1 week Ago By JAKE IVERSON [email protected]
Vine Dorian Broken Rope was one of the great artists in Montana history. But if you want to see his work up close, you’ve got to break a few rules. People compared Broken Rope’s paintings to C.
M. Russell’s, and his works hung on the walls of Billings luminaries — Mayor Willard Fraser, who transformed Billings into the biggest city in the state, was a known collector. So was Gerald Dunbar, who was a Billings Police officer for three decades and chief from 1968 to 1977.
This sketch hung in Police Chief Gerald Dunbar's office. The carceral connection makes sense, because Broken Rope’s best-known works, or at least his most accessible, are on the walls of the old Billings jail at 220 N. 27th St.
That building, which was Billings’ City Hall before they moved to new digs at the Stillwater Building, has three holding cells plus a drunk tank. The jail is on its third floor, barred windows facing the Rims to the north. The remnants of the prison facilities are mostly still there — a shower, the little windows that used to peer into the visitation room — but nobody’s been held behind these bars since 1974.
That’s when the city stopped holding prisoners in their own lockup, instead opting for the county facility, which at the time was on the eighth floor of the courthouse across the street. Donald drake, James Hoff, Phillip May and Leonard Kilwein cling to their capsized boat in Vine Broken Rope's cartoon. And even before then, nobody did hard time here.
The Billings jail was too small to hold more than a handful of prisoners, and most of the people who got locked up here were only held overnight. Still, Broken Rope spent a lot of time in here. Search his name on newspapers.
com and you’ll find it attached to a litany of charges. On July 29, 1968, alone, the Hardin Harald noted his citations for driving without a license ($25 fine), public intoxication ($40 fine and 10 days in jail) and resisting an officer ($50 fine). The Arizona Republic snapped this photo of Vine Broken Rope in September 1969.
Broken Rope, who was Oglala Lakota, was born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, on Nov. 11, 1933, and grew up in Rapid City. After a stint in the Marines, where he achieved the rank of Corporal and served in the Battle of Inchon, the decisive victory in the Korean War, Broken Rope wound up first in Phoenix and eventually Billings in 1963.
He was a popular figure around town, and unmistakable. Broken Rope had a face that told a story. A scar ran from his right ear to the corner of his mouth.
He had a red mustache and gray eyes, traits linked back to his distant ancestor Pierre Dorion, a Canadian trader who lived with the Lakota for decades, briefly worked as an interpreter for the Corps of Discovery and was one of the first white men to enter Montana. Vine Broken Rope's artwork can be seen at the old Billings City Hall jail on North 27th Street. And boy could he draw.
He could create things you wouldn’t believe. Broken Rope picked up that skill young. His father, Godfrey Broken Rope, was a painter and Episcopal minister.
But things really clicked for Vine after he saw pieces by the Brulé Lakota master Moses Stranger Horse, who pained under the name “Sundown.” “I looked at his work and I thought it was good,” Broken Rope told a Gazette reporter in 1971. “It was an easy way to go.
” Art might’ve come easy, but he struggled with life. “I drink and I get wild and get in trouble,” he admitted in that Gazette article. “But no matter what, I don’t hock my easel.
” Painting got him out of some of that trouble. He painted the lettering of every door in Billings’ old City Hall to work off fines. The cops would pester him to draw buffalo, drums and other Native American tableaus.
But not all of Broken Rope’s run-ins with the law had such clean endings. In June 1972 he was found unconscious and bloody next to the train tracks near 27th Street. When he woke up in the emergency room, he explained that he made a bet that he could jump onto and then off of a moving train while staying on his feet.
He lost that bet. Broken Rope was patched up at St. Vincent’s and went back on his way, but on July 28, 1973, he had a run-in he couldn’t walk away from.
Outside Rifle, Colorado, Broken Rope fell from a train and was killed. His body was returned to Billings, and after a funeral at the Four Square Gospel Church in Crow Agency, he was buried, with military rites, at Custer National Cemetery. He was 39 years old.
But Vine Broken Rope’s story doesn’t end there. He created too much to be truly gone. You just need to know where to look for him.
