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HISTORY OF THE STILLWATER STATE FOREST

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MAURICE CUSICK

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Maurice Cusick

Date

BACKGROUND HISTORY OF THE STILLWATER STATE FOREST

INTERVIEW WITH MAURICE CUSICK RETIRED DIVISION OF FORESTRY EMPLOYEE

September 21, 1981 Whitefish, Montana

Helen Murray, Administrative Assistant, Montana Division of For¬ estry, Department of State Lands, conducted this interview with Maurice Cusick at his residence in Whitefish, Montana. The fol¬ lowing report is written up in Maurice Cusick 's own words.

BIOGRAPHY

I was born in Vermillion, South Dakota, January 17, 1909. My fa¬ ther was John Cusick, and my mother's maiden name was Leana Martha Stebbins. Both were born in southeastern South Dakota. I came to Montana in June of 1911, and I settled on a ranch northwest of Kalispell, and lived there until I was a young man, and started to work for the Office of State Forester. The fact is, it was my home for the first ten years that I worked for the State Forestry De¬ partment .

I got the idea of becoming a forester when I was in high school. But with the good old Depression and the finances, I had to go out and go to work. I was the oldest in the family, and with five youngsters at home a lot younger than I, I was kind of busy helping Dad make ends meet. When I started in the forestry business, I started just as a laborer and followed it through. I have a per¬ sonnel file that will tell you every job I was on from the time I was 16 years old until the time I retired. I know when they were figuring out my retirement, they didn't know where to look, and I think some of the girls got a big kick out of reading my storybook.

I started to work for the original "Office of State Forester" April 15, 1928. Rutledge Parker was the first State Forester that I worked for, and I worked for Mr. Parker rhe first 24 years that I worked for State Forestry.

I was seasonal for the first few years--I went to work in the CCC Program in 1933 (still for the State of Montana, but with the CCC), and then I transferred over to the federal payroll in 1934. I was the CCC Foreman, the Caretaker, and Foreman again until April 1936, and then put in charge of the Stillwater State Forest Station, and was the Firewarden there from 1936 through 1952.

I left the State and went to work for private industry (Diamond Match Company) for two and one-half years.

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Montana State Library

https://archive.org/details/historyofstillwa1986cusi

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When Gary Moon became State Forester, he approached me one day to see if I wouldn't consider coming back to work for the State. I came back to work in December of 1954, and worked straight through until I retired, April 24, 1975.

BACKGROUND HISTORY OF STILLWATER STATE FOREST

I think the best way to approach this is to give the background of the Stillwater area. Not the Stillwater Forest, but the Stillwater area, from Kalispell northwest, clear through to Eureka, or to Stryker. The Stillwater drainage in itself is commonly known as the Stillwater area.

Before the railroad came into the Flathead Valley, there was a steamboat landing at a place called DeMersville, south of Kalispell. DeMersville was before Kalispell was ever founded. It was the first town in the Flathead Valley. DeMersville was founded in 1887, by a Mr. Telesphore Jacques DeMers. There was a settle¬ ment at Ashley that had been there for many years, but DeMers bought a piece of land which is called Gregg's Landing, built a store, and started the town of DeMersville in 1887.

DeMersville is no longer shown on the map. As you come up U. S. Highway 93, there is a bar called Four Corners, south of Kalispell. This was probably the first bar in the Flathead Valley at Four Corners, and it has a history of degradation and problems no end--and it still has them.

The town was on the Flathead River about one-half mile east of Four Corners. There is nothing there to show today what it was, but the DeMersville Cemetery is right west of the bar. It is not marked with any historical sign, but the headstones are visible from the highway. It is about a quarter of a mile back from the highway--you have to look close to see it, but you can see the headstones .

When the railroad came through, the original town was planned to be at Columbia Falls (the division point), but the land developers wanted too much for their land, and Jim Hill got hold of Charlie Conrad, bought the Kalispell townsite, and the first lots were sold in the townsite in 1891. That was the beginning of Kalispell.

Kalispell is an Indian name. It was named for the Kalispell Indi¬ ans, and the Kalispell Indian Reservation is around Cusick, in lone, Washington. Over there, they spell their name with a "C." Other places have different spelling of the Indian word, but the name originally came from the Kalispell Indians. The Indians pro¬ nounced it "Kullyspell . " In some places in Washington, they start¬ ed the name with a "C" and some places with a "K." There is a Kalispell Island, which is in Priest Lake, and is spelled the same as our Kalispell here. It was just different the way people saw the name at the time.

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When the railroad came to the Flathead, DeMersville was off the railroad, so the people loaded their buildings on wagons and set them up in the Kalispell townsite. DeMersville was the jumping off place for the freighters freighting supplies to Ft. Steele, Canada.

FT. STEELE TRAIL (Ft. Steele, Canada)

The Ft. Steele trail went up the Stillwater River, or valley, or whatever you want to call it, over the divide at Stryker, down to Eureka and crosses the Canadian line at Gateway up to Elko, and then to Ft. Steele. That was the only means or supplies they had at first, and then they started taking supplies from Jennings up the Kootenai River in high water by steamboat, but the main supply route was by wagon from DeMersville, over the Ft. Steele trail to Ft. Steele.

One of the first stopping places on the Ft. Steele trail was in Section 36 by the Kalispell Office. There is a large pine tree and a pond out in the field there, and they used to stop for dinner when they would come up from DeMersville with their wagons. That would be the first stop for lunch and to water their horses. They used to park their wagons under that big tree, eat their lunch, water their horses, and then go on.

The first roadhouse that I know of on the Ft. Steele trail was in the NE5SE5, Section 8, T30N-R22W, which happens to be State land--40 acres. There was a roadhouse there, and a cemetery with one grave in it, they tell me. It's long since gone. The Ft. Steele trail went on up the valley with various stopping places along the route, but the first one that I know of was in on Tamarack Creek. But, the roadhouse that everyone spoke about was at Lupfer, which they call Sguaw Camp. Squaw Camp was nothing more than a bar and a few cabins, and again, there was a cemetery there. When they built the highway through there in the early days, not knowing that it was a cemetery, dug up the grave that was in it. They got hold of Mrs. White and asked her if she knew who was in the grave, and she told them that she did, and that he died at Squaw Camp.

