Western royalty

Frank Bird Linderman inducted into cowboy museum's Hall of Fame

One of Montana's greatest names has gone national with a recent induction and grand ceremony at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

Frank Bird Linderman - legislator, author, sculptor, journalist and Indian advocate - was inducted April 21 with his granddaughter, Kalispell's Sally Hatfield, accepting the honor.

"It was just like the Academy Awards," she recalls. "It was scary."

Hatfield took to the stage with her husband, Bob, and son, Mark, and words for an audience of about 1,500 people, most of them wearing cowboy hats.

"I watched my grandfather write, and model the likes of Crow Chief Plenty Coups and Charlie Russell," Hatfield said in her speech. "I listened to him talk to animals and sing to birds. He was my hero."

"She really did a good job," Bob Hatfield said of his wife. "A lot of those directors and producers get up there and stammer and stutter, but she didn't."

The Hatfields left the stage with a bronze cowboy-on-horseback sculpture called the "Wrangler Award." They rubbed elbows with celebrities, including actor and master of cermonies Sam Elliot, actor Ernest Borgnine, country musician Michael Martin Murphy and Hollywood producer Thad Turner.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I don't know how I got through it but I did," Sally Hatfield said. "We even walked in on a red carpet."

The Hall of Fame has different categories. Frank Linderman was enrolled into the Hall of Great Westerners - a roster of about 200 people that includes his friend and famed Western artist Charles M. Russell, and other famous names such as Jim Bridger, Chief Joseph and "Buffalo Bill" Cody.

Getting Linderman picked for the Hall of Great Westerners was no easy or fast task, with just one or two people being added to the Hall every year, said Bob Hatfield, who started pursuing the nomination process in 2002.

That process required five recommendations from historical authorities. These were also leading authorities on Charles Russell, who often visited the Linderman cabin on Flathead Lake's Goose Bay.

While visiting the National Cowboy Museum, the Hatfields got to see once again an artifact that demontrates the Linderman-Russell friendship - a .30-caliber rifle owned by Linderman with wildlife etchings from the hand and pocketknife of Russell. Bob Hatfield remembers handling the firearm before it was prominently displayed in a glass case at the museum in the mid-1980s.

The story of Russell etching the rifle is featured in a Linderman book about Russell.

There have been 22 Linderman books published, 14 before his death in 1938, and eight that have been published largely through the efforts of his granddaughter.

Sally Hatfield is working on another posthumous Linderman book, based on short stories and essays written about people from different eras in Montana history. The theme of the book is trapping, gold-mining and livestock, with the appropriate name, "Fur, Gold and Grass."

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com