Vine Broken Rope's pink elephant decorates the drunk tank at the old Billings City Hall jail on North 27th Street. The old Billings city jail is the best spot. There are nine original Broken Ropes in there.
Two of them are big pink elephants, with bloodshot eyes and water bottles on their heads. They are, of course, painted on the walls of the drunk tank. The others, which are stuffed into a narrow hallway one person has to squeeze through to get down, aren’t western scenes he was known for.
They’re cartoons, each displaying a different anecdote he learned from BPD officers. Vine Broken Rope's drawing shows Douglas Dreeszen crashing his bike thorough his garage door — on his first day as a motorcycle cop. There’s Eugene Robinson, a captain, riding a motorcycle like a bucking bronco, a nod to the unstable, kick-starting machines the department used to ride.
There’s also a cartoon of Douglas Dreezen, who, on his first day as a motorcycle cop, rode his new machine strait through his garage door. This Vine Broken Rope cartoon shows Jim Nixon capturing a would-be Christmas tree thief. One shows Jim Nixon, a patrolman who stopped a would-be Christmas tree thief — the man was carrying the whole thing, lights and all — on Dec.
25, 1954. Another, which is hidden behind a heavy metal door, shows four officers — Donald Drake, James Hoff, Phillip May and Sgt. Leonard Kilwein — hanging onto a capsized boat after they flooded the vessel by trying to take it for a fishing trip.
The case of beers they brought along is a lost cause, each can slowly sinking down to the depths. Vine Broken Rope's cartoon portraying Lt. Charles Lechner accidentally breaking City Hall's main water pipe.
The best of the lot is captioned “The Day City Hall Went Dry,” and it shows Charles Lechner, a BPD lieutenant who, while practicing on the firing range in City Hall’s basement, accidentally misfired, sending a ricochet into the building’s main water pipe. He didn’t flood the building, but he did deprive everyone of water for the day. That firing range is still there, and amidst the shells spent decades ago, the dust bunnies and the misshapen slugs you can find embedded in the backstop, there’s a wooden guard covering the pipes.
The old firing range at Billings' former City Hall, complete with a guard protecting the pipes from any errant shots from Charles Lechner's gun. “This shield placed here to protect City Hall from Charles Lechner,” it reads. These are humorous, goofy stories.
The officers must have really trusted Broken Rope if they were willing to let him in on this. The record Broken Rope left doesn’t make him sound like an easy guy to be around. But people just liked him.
And he wasn’t the only artist in the family. In addition to his father, Vine’s brother Joe Broken Rope was an accomplished watercolorist who specializes in grand, colorful portraits of Plains Indian warriors. For a while, Joe’s life echoed his brother’s.
He used to trade paintings for port wine at the Arcade Bar in Roundup. But in June 1974, almost exactly a year after his brother’s death, Joe got sober. His work flourished.
Joe Broken Rope sat down for an interview with the Gazette in May 1991. When asked about his brother, he kept it short. “He was good,” Joe said.
And it’s true. Joel Watson, who spent years as a BPD detective and now works as an evidence technician, was enamored with the works Vine Broken Rope left behind in the Billings jail. One of Vine Broken Rope's pink elephants was featured in the Feb.
3, 1971 issue of the Billings Gazette. Watson has scoured the archives to find any traces of Broken Rope that are still out there, noting newspaper clippings that mention him, finding old photographs of the jail when it was turned into evidence storage. And now he’s making sure Broken Rope’s works endure.
Last March developer Bill Honaker, who was the brains behind Walkers Grill and is one of the best jazz drummers in the state, bought the building. It’s future is unclear, so Watson called together members of the Yellowstone County Museum and Sam Russell, a welding and metal fabrication instructor at the City College at Montana State University Billings. Next Tuesday, April 15, Russell and his students are going into the old jail with saws, to cut away Broken Rope’s drawings.
They’ll be secured transferred to BPD’s evidence facility, for temporary storage. Finally, you’ll be able to see Vine Broken Rope’s work without going to jail..