The next roadhouse was at Stillwater Inn--it was Stillwater Inn then. The land was owned by a man named Gallenger. I worked with his son at Diamond Match Company. The Stillwater Inn was quite a prominent place.

On up the trail at the Olney Ranger Station, the field in back of the station was called Long Prairie, and it was quite a stopping place nights. I had some of the old freighters tell me that they had seen 24-4 horse teams there in one night. They would come up the Ft. Steele trail, up into Section 1, T32N-R24W. There was a bar there owned by Pete Peola and his brother-in-law. It was built to accommodate railroad people when they were building the rail¬ road.

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Stryker was the next roadhouse, and it was right at Stryker to Stryker Meadows. There was also a stopping place at Ant Flats, which was also a prominent stopping place. There were a lot of little rough round knolls in the fields about the size of a big ant hill. No one pretended to know what they were made of, but the oldtimers called it Ant Flats.

Then there was Eureka, and Gateway, and on up into Canada--! don't know where the stops were, but there were stops all the way to Ft. Steele. The Northwest Mounted Police had a Fort there to keep the Kootenai Indians in line. They figured they were going to have an uprising, and the Indians would see the gentlemen in the red coats, and they decided that they wanted to be peaceful, and they didn't give any trouble. But that was how Ft. Steele came to be built. It was also a trading post for supplies for the miners in Canada. They even at one time, had a brewery there. It was going to be the big town in Canada, and like Kalispell and DeMersville, the rail¬ road came through, and they made their division point at Cranbrook, and Ft. Steele died on the vine.

In 1895 , the people of Eureka decided they needed a road out, and two crews started building road, or wagontrail, or whatever we might call it. One crew from Eureka south to DeMersville, and the other from Eureka to Ft. Steele. The route was the original Indian trails that the Kootenai used to go through the Flathead Valley down to Hellgate, and over to Dillon. They could go over the Divide to Clarence Creek, and over Marias Pass and up the Blackfoot, but the Blackfoot Indians were so hostile that they didn't go on that route. When they wanted to hunt Buffalo, they would go down to the Beaverhead Valley and hunt Buffalo down there. That trail has been used by the Indians for years and years, and all that the people of Eureka did was rebuild it so they could get their wagons over it. They just used the old Indian trails, and worked it over, and that became the Ft. Steele trail.

I was told by one of the old freighters that either three or four barrels of whiskey was a wagonload for four horses to take to Ft. Steele. The freighters liked to haul whiskey and dynamite because they got double freight rates for that. I knew several of them--one of them in particular talked a lot about it. Each man went up independently, but he told me that there would be as many as 24-4 horse teams parked there at Long Prairie (where the Still¬ water Station is) at one time. There was a lot of travel on the roads--it was heavy travel. A ton of freight was a tremendous load for four horses to go on that route, and it took a long time.

Before it became the Stillwater State Forest, it was under the Department of Interior. At the time of the land exchange, it was part of the Blackfoot National Forest, which is not in existence anymore. There were two Ranger Stations on the District--Point of Rocks and Olney.

Point of Rocks was so named because the Stillwater River comes right up to the highway from the old Ft. Steele trail. There was just room for the wagons to get between the rock bluffs and the

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river to go around this Point of Rocks, and that is the reason it was called Point of Rocks. The old Point of Rocks Ranger Station is marked on the map.

CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS ( CCC )

In 1933, the first Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) for the State of Montana was built where the Stillwater Station is now located. They had only three buildings: a laundry, washroom and bath facil¬ ities, a kitchen and dining hall, and a small building for the officers' mess. The rest of the camp was just tents. This camp was there from 1933 to 1935.

The purpose of the CCC camps was to create jobs for young men be¬ cause the country was in a Depression. It is a good deal like what times are coming to now. Nobody wants to hire a young inexperi¬ enced man--they want someone with experience. These fellas were off the streets and would take anybody that wanted to sign up.

The first trainload that came to the State of Montana from other states, came through Olney. The first shipment was 25 boys from Fort Niagra, Upstate New York, Utica, Syracuse, and up in the Adirondacks and so on. We got 225 of them in the entire group. The first consignment was 25, and the next 200 came ten days to two weeks later. They hired 25 local men to work with these fellas. These weren't just foremen, they were local men hired to work with the boys and show them how to work. The young boys were from 16 to 22 years of age. That was the age they were supposed to be, but I know I had a lot of 15 year olds (and probably 14 year olds that lied about their age to get in), and I had them as old as 27. No special requirements were needed.

These young men received $30.00 a month, and five or ten dollars of that went to them, and the rest was sent home to their families. I have known boys to work in the camps and save their money by send¬ ing it home, but their family wasn't spending it. I know several that saved enough money in their career in the CCCs, that when they got out, they went to college and became college graduates. One of them became a forester who is retired now, I presume in Old Voyage, New York. I had one that became an architect, but I don't know whatever became of him. I can't even remember his name now.

The $20-25 a month that the boys sent home was all that their fami¬ lies had to eat on. This was especially so with the boys out of Kentucky.

In later years, I had several Kentucky boys out of the coal mining districts of Kentucky (Hariand County where the poverty probably was the worst). Those boys were woodswise, never had a job in their life, and some of them were let out of j ail to go to work. And, some of them promised that they wouldn't be put in jail if they joined the CCs. The Kentucky boys, as far as I am concerned,

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were probably the toughest, ruggedest men that I had anything to do with. They were not quarrelsome, they did fight amongst them¬ selves, however. They would fight with knives--they were bad for that. I had one boy who went into Whitefish and got into a fight. Anyway, they thought they might run out of thread before they got him put back together again. He ran into a fella with a razor.

About 12% of the boys that came out of Kentucky could neither read nor write. Young men out of towns with 5,000 - 10,000 people had never been to school a day in their life. It is pretty hard to believe, but that was the case.

The boys that came of of the farming communities in Kentucky, out of the Blue Grass Country as they call it, were well educated in their time and all that, but they were poverty ridden, and you couldn't sell anything. That is when they were plowing under the crops, killing the little pigs to keep from feeding them, and that sort of thing. And these boys came out of the tobacco country! But, the ones out of the coal mining districts were where the trou¬ blesome ones came from. They weren't any trouble to us, but they would fight amongst themselves, but it wasn't anything that we couldn't handle.

These boys were paid by the federal government. All the State did was furnish them a place to go to work. The federal government even furnished the money for equipment, supplies, machinery, telephones--the whole works.

