That line comes from “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg,” Hugo’s ode to the tiny town in the mountains near Anaconda. But he could be talking about hundreds of communities that dot Montana’s massive plains. There are places here that you don’t go to unless you’re planning on it. And you never really get a reason to visit. It’s hard to just pass through.

One of them is Utica. It’s in Judith Basin County in the foothills of the Little Belts, where Waite Creek (remember that name) and Courtneys Creek flow together to form the Judith River. Utica’s main drag is called Pigeye Road.

When Hugo wrote “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg” in 1973, Phillipsburg and Utica had a lot of similarities. It was silver that brought people to Phillipsburg, but in Utica it was two things. First there was the cattle, driven up the prairies from Texas to gorge themselves on the sweet grass of the Judith Basin, which stays green long into the year, well past the time most of the Great Plains have turned yellow. But what really put Utica on the map was Yogo sapphires, the brilliantly blue gemstones that can only be found in Yogo Gulch, a small fold in the Little Belt Mountains. Utica was the closest thing that passed for a town near Yogo Gulch.

There’s an old story that Yogo sapphires are part of the Crown Jewels of England. It’s probably not true, but the myth’s prolificacy is a testament to the gem’s power in Montana’s imagination. The sapphires are our great claim to legitimacy, the priceless jewel you can’t find anywhere else. Miners flocked to the area to try and find the “blue pebbles.”

It didn’t last. In September 1959 organized mining in Yogo Gulch came to an end. It’s become a place of hobbyists, and despite some rare success stories, widespread mining of Yogo sapphires has never really picked back up.

Phillipsburg’s mines dried up sooner, ending most economic activity in the town by the First World War. When Hugo visited in the 1970s he saw a town in disrepair, a ghost town just barely holding off its death rattle.

He wrote of the “two stacks high above the town / two dead kilns … that won’t fall finally down.”

Then a funny thing happened. Phillipsburg came back. The town rebranded itself as a tourist hub. Nowadays Phillipsburg is best known for being home to one of the state’s best and most prosperous breweries. There’s a candy store folks drive from miles away to peruse, as well as art galleries and upscale eateries. It’s a trendy wedding destination for movie stars, a sort of pretend Old West. For a few bucks, visitors can try their hand at mining for sapphires, the former life and death struggle turned into an Instagramable vacation moment.

Utica is still stuck in its degrees of gray. In fact, it’s worse off than Hugo’s Phillipsburg ever was. The poet bemoaned that, “One good / restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.” But Utica’s only got one, a bar and grill called the Oxen Yoke Inn where you can get a cold beer and a hamburger roughly the size of a hubcap.

Utica’s streets are dusty — the pavement turns to dirt after a couple hundred feet. And the residents’ mailing address is Hobson, whose population of 179 (enough to make it a city) have absorbed Utica’s 23 (still stuck as an unincorporated community). There are a few signs that mark historic buildings, but many are old and sunbaked, the metal clamshells protecting the words are falling apart. There’s a museum, but the hours posted in the window are from summer 2018.

But one man has dedicated himself to telling Utica’s story. His name is Don Waite. He’s now 83-years-old, but in his time Waite worked a series of federal jobs that brought him to Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Currently, he lives in Spokane. But he keeps coming back to Utica.

For almost 20 years, Waite has been building in his hometown. His work is now the most prominent thing in Utica, and if you drive by, you can’t miss it. He’s constructed a series of buildings that now line Utica’s main street. It’s difficult to say exactly how many there are because they all blend together, like something off of a western film set. There’s a hotel and a café, a pair of saloons, and a prominent general store with a big false front.

Those buildings might look familiar. That’s because Waite based them on the most famous depiction of Utica ever made. Waite based them on the structures you can see in the background in Charlie Russell’s painting “A Quiet Day in Utica,” which the painter, whose western works are so iconic they’ve become the images most people see when they imagine what the old west looked like, finished in 1907.

Waite has filled the buildings with paintings and pictures, telling the story of Russell and his connections to the Utica area. He’s built a great museum to this specific place, way out in the middle of nowhere, not on any major highways and at least 75 miles from the nearest interstate. Waite is so invested in the story of Utica because it’s also the story of himself.

Waite was born in 1939, and he grew up in Utica. He was raised in a small cottage that’s the first building on your left when you drive into town, across the street from his reconstructed buildings. 

“We had fun,” Waite remembered of his childhood. “We’d go down to the Judith River and hunt magpies. They’d give you a penny for a magpie egg, and five cents for two magpie feet. It was the darndest thing. We’d be gone all day and our mother never worried about us.”

“A Quiet Day in Utica” captures a gang of cowboys “tin-canning” a dog, which was a pastime where bored people would tie tin cans around a dog’s tail and watch the animal run around, clattering about. It feels too old timey to be true, but Waite remembers seeing it happen on the streets of Utica when he was a kid, years after Russell made his memories here.

