—first generation Japanese men who, due to restrictive immigration laws, could not become citizens—underwent Loyalty Hearings at the Fort. The average age of the Issei was sixty, and they had been in the US for an average of thirty years. If they passed their hearing, they weren't released, merely sent to a less-restrictive camp where they might be reunited with their families. If they failed, they went to a more restrictive camp. The Fort retained no records of the men housed or administered their Loyalty Hearings there but is developing such a list based on visitors who tell of relatives interned at Fort Missoula.

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The sun's orb, brilliant orange from smoke particles in the air, dipped below the western horizon as lenticular clouds morphed from warm pink to flat gray. We hurried to squeeze in the Grant Creek Schoolhouse, built by Jeanette Rankin's father; Hellgate Chapel—originally St. Michael's—and dating from 1863 the oldest structure at Fort Missoula; the 1918 LaFrance fire engine that was used until the 1970s with its strainer to keep fish out of the intake hose when they pulled water from the Clark Fork River. We rushed to see the Black Foot Stage Coach, last used in a 1932 race; the trolley that ran until the 1930s between the town of Bonner and Fort Missoula; and learned that it was illegal to shoot rabbits out the window of the trolley. The sprinklers still spat cold arcs of water as we headed to the parking lot.

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The Fort acknowledges occupying Salish and Kalispell historic grounds and refers visitors to the Ninepipes Museum in Charlo, Montana, so that the Native Americans may tell their own story.

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What of the Fort? We attended expecting to stay dry, to listen to the prepared narrative, but the real message was splattered on us by irrigation heads, jets of water bathing us in what had remained unsaid. Can any field trip convey unvarnished truth, or is the lesson that we must engage not only with what we hear and read but with what we observe and know independently, in order to ferret out our own truths?

Photo of Marcia E. Williams

BIO: Cornerstone Press will publish Marcia's memoir, "Departures" in 2026. She has worked as an assistant editor for Narrative magazine and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana.