Blustery, a bit on the grimy side, and economically static, Deer Lodge, Montana, scarcely reverberates as one of the most attractive tourist traps of Big Sky Country. Historically noted as a kingdom of cattle, it’s a vast panorama of sweeping sunset plains and second-hand shops, home to a recently burnt down, fire-gutted theatre and a scattering of cowboy saloons. Unquestionably, the town’s major tourism blessing – advertised across billboards for 200 miles, to the east and west, along Highway 90 – is Old Montana Prison.

Just a horseshoe’s toss from the entrance to Old Montana Prison, there’s a small collage of replicated and original buildings that form a kooky, if not tacky, coalition of western folklore known as Cottonwood City. This city’s largest structures are the Blood sisters’ homestead cabin – once lived in by a group of Bearmouth area women, some of whom are still alive – and a one-room schoolhouse relocated from the town of Snowdrift.

Replete with a reproduction whorehouse, saloon, and prison, all the playful artifacts of old-fashioned imagery are to be found, including the blacksmith’s shop, where a man named Lemuel Oehrtman does more than just look the part; he resonates it.

With his stubby hands looking capable of uprooting a western larch right out of the ground, a woolly red beard, glasses, and triceps of steel, Oehrtman looks as natural as a blacksmith as Conrad Kohrs did a cattle baron, or Theodore Roosevelt a hunter.

“It’s in our blood as people to blacksmith,” says Oehrtman. “Hunting, fishing, and pounding iron are in the blood. Once we figured out iron, oh man, we took off as a civilization.”

Like so many others who go to great lengths to live at such remote distances from big cities such as Deer Lodge is, a serpentine path has led him to present circumstances.

“I moved out here a long time ago to get away from all them crazy ass crowds,” says Oehrtman. “My wife, Andy – she didn’t like being called Andrea – and I lived in Basin from 1978-1997. I met her in the hospital. I had a bad heart and had to have a pacemaker put in my chest. She was a dietician there.”

In 2004, Andy was killed in an accident, and things, understandably, have never been the same for Oehrtman. Three months later, he did something he had been thinking about doing for years: he learned the brass tacks of the blacksmithing trade, at Turley Forge Blacksmithing School, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

There he would spend three weeks reworking new horseshoes out of old ones. It would be an oversimplification of emotion, if not a hackneyed cliché, to say that blacksmithing helped Oehrtman cope with tremendous loss. Although it did in fact do just that, it also allowed him the opportunity to self-medicate, and at the same time, spread fertile soil for the seeds of self-reinvention to flourish.

“I like the old time stuff,” says Oehrtman, holding a hand-forged beaver trap made by one of his blacksmithing heroes, a man called Hiram Hunter. “I was raised around a lot of really old people as a kid. I mean, guys older than Christ by a week, my grandmother, and people like that. I was named after my great-granddad, an old independent farmer who knew blacksmithing and how to handle horses. I’ve always known about it.

“Right now, there are only two places I belong: in the blacksmithing shop or out on the ship. I think it’s genetic. It’s something Scandinavian, I guess. I’ve done all types of things for work, and most of them just sucked.”

Blacksmithing offers Oehrtman the coruscated coliseum to forget about the past, and the opportunity to bury it deep within the carbonized coals of forgotten memories. Reality is only what’s directly in front of him, the standard triangular setup of the anvil, forge, and vice.

“I come out here and my mind forgets everything else,” says Oehrtman. “ It’s easy to forget it all.”

Even though Oehrtman is trying to forget persevering personal haunts – a loving marriage maliciously snatched from the grace of goodness for no sane rationalization, mounting physical health problems, the lingering effects of a bevy of unpropitious life choices – he has perhaps no greater interest in life than to see to it that the nuances of blacksmithing are duly remembered.

“When I teach basic blacksmithing, there are two things I try to stress: You need to get the iron hot enough, and you need to strike rhythmic blows. You need a deliberate rhythm, and to use even, controlled blows.

“There are only two types of blacksmiths. There are ones that won’t show you anything that’s going on - you know, the type of guys that want to horde the knowledge. And there are guys that want to show you. I want to be the type that shows. I mean, it’s important to pass this stuff on. We’ve been playing around with metal for thousands of years, right?”

Thanks to the trickling of tourists from Old Montana Prison, Oehrtman, at least during summer months, manages to sell a few metal trinkets, moving a cross here, a hook there, and a dinner bell or two every so often. A jar can be found in the shop which has a notecard with “401K” scrawled across it. Modestly solicited or not, these tips do add up for him.

“I’ve got a little money saved up, and I’m all paid up on my bills and property. That’s something that makes me lucky, because I’m not the most ambitious guy in the world. I like to lay low during the winter, to sit home to give my arms a break.”

At 53, Oehrtman has a severe case of arthritis, and he feels as if he doesn’t have much time left to spare. He’s feeling every bit his age – and then some. But 53, isn’t really that old, is it?

“The hell it ain’t old,” says Oehrtman. “I don’t buy into that weird idea bullshit about 50 being the new 40. I remember when I was a kid, guys that were 50 were so damn old. I come from a completely different lifestyle, and I’ve earned my 50.”

Isolation makes this blacksmith a content man, or at the very least a slightly more caustic one.

“I don’t require a lot of people around me,” says Oehrtman. “I have a small group of friends. If I were to wake up tomorrow and find the human population completely gone, it wouldn’t bother me a bit. I’d just go ‘hmmm, a little more elbow room.’ I bet gas prices would go down.”

This is Oehrtman being a little bit disingenuous here. After all, he works on the side as a preacher, performing wedding and funeral services, so he can’t always be a complete curmudgeon. Plus, he let me spend the day with him – politely showing this klutzy neophyte how to heat, pound, and curl a bouquet of iron roses.

Indeed, in a six-hour span which includes a short ride to the drive-in to chow a hamburger lunch, a walk to the prison to find a woman who apparently organizes monthly ghost busting tours, and a scamper through Cottonwood City (with his sportively plump dog, Dee Dee, leading the way), Oehrtman is quite gracious. He speaks in a free, unguarded style (awash, albeit, with cuss words, vitriolic assessments of others, and singeing statements of self-deprecation) which refreshingly contrasts the self-romanticized fictionalizations and narcissisms spewed ad nauseum by the average Missoula denizen.

In fact, besides sparks of swelter and slivers of steel, one thing that emits most conspicuously when Oehrtman blacksmiths, is his personality.

Self-defined as shy, he lets loose the offshoots of irrepressible character through quick barbs, rehearsed puns, amusing aphorisms, and random acts of munificence, such as handing iron roses, free of charge, to curiously rapt children.

Perhaps during these exchanges of craft and culture, the blacksmith not only explains to passersby the nature of his scorching skills, but even a thing or two about requisite humility.

“The thing that I find most funny,” says Oehrtman, “is that the very same people who would never speak to me on the street, they come in here to watch and listen and to learn from me.”