When the CCCs came into existence, there wasn't any road on the Stillwater Forest except the one up through the center of the val¬ ley, the present U. S. Highway 93. At that time, it was called Roosevelt Highway. There were short side roads, but there were no roads in the Upper Whitefish. The first project was a 13 mile road from Olney to Upper Whitefish Lake, which was constructed that first summer. The second year they improved that road and built a road from Stryker to Upper Whitefish Lake. A tower was also con- tructed on Dog Mountain--the first lookout building that the State had.

There were numerous small jobs, such as bridges, etc. Moon gets quite a kick out of me when he has to show everybody. They built a concrete and steel bridge at Stryker, and there was a lot of harrassment back and forth between the foremen and the engineers, and the foreman who did the carpentry work on the bridge.

The engineers absolutely refused to let them have anything to do with staking the abutments for the bridge--they just had to do it themselves. They came in and measured it out and staked it, and were very specific on how it had to be built. Our foremen were exceptionally good men at that business, and our carpenter was an expert. They built the forms, poured the footings, and had ev¬ erything ready to slip the beams in place, and lo and behold, the beams were a foot too long to fit the concrete abutment. Just exactly a foot! Boy, was there a big to do! The engineers were hollering about the stakes being moved because they just knew they

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couldn't be too long; but nevertheless, it was a foot too long, and the beams wouldn't go in. So, the engineers told the mechanics to come up and cut a foot off the eye beams. Cut them to fit! Well, they went up, and cut them to fit, and the engineers said that while they were there, to cut a foot off the railing, because they will have to be cut. Well, the railings were in two sections, so they cut a foot off of each section, and when they put them up, one side was too short--a foot. Well, everybody was dashing around to find the pieces they cut off to weld them back on, and lo and behold, they couldn't find them all.

To this day, you go up there on the bridge, and there is a piece of strap iron welded down on one of the railings. The commotion that was created over that, and the telephone calls, and the backbiting, was just out of this world. Moon can't go by that bridge, but what he has to show everybody the piece of strap iron in that bridge. I don't know who was to blame, but the engineers swear up and down somebody moved their stakes. But--I have my doubts.

We had a foreman in the CC Camp at Stryker, by the name of Frank Masterson. He had cancer and he knew that his time was short. And, like some fellas do, they wanted to leave something behind, so he picked seedlings out of the backslopes of the road and planted a plantation of spruce trees up in Fitzsimmons Creek. You can see them yet--they are in rows, eight to ten inches through. The natu¬ ral reproduction came in so thick that they are actually growing bigger than the ones he planted there. It is just a small area, probably about an acre. They grew, but they didn't grow as fast as the natural reproduction that came in later.

The CCCs was disbanded because WW II was declared. The boys regis¬ tered for the draft while they were still in Camp, but they were disbanded and went home. A lot of them enlisted right away. I know one boy, that I knew here, became a First Sergeant. My brother was a First Sergeant in the Air Force also, and they met at March Field. They were in school, and this New Yorker asked him what his name was, and he said it was Cusick, so he asked him if he knew Maurice Cusick. He said yes, he's my brother. He said that I was with him in the CCs. He was with the first group of CCs that we had. He came in April or May of 1933, and worked with the CCs from the beginning until it was disbanded--1933 to 1941. Then he went into the military, and he was a First Sergeant in the Air Force, and was about ready to retire when my brother became acquainted with him. My brother retired shortly afterward.

That was the story of a lot of them. But, it was easy for them to slip into the routine of the military after being in the CC camps. Of course, the military handled all the feeding and medical atten¬ tion, and so on, to teach these boys. They travelled with the Company Commander, a Captain or a Lieutenant, usually a second in command, and a doctor, and so on--but in a military fashion. So, it was easy for them to switch over into the Regular Army, and they did when World War II came along.

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I haven't mentioned the foremen or the superintendents that worked at the CC camps, and I probably should.

The original Superintendent was an ex-Dean of Forestry from Missoula, Dor Skeels. I worked with him the first year the Cs went in. The foremen, at various times, were Fred Metcalf and Richard Dual. Some of the names I can't remember. Frank Costich worked with us all through the program, and Frank Masterson, the fella that had the plantation of trees at Fitzsimmons Creek, was with us for the last two years of the CCs.

The next superintendent was Jim Lee from Columbia Falls, and I worked many years with him, and then when the CCs were ready to be disbanded, a man from Thompson Falls, Oley Johnson took over the camp then, and closed it too.

There was also George Fern, and Freeman Conners, and a machine operator who is a farmer now over at Judith Basin, Max Tyler. I see Max quite often. He came in as an enrollee in the CCs, and became a machine operator, and he was an exceptionally good one. When the CCs disbanded, he went back to the farm, and he is one of the big wheat farmers over at Judith Basin.

As I said before, the permanent camp of the CCs was a nut and bolt sectional affair, and it was taken apart and sent to Seattle and then up to Whitehorse by boat and set up on the Alaska Highway. The other buildings were simply dismantled and the lumber piled away and used for something else. The equipment went back to the Forest Service Engineering Division. A lot of the small materials and equipment used, such as cooking utensils, dishes, and so forth, went to the State of Montana. We used the dishes for many years. Of course, the military took all the bedding, beds, etc., and the military put it in the camps for recruits during World War II.

STRYKER BURN

When I first saw the Stryker Burn, it was 1929, and there were places in the burn that as far as I could see in any direction,

wasn't a living green tree-everything was dead. There was no grass, and the shale rock was burned until it was the color of

brick red. There were only two places in that area that we could

even find feed for the horses. There were two meadows that hadn't

gotten burned that we could always keep our horses, but the burn, in general, there was absolutely nothing on it. You would swear that nothing could grow there. It seeded back to the point where it should be thinned again.

The seedlings started coming back in 1931 or 1932--they started

showing in about five years. The lower part of the burn, next to the town of Stryker, the fire wasn't so violent. It wasn't so

killing, and the reproduction came the following spring. It hap¬ pened to be a seed year for larch and the following spring, the

little larch trees came in like a lawn. There were trees

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everyplace. Those are rhe trees I mentioned that were thinned by the CCs, and later thinned for the second time.

