John Harrison

John Louis Harrison was born in Browning, Montana, at the Indian Health Service Hospital on July 26, 1938, to Frank and Cecile (Trombley) Harrison. He was the sixth child, though there were ten years between him and his older sister, Teenie. He liked to call himself "the first of the volunteer crop."

John was a cowboy--no getting around it. From the time he could sit a saddle, he was riding for the brand. He was just a toddler when his dad, Frank, moved the family onton the Old Person place, just a mile or so from the Canadian border and in the sunset shadow of Chief Mountain. John loved his time on the prairie and in the hills. He worked running cows, wrangling horses, and putting up hay for all the ranchers out there. 

One of John's favorite stories was about the time his dad asked him to pick some strawberries from the patch by the canal. He came back with a measly few at the bottom of a jar. His dad looked at it and said, "Damn stingy, aren't you? Go get me some more." John admitted he'd eaten way more than he brought back. With a fresh bowl of cream in hand, he headed back up the hill. That was a memory, he said, that he could still taste. The patch is gone now, and what saddened him most was that he couldn't share that favorite memory with his grandchildren.

John spend most of his youth in the north, in that old bootlegger's house. He and his brother Jim found most of the cubby holes and stash spots--but not all. His mother had one secret hiding place where she stashed Christmas and birthday presents that they never found.

John left the north for the south, to Little Badger, in the late 1950s. Shortly after voting for Kennedy in the 1960--his president drafted him to serve during the Cuban Missile Crisis as part of a STRAC unit: Skilled, Tough, Ready Around the Clock. He served honorably as a telephone lineman and returned home in 1963.

In 1964, he married the love of his life, Eula Inez Champine. Together they had four children. John went on to work as a lineman for Glacier Electric, served in Tribal Housing and Forestry, and spent many years as a skilled carpenter on his own. 

John passed on March 26, 2025. He was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Eula, and all of his brothers and sisters.

He is survived by his son, Sheldon Harrison; daughers, Johnel (Don) Barcus, Nema Harrison, and Rhonda (Jason) Hogstad; grandchildren, Katelyn (Kyler) Rutz, Kelsey (David Porter) Meier, Jeran Barcus, Kirsten Hogstad, and Owen Madman; and great-grandchildren, Kamden, Tayden, and Reegan.

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