The Waite family goes in deep in Utica. His first cousin twice removed, Jack Waite, came out here first. Shortly after, in 1882, Don’s grandfather Walter Waite followed Jack, who was his cousin. Utica was a rough and tumble cow town back then, full of cowboys who would drive stock out from Bozeman to feast on Utica’s grasslands. Walter took a look at the little town and saw a need.

“He decided to build them a big, fancy hotel,” Don Waite said.

So Grandpa Waite, along with a business partner, did just that, finishing the Silver Dollar Saloon in 1888. It was a grand place, with a bar in the front and an upstairs for dancing. There was a barbershop, and the saloon eventually expanded into a large livery stable. They even sold coffins out of the back.

Back then, Utica was on the main stage road through central Montana. Freighters needed a cool spot to store their perishables overnight, and Walter Waite obliged by building a pair of cellars.

The business was so profitable that they expanded into a full hotel, called the Judith.

“This was a first class operation,” Don Waite described. “They had 15 rooms, and a dance hall. You could eat, go to your room, go dancing, go to the bar.”

Waite can rattle all of this off the top of his head. He’s a student of Utica, full of endless stories. Sometimes one tangent will interrupt another. Waite knows so much about this place it’s hard to keep it all strait.

Russell, like Waite, knew Utica. It’s him, not sapphires, not cows, not even hamburgers, that gives Utica its great claim to fame. Russell was born in Missouri, but at age 16 he grew tired of the east and moved to Montana. He spent some time on a sheep ranch but quit, eventually winding up as a night herder on a ranch near Utica.

Being a “nighthawk,” as the cowboys call it, was a lonely job. Russell had plenty of time to think. Pretty soon he started to put the images in his head onto paper. His first major sketch, ”Waiting on a Chinook,” is of a skeletal cow freezing to death in the legendarily tough winter of 1886-87, which Russell spent on the O-H Ranch near Utica. The sketch became something of a phenomena in pre-statehood Montana, and pretty soon the night herder started taking painting seriously.

His first makeshift studio was in the Shelton Saloon, which is one of the buildings Waite has dutifully rebuilt.

He started the project in earnest in 2006. The buildings are made with reclaimed lumber that he found in broken and decrepit shacks along the Judith Basin plains. Those logs had been split decades, maybe a century ago, and used well. But with nobody left to live in them, Waite turned them into something else.

He also went into the mountains to cut down lodge pole pines, and got some shingles from an old church in Lewistown.

Waite does copious research to reconstruct these buildings. He’s got a packet of writing he’s done about the area. And he’s not alone. His older brother Walt wrote two books about Utica history. And his father Charles left a note in an early biography of Russell that misidentified the Shelton Saloon, confusing it for another building in town.

“Wrong!” Charles Waite wrote underneath the photo. He signed the correction and dated it 1948.

Russell churned out art from the saloon. His early paintings bear little resemblance to the majestic work he’d do later in his career. They’re sparse and flat, clearly done by a greenhorn who has yet to fully learn about life on the plains.

But they’re full of character. Waite has many of them printed out and on display in his replica buildings. One, an 1887 work called “Cowboy Camp During Roundup,” captures Utica at its early cow-town peak. The painting includes portraits of many of his friends on the range. Waite has taken the time to annotate the painting, labeling each figure. They’ve got great cowboy names like Kid Antelope and “Slack” Jackson.

Waite is done with his buildings now. Truthfully, he only spends a few weeks a year now in Utica. The buildings are locked when he’s away, but you can admire them plenty from outside, and he’s installed an open air gallery full of pictures and writing about Utica’s history, which included icons like Calamity Jane in addition to Russell. And his phone number is on the sign that welcomes people to the buildings. He’s always willing to talk Utica. 

Why does he do this? Why has Waite, the world traveler, dedicated this much time to the tiny town he grew up in?

“I’m crazy,” he admitted, before doubling over in laughter. “Well, at least some of the ranchers around here think I’m crazy. But people are really enjoying it. And I did it for the community.”

“Charles Russell is huge for Utica,” he continued. “He’s huge worldwide. He got his start right here.”

But it’s deeper than that. If you compare Waite’s buildings to the ones in Russell’s painting, you’ll see a couple discrepancies. The structures he’s built in Utica are just a little bit different from Russell’s painting. That’s because he’s included the Hotel Judith and the Silver Dollar Saloon, which were on the opposite side of the street from Russell’s point of view. These buildings are about Russell, of course, but they’re about the generations of Waites who have roots here, too, including Don’s two daughters, Karla and Kim.

“I did this for my granddad and my pioneering family that came here and weathered all of this,” he said. “I did this to share it with people. In 50 years, people can come by and learn that all of this happened here in Utica, Montana.”