Farther up v/here the fire was more violent, it took, I would say, five years before you could see the reproduction. It grew back uniform all over the area, and in some places, I know there wasn't a green tree within a mile, but still the seeds got there, and it came in a natural stand. But, as I said, the first years that I went in there, it was just a ghost forest. Everything was dead, and the trees were cracked, and the wind would blow through there, and wail and moan--it was just horrible.

After the CCs felled all that stuff, the reproduction was coming back then in good shape, and now it is all covered over. I am concerned, however, that it will be a fire hazard, due to the fact that all the original stand lays on the ground. It has rotted down now, and it will ignite easier. I wouldn't be surprised either to see a lot of fires in there in the future. Of course, the repro¬ duction keeps it pretty moist and ail that, but these logs have been dead now 54 years, and laying on the ground, pretty rotted out. A good lightning strike would start it. I don't know whether in late years they have had any lightning or not. I have had to go in there and put out one or two fires. When the stuff was sound and boney-hard like it was with no bark on it, it wouldn't ignite easy, but now that it has started to rot down, like punk, it will ignite easier.

The reason it was just left laying there, is that there was no market for it at the time. The idea of falling it down was in case of fire, the snags would blow fire all over, and if you get them on the ground, fire can't travel so fast. But, you do put a tremendous amount of fuel on the ground, and as I said, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it make trouble. But, then again, it may not.

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ROBERT P. MacLAUGHLIN

STATE FORESTER (1921-1926)

MacLaughlin was State Forester from 1921-1926. He had his own ideas, and was a man way ahead of his times. He desired to con¬ solidate State Lands and treat it as a forest, administering every¬ thing by the State of Montana. The politicians didn’t see things his way, and it cost him his appointment.

MacLaughlin did, however, get one land exchange made that created the Stillwater State Forest. 90,000 acres was exchanged for the federal government. We exchanged 16 Section 36s, and isolated grant lands from the Stillwater Forest. The politicians considered Tamarack, fir and spruce as a worthless species of timber, and criticized him politically until it cost him his job.

He had a second exchange all arranged for, and when I first went up there, survey stakes were piled by the track at Olney to take in the Sunday Creek, LaBeau Creek and Good Creek drainages, and make the Stillwater Forest approximately 200,000 acres. But, as soon as MacLaughlin was out of office, all the work that was done on the exchange was out of the picture, and we have what we have now, the Stillwater Forest.

I never knew State Forester MacLaughlin, but I knew of his work. His son, Joe, worked for me at the Stillwater Station a year before the war. Joe was a fighter pilot in the Air Force when World War

II was declared. He was in the Philippines when they bombed the devil out of the fields there, but Joe managed to get away to Aus¬ tralia .

When General MacArthur made his long flight from Australia to the United States, the airplane was constructed with special gas tanks. Joe was a real small man, and the only one small enough to get in and take a hose into the plane and fill the gas tanks. Joe, howev¬ er, had a reputation of being reckless, and he was on a flight over Australia some place in the early part of the war, and they don't know what happened, but they just lost him. Joe was a Bantham Weight Golden Glove Boxing Champion for the State of Montana at one time. I suppose he weighed out at about 110 pounds.

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RUTLEDGE PARKER ADMINISTRATION

STATE FORESTER (1926-1954)

Rutledge Parker was State Forester when I started to work for the State. His idea was to farm the fire protection out to the U. S. Forest Service, and all the State would have is administrators for timber sales and so forth. They wouldn't have anything to do with firefighting, or anything else--just administer timber sales and that was all.

As it turned out, 1926 was a bad fire year, and the whole north country was on fire, and the attitude that the State of Montana took was that the Forest Service was going to look after their own first, and as far as the State of Montana was concerned, that was secondary. In other words, the first thing you did was fight for¬ est fires on forest lands, and fighting fire on State lands was secondary. If the truth were known, there were so many fires that it was impossible to man them, and in the back country, the Forest wasn't manning their fires at all--they just let them burn. They fought the fires around the towns and communities, and let the rest go. The State of Montana lost an estimated 90 million board feet (90 MMBF) of timber at that time from forest fires that didn't originate on State land--they originated on Forest Service land, and running in onto the State. Because they were on State lands, they didn't get first class attention. There was a token firefighting force and that was all.

The Department and Land Board got all shook up. The agreement with the Forest Service was still in tact, but they started a fire pro¬ tection unit in Stillwater. That was the only one that they had.

In 1927, there were two organizations watching for fire over the State Forest. The agreement with the U. S. Forest Service was still in tact, as I stated earlier, and they hadn't been there, and the State of Montana hadn't been there because they were elsewhere fighting fire. There were no fires that year, however.

In 1928, there was no Forest cooperation. It was all State Forest, and that was the start of the firefighting on State lands--that is, by State crews, and Olney became a full fledged ranger station with fire protection units, telephone systems and so on. In 1927, the Firewarden (that is what they called him then--he was actually a Ranger), was Monroe Spink, who later went to work for the Pacific Light and Power Company, and worked there until he retired. Monroe worked for us again after he retired--he scaled at Stillwater in 1955, 1956, and I believe, in 1957.

In 1928, Pete DeGroot who had been working for the Department for a long time, was Ranger, and we setup our organization. In 1934 , Barney Mooney was Firewarden.

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I hired out to be a Lookout on Dog Mountain, and I moved my be¬ longings up on the Lookout one day, and moved them off the next. They took me down and let me in as a packer. I was a packer from 1929-1933 . In 1933, I spent most of my time making primary loca¬ tions for roads, and in 1934, I became foreman in the CC program from 1934 to 1935 . In the spring of 1936 , I took charge of the Stillwater Station for the first time.

In the years 1937-1940, Otha Isaacs was there with me, and we were supposedly working together. He was to handle the timber sales, and I was to handle the fire work, and we were to cooperate with each other. In the fall of the year, I would run compass on the cruising crews, and in the summertime, Otha would help me with fire .

I was Firewarden at the Stillwater from 1936 until 1952, when I quit the State and went to work for private industry. When I left in 1952, Virgil Weaver became Firewarden, followed by Joe Cone. I came back and took over the Stillwater Station in December 1954.

After I left the Stillwater in 1968, Tommy Vars took over and is still there. In fact, he is a senior member in the State Forestry Department right now. He has more years in this Department than anyone else.

One of my first assignments when I came back to the Stillwater in 1954 , was to rebuild the Station. There was only a machine shed and a cabin. I was to construct two new buildings there and then go to the Swan. I designed and constructed four buildings at the Swan. The Swan was not active at that time--it became active when we started to build, and Dick Isaacs was supposedly in charge.

The first summer after we built the station, Dick was transferred out, and Sherman Finch came in. When Sherman transferred to Missoula, Jean Mohler took over and following Jean, Don Wood. When the camp was started, Don Wood was transferred out and Jim Poling came in. Jim was to be the Firewarden, and I was to run the Camp. It didn't go too harmoniously, and they transferred Jim, and turned the whole operation over to me, and I worked it until I retired.

I had Glen Gray as a helper for awhile, but he was transferred, and when I was ready to retire, I recommended that they transfer Glen back to take over the duties that I had. The duties were divided between Joe Lawrence and Glen Gray. Lawrence runs the Camp, and Glen runs the field work, but Glen is the senior man in charge.

The programs that were handled in the earlier years, besides fire protection and timber sales, were not as great, of course, as they are now. There were no farm foresters then, and we did very little stand improvement work. We had brush disposal and road mainte¬ nance, but we didn't build any new roads--we just tried to hang on to what we had. The fact is, that they are still trying to hang on to what they have, and are having an awful time doing it. But, the Firewarden's duties included cleaning the roads, having the roads

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graded, and so on. We would keep the culverts clean and watch over the bridges for flood waters, and all this sort of thing.

A forest is like a farmer with a farm. The farmer doesn't just plant wheat and sit back and watch it grow. He has his fences, weed control, and all the rest of it to do. The day is not far off when we will have to treat a forest like a farm if we are going to have timber in the future. We will automatically have a certain amount of timber, but we can increase that volume by speeding up the growing process by thinning, planting and so on. The planting in this area is not much of a problem--it takes care of itself automatically, but the thinning is a must, and of course, disease control and all the rest goes with it. But, if we are going to grow a new forest, we are going to have to treat it just like a farmer treats his crop--there is no way out.

I feel very strongly in taking the prisoners to do the work that needs to be done. There is no money available to do the work, so they may as well have the prisoners do it rather than be cooped up either doing busy work or sitting in a cell. Why not let them pay for their keep. That is just the way I feel about it. They are capable of doing it, they feel much better, and they aren't nearly as hard to handle if they have something to do, as long as it is something constructive, and they can see that they are doing some good. If they get the idea that they are just doing busy work, you lose all your initiative right there. But, as long as these fel¬ lows can see that they are accomplishing something, they don't object to it at all. The fact is that they work good, and I think that they should do more of it, and it is the way it should be done. It isn't good common sense to pay more money to shut a man up in prison when he could be out doing something constructive, and the administrative costs would be less.

There are a lot of arguments against using prisoners, and one of them is that you are taking jobs away from other people that would work. Well, there is absolutely no grounds for that. In the first place, there is no money to do this work, you have the prisoners, you have to take care of them, you have to spend that money on them, why not get some return on your investment. You are not putt¬ ing anybody out of work, and if you have got money to do that kind of work with, and want to pay somebody to do that, fine, but there are lots of other areas that they can do the same kind of work.

If we should go into a Depression due to circumstances, I would presume that they would want to do something like the CCCs again. It is a poor time now to talk about it when everybody is working, but it is fast coming to a point where everybody isn't going to be working, and they may have a CCC program again.

13

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4

OFFICE OF THE STATE FORESTER

State Forestry was started as a separate Department, but it had an advisory board--the Board of Forestry. The Board of Forestry, someplace along the line, forgot they were an advisory board, and thought they were a controlling body. They started dictating to the State Forester as to what they would do, and what he should do. They were not advising him, but telling him that that is what they would do. Mr. Moon made an issue of it at a meeting, and after Governor Hugo Aaronson read the laws pertaining to it, the Governor made it clear to the Board of Forestry that they were not a con¬ trolling body, but an advisory body, and the State Forester didn't have to abide by the ideas they set down.

Anything on State land pertaining to oil, minerals, gravel, etc., was, and still is, handled by the Land Commissioner. All we did was appraise the value of the timber removed, and of the stand removed, but all the controls lie with the Land Board.

The Office of State Forester was created in 1909. Every timber sale had to be okayed by the Land Board, just the way it is now. The present system just saves a lot of red tape. As long as they keep a good forester to make the recommendations, that is the way it should be.

The State Forester has always been headquartered in Missoula. When the Forest was created, and the Forestry School was created, part of the agreement between the Legislature and the University was that the School of Forestry would provide room in the Forestry Building for the State Forester. Dor Skeels, the person I talked about earlier, was Dean of Forestry then and that was part of the agreement that got the Legislature to approve the Forestry Building and the setup at the University. That was part of the original agreement .

When Moon came on board, there were some arguments about this. In fact, I think he had to run down Dor Skeels to verify that that was the agreement made at the time the forestry building was construct¬ ed at the university, and that it would house the State Forester. They didn't want him in there in late years, and he didn't want to be in there in late years. This was called "Jumbo Hall" and you don't know what that place was like until you were in it. The rooms weren't very big at all, and the desks were edge to edge, and typists working at the desks, and the men in there trying to work at the desks. You couldn't hear yourself think in that place.

One of the first assignments that I had was when the State Forester called me to Missoula and said he wanted me to order new materials to equip the cookhouse, and order a set of carpenter tools to put out in the various Areas so these fellows would have something to work with. I took one look at this place, and Don Drummond asked me what I was going to do? I told Don that I was going to my motel room and stay there, and when I got done, I would be back. He asked me what I needed, and I told him I needed a wholesale supply

14

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catalog. Don went over to the administration branch building at the university, picked up a catalog for me, and I went back to my motel room and stayed there for about three days figuring out the neces¬ sary materials that we would need and ordered them.

My order wasn't cut one iota--it went through just identically the way I sent it in. One thing that tickled me in this whole ordeal, after it was all over with, Virgil Weaver, who was my Assistant in the Stillwater, didn't know anything about the order, and I didn't say anything about what I had ordered. When he asked me what I had ordered, I just simply told him that I ordered supplies to equip the cookhouse and equip the Stillwater District.

When the supplies came in, they were delivered right to the Stillwater Station, and I put Virgil to unpacking and inventorying it. He just nicely got started, and I was over at one of the other buildings doing something, and here comes Virgil and asked if I would come look and see what they ordered for this place. He was just shocked no end. One of the things that had upset him was the fact that all the kitchen utensils were Revereware Stainless Steel, and what was the idea buying something like that for this place. I listened to him and laughed, and went on about my business, but didn't tell him that he was looking at the damn fool that ordered it. I don't know if he ever found out, but I know when they or¬ dered for the Swan, they took my order and duplicated it again.

The same stainless steel that was ordered 25 years ago is still being used, and there isn't a chip on it or a dent in it. It is just as good as the day it was purchased. They had been in the habit of going down and buying granite ware or something like that for pots and kettles, and in a year or two, it would be all chipped and not fit to use, and they would order some more, and it would go on and on that way. I know when they built the Swan, some of the guys in the Missoula Office didn't think stainless steel was the thing to have--they should have purchased cast aluminum. Moon, like he always does, listened to all their stories and never said anything, and as soon as they got all through he said, we'll order stainless steel.

When I started to work, there were three permanent men in Kalispell--Pete DeGroot, Fred Metcalf, and Emil Anderson. In Missoula, there was Mr. White, Nathan Hayes, and Archie Thayler.

In 1933, Otha Isaacs was hired. I actually didn't go on as a per¬ manent employee for the State of Montana until 1936, but I worked seasonal for four years, then I took over the State and lived there. Herb Jamieson came later, along with Jack Hamilton and Rod Krout .

There were other men who worked at various times, but didn't stay. One of them was Allie Brennan. Brennan's father was a famous pio¬ neer lawyer in Kalispell, and they called him "Tinplate Bill." Rex Beach wrote a story about him, "North of 63." He was a lawyer also, and represented the small goldminers in Alaska when they were having trouble with big companies trying to take over the claims of

15

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the little fellows and so on. He was a little old dried up lawyer that wore a stovepipe hat, and they tell about him going to a lit¬ tle rodeo south of Kalispell and giving one of the riders a bad time, and the fellow said that he wasn't in any position to talk because he couldn't do as good. Brennan said "the hell I can't" and he strolled onto the horse, hat and all, and rode the horse to a standstill. He was just a rough, tough guy. His son Allie, was kind of a little bit on the misfit side, I would say. He was part Indian and I knew him well. He couldn't let having fun interfere with his work--that was out of the question, you know. He enjoyed himself and didn't care if the job went along or not. I know that he finally committed suicide. I don't know why, but he was getting old and things weren't going the way he wanted.

John Mclntire, the Hollywood actor, is a native of Kalispell. He went to high school in Kalispell. He was an upper classman when I was a Freshman. I have met him, but I don't know him. His father was a pioneer lawyer in Kalispell in the early days.

John Mclntire was a product of the Depression. He had nothing to do, went to Los Angeles, and hung around the studios picking up a buck here and there working as extra, and somebody finally spotted him and he became what he is now. He is long on ecology and so on, but he is quite a guy. He spends most of his spare time in Montana and only goes back to Hollywood when there is a special job for him, but the rest of the time, he is up here.

16

LOGGING IN THE STILLWATER AREA

The logging in the Stillwater area started in World War I. The ground work was laid way ahead of time, but as far as logging on State land, it was just before World War I. Henry Good was the prime contractor, and he logged Forest Service land and State land.

All the logs were floated down the Stillwater River, and they logged what they could get to the river with sleighs. The men who were logging there were Joe Johnson, Manley Street, St. Augustine Cindon, Sam Connors, the Turk Brothers, and Stoner. That is not all of them, but I have mentioned a few. They hauled their logs until the crash of 1929 and that was the end of logging on the Stillwater River.

The areas that were partly logged, the contracts were cancelled because there was no market, nothing they could do with the timber, and there was no logging then of any consequence. Charlie McDowell was cutting salvage timber in the '31 burn at the ranch west of Whitef ish--State lands, T30N-R22W. After logging in the burn, he later went to sawmilling on the timber that didn't burn.

The Baker Brothers were doing salvage logging in 1928 on the Stryker burn. They were doing salvage logging and cutting ties. There was no market for side lumber, so they just piled the slabs up and either burned or sold them for wood. Most of them were just burned.

Then World War II came along, and just before the war, the market for lumber picked up and there were small mills on State land in various areas in the Eureka country. When the war came on, all the mills switched to ties. Railroad ties were sawed out of State timber, the slabs were piled up, and again they were either sold for fuel, or burned.

The American Timber Company started logging at Olney and Columbus Clark was logging at Eureka; Mitchell Greer had a sawmill at Eureka on State land; Jack Stevens had a tie mill on State land; and the McDowell Brothers were cutting ties and lumber on State land. Then some loggers from Priest River came in, the Doolittle Brothers, and they set up a mill on Stillwater Lake.

The American Timber Company had only portable mills at that time, but they got the idea that they wanted to go into the lumber busi¬ ness, so they set up a permanent mill on State land in the Lower Stillwater Lake area. During rhe war, they cut ties over a vast area from Lupfer north up on Dog Creek on a strip of State land, and when the war was over, the portable mills started cutting lum¬ ber again.

Roy Conant set up a planer at Olney, was buying lumber and planing it green, and shipping it green. John Slack and the McDowell Broth¬ ers hauled lumber to Roy and he planed it and marketed it. They

17

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started to bear down on the sawmills, and the competition got too keen. The American Timber Company set up their permanent lumber mill there, and sawing lumber for Plum Creek, which at that time, was owned by a man by the name of Dunham. He was selling a lot of his lumber for box stock, but he kept building up his business until it became what is now known as Plum Creek. When he died, the Northern Pacific bought his interest in the business, and it became a Northern Pacific mill. When the railroad merger came, it became Burlington Northern, and Plum Creek is now a subsidiary of the Burlington Northern.

The lumber industry at the end of World War II was selling stumpage for $5.00 to $6.00 per thousand, and the market kept jumping, and the price of stumpage kept going up. I know it was only a few years until salvage was bringing $16.00 per thousand, which was a tremendous price, and Yellow pine went to $88.00 a thousand.

The market just continued to go up and up to where the present market is now. I believe the value is inflated now to a point where there will be a day of reckoning, but only time will tell us that .

The American Timber Company, (Lawrence Larson), saw where they could take this small material, make two-by-fours, and show a better profit than the lumber mills. So they did away with their lumber mill and made a stud mill. Today, the American Timber Company is working two shifts and turning out about two million feet of two-by-fours a week. It is really unbelievable, but they are turning them out of material that used to be considered worthless, and probably have the most efficient operation of its kind in the world. Seventeen men will make a million feet of two-by-fours a week, and they salvage all the chips, they salvage all the bark, the bark furnishes the fire in the boilers, and the boilers, in turn, generate electricity to run the mill, and all the chips go for pulp and paper. They don't leave enough in the woods that you could even bother to cut the limbs off of them--they just load them on the truck, tree length, take a chainsaw and cut the end of the load off. They don't care about the top diameter, if it is two inches, or if it is four inches. They don't want it any bigger than four inches, however.

The mill is so automatic, they don't touch a board with their hands from the time the log meets the mill yard until it comes out a finished two-by-four, planed and ready to market. It is then bundled automatically and stacked aside, and when the carpenter is ready to use it, that is about the first time it is touched by hand. It is a very uncanny operation, but it is also very efficient .

I have always said (I don't know if it is exactly right, but it is a good comparison) , that the American Timber Company can take $100 logs, and make it into $100 two-by-f ours , and show a profit. At one time, the chips alone would pay for the operation, and the overrun would make still more margin to work on. In small timber, there is a great overrun, and they will save anything that will

18

make a one-by-two, and it is all sorted for size and length automatically. A million feet of two-by-fours a week, when the average two-by-four has five feet in it, you can figure how many pieces go through that plant. It is something to behold--it is really uncanny.

19

CEDAR POLE OPERATION ON STILLWATER STATE FOREST

The majority of the cedar pole logging was done before the land exchange during World War I. It was an area a mile south of Dog Creek, along the foot of Stryker Ridge, clear to Stryker Lake. There was a tremendous volume of cedar poles in there.

The C. I. Ewing Pole Company actually got their start in that operation, and Ewing McCabe, and several other loggers had camps in there, but Ewing got the majority of the poles. They took out any cedar tree that would make a five inch top--25'-0" pole. Everything in the cedar line went at that time, but the reproduction, of course, was there. In 1950-51 , we sold the poles the second time on the same area, and we got no end of 5 5 foot poles, and lots of 70s.

In 25 years, the cedar had reproduced and made a tremendous amount of poles again from a flat start. Emil Anderson was administrator of the sale for the Forest Service, but before World War I, and directly after the war, he worked on it, and 25 years later, we cut poles on the same ground, but I don't remember the volume we took out .

The foresters today don't value the cedar tree as a pole product. They say they are going to quit using cedar poles, but if they can get them, the demand is greater for cedar poles now than it was during World War I. The demand is there for them.

The country along the foot of Stryker Ridge will reproduce more cedar, and a better quality of cedar pole, than any area that I know of. It is something to watch in the future, because they will always be taking cedar poles. The reason that the cedar grows so well at the Stryker Ridge site is that it is a natural site for cedar. Idaho grows lots of poles--longer poles, and they grow just as fast, but they don't have the form that the cedar poles have that come from Stryker Ridge. What I mean by that is they don't have the taper ro make a pretty pole. A 3 5 foot pole, for instance, has to have a certain butt diameter up seven feet. With the butt diameter, you can only make a 3 5 foot pole. These poles along there are naturals. If you get a butt diameter for a 35 foot pole, you will get a top that will meet the specifications perfectly. In Idaho, you take the same tree, you will only have a butt diameter for a 35 foot pole. If you cut a 35 foot pole off of it, the top will be big enough that you can take the top and cut another 30 foot pole off the top. They are long and slim--the poles in the Radnor/Stryker/Olney area are just natural and better formed. They are just a higher class pole than any place in the country.

I have seen good cedar poles sold for sawlogs where they brought about half as much as they would if they were sold for poles. This is mainly because people administering the sales are not familiar with the cedar pole, and don't realize the value it has.

20

People today are just beginning to realize the value that cedar really has. It didn't sell high on the market, it was hard to get, but now it is one of the most expensive species on the market that you can buy. It was selling for over $1,000 per thousand a year or two ago. It just has a tremendous value. It is a minor species, and it is hard to convince anybody that it has a value. There are other areas on LaBeau Creek and Miller Creek where you can get wonderful cedar poles.

The original logging, up until 1929, was practiclly all done by horses. They had some caterpillar logging, but very little. It was mostly horses, and all the logs were hauled on sleighs.

Truck logging was started before World War II, but it wasn't the common thing until the war, and they turned to trucks in a big way.

The first logging operation that I worked on that used trucks, we were hauling logs on a Model T Ford truck. A short haul, but it worked, and they have developed the trucks over the years to what we have today, which is quite a change from a Model T. As I said, up until 1929, the principal means of logging was with horses, and in the 1930s, they started to use more and more machinery.

21

GLACIER PARK LAND SALE

The Glacier Park Land Sale, was a sale of State land and timber to the old Northwestern Lumber Company. I don't remember the name of the State Forester that engineered the deal, but he had worked for the lumber companies, and was appointed State Forester. He arranged a deal where they bought State land, timber and all, for $10.00 an acre. The sale consisted of not quite a township in the Upper Whitefish, right in the heart of the State Forest Unit. It was a legal deal, there wasn't anything illegal about it, but what it amounted to was a land steal. There wasn't any competition when they sold the land. I know of land south of Whitefish (Blanchard Lake) where they logged it, and got a million and a half of larch logs on 40 acres which is a tremendous stand for this area.

This sale created a big stir in the Legislature. Even though it was perfectly legal, the State got a beating, there was no doubt about that. The next session of the Legislature passed a law that all lands owned by the State, classified as Forest Land, could not be sold, that they would keep them for timber lands. That was the start of the State not being able to sell land classified as timberland. This Glacier Park Sale brought the whole thing on. The old Northwestern Lumber Company, which later was absorbed by the Somers Lumber Company, engineered this deal, and the State lost millions of dollars in the sale.

22

CHINA BASIN

The China Basin was not named after a Chinaman, but a Japanese. To the oldtimers, any oriental was a Chinaman, it didn't make any difference. They even called the Philippines Chinamen.

A man by the name of Zachkra, or Zac, as they called him--I can't tell you exactly how he spelled his name, but he was a Japanese military man. We had several in our midst. It was no secret, and we didn't pay any attention to them. They weren't any different than anyone else as far as we were concerned.

This fellow posed as a trapper, and he worked as a trapper. He had a family in Japan, and what he was actually doing was mapping or remapping the Whitefish Divide for Japanese Intelligence.

When Zac came up missing, and his dogs came into Olney, the Japs were all concerned about him, so they offered a reward for anyone that could find him. They tried to find him that fall. A man by the name of Murphy, (an oldtimer who had helped make the original surveys), found the body not far from the cabin. They figured that Zac had the flu, complicated with pneumonia, and he just collapsed before he reached the cabin. He managed to crawl in underneath a tree and died. He died in the fall of the year, but his body wasn't found until the next June. The dogs abandoned him because they were hungry, so they came back to Olney.

The question arose as to what they were going to do with the body. Pete DeGroot suggested to the coroner that the Japanese take care of the body. The Japanese agreed to that, and the coroner and some of the ranchers around Olney went up on Werner with them. The Japanese made a big fire, laid the body on it, piled more fuel on the fire and cremated him. They gathered up his ashes, put them in an urn, and brought him down off the hill. His ashes were sent back to Japan. His death certificate, along with the coroner's report, and all the other papers are in the historical files in Missoula .

There were several other Japanese that were known military men connected to the Japanese Intelligence. We knew them, there was nothing out of the way about them, and we associated with them all the time.

The Section Foreman at Olney, whose name was Tiege, as soon as his family was grown to where the kids had to go to school, he shipped them all to Japan, and one of his sons was quite a high military officer in World War II.

Just before Pearl Harbor, the word got out to these Japanese to come home, I think Tiege made it home safe. There was another man by the name of Mito who died enroute , but he was dying of cancer when he decided to leave the states. I think Johnny Hagadashy was captured. American Intelligence picked Johnny up before he got out of the United States.

23

One of the Japanese boy's from Whitefish, was a Japanese military officer in the Philippines in charge of the Kabonton Prison Camp that you hear so much about. He was the Commanding Officer in that camp. An American boy from Whitefish was in the prison camp. These two boys went to school together in Whitefish. The Japanese Commanding Officer, spirited the American boy out of the prison camp, got him on the underground railroad and he was taken to the Southern Philippines, and a submarine picked him up. He took information from the Philippines with him, and he talked too much, and the Army had to shut him up.

There were two lines of thinking in the Japanese people. Any family that educated their children here, and kept them here, were good American citizens, but any of the families that had Japanese tendencies, their children and wives were sent to Japan to be educated. It didn't take any effort to pick out which ones were which. The ones that stayed here were the best of American citizens .

At the start of World War II, there was a Japanese in Whitefish putting pressure on Japanese section workers to give money for the war effort in Japan. He got pretty demanding, and one of the local Japanese here shot him. There was no ceremony about, it, he just shot and killed him, and then walked down to the Past Time Saloon and gave the pistol to the bartender and told him what he had done, and the law came and got him. We never did hear what happened to that man. There was no big to do about killing the other Japanese.

There was a Japanese in Whitefish that had a laundry, and he was getting ready to head back to Japan with military information, but he was picked up by the authorities before he had a chance to leave. He had a trunk full of information that he was taking back, but you never hear what happened to these people. They just spirited them away, and I presume when the war was over, they went back to Japan.

As I said earlier, we definitely had two factions of Japanese here--one that was strictly for Japan, and the others were the best of American citizens. They never put these Japanese in concentration camps, they just stayed in Whitefish and worked.

I knew Tiege and Johnny Hagadashy as well as I knew any man. Johnny Hagadashy--we all knew him as "Scarface Johnny." He got the name through an accident he had at Lupfer. The section crew was living in box cars that were setting off the tracks in Lupfer. The bedbugs got pretty bad and they washed everything down in the box cars with gasoline to try and get rid of the bedbugs. Using Johnny's own statement--"if somebody would light a cigarette, poof, everybody outside." Johnny got pretty badly burned, and was in the hospital quite awhile--it all but blew his clothes off. But, he lived, and after that he was always Scarface Johnny.

Tiege and Johnny Hagadashy worked for the Great Northern Railway, and they knew every tressle, every tunnel and all the details of it. They had it down pat. These were not average Japanese, they

24

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were outstanding Japanese engineers, but they worked here, and that was the way the Japanese operated.

Tiege went back to Japan to visit with his family every year or two, and his only complaint was that he lived in the United States for so long, he couldn't speak Japanese, and he couldn't speak English either. He could write though. I wrote him many a burning permit, and if you made a mistake on a permit, he would catch it right now. He knew his stuff.

There were a lot of individuals that were really characters in the early years. An example of one was a fellow by the name of Oliver Johnson. Oliver was an adventurer, pure and simple. He was a trapper, but just for the adventure of it.

Oliver and a bunch of other fellows decided that they would go over to Glacier Park by the way of Shorty Creek and trap Martin in the Park. It was getting too slow on this side, so they decided to go to the Park. The fact that it was illegal was only secondary, but that is where they were headed when Oliver died. They knew the country and the cabins, and they were going to the cabin to spend the night. They planned on going all over Red Meadow and down Red Meadow Creek, and then into the Park. They would go into the backside of the Park and do their trapping, and get out the same way, and no one would ever know that they were in there. They would have gotten away with it too, but Oliver died before they completed their mission.

One of the fellows that was with Oliver when he died, stayed around this country and went to work for the Anaconda Copper Company, and then down into South America to do prospecting and do exploratory work for the ACM, until it was time to retire, and he retired in Butte .

Oliver's grave is in the Upper Whitefish on the East Fork, Section 17. The grave is marked with signs pointing to it. I believe he died in 1922. There is a death certificate in the files on him in Missoula also.

Another real colorful character was Joe Bush. He was a renegade, there is no doubt about that. You can talk about what a fine old man he was, but he was a character.

Joe told Giles Crane that he got the wrong kind of discharge from the Army. Giles asked him what he meant by that, and Joe said that he got a dishonorable discharge. When asked why, Joe said they there was a Sergeant who was always picking on him, and one day he got tired of it and shot him. Giles asked Joe if he killed him and Joe said no, if he had, he wouldn't be here. Joe said they just discharged me and set me afoot on the prairie, and I was on my own.

Joe Bush was with Captain Crook and they were chasing Sitting Bull at one time, and Joe was at the Custer Battle Field before the dead were buried, but Crook's outfit didn't stop--they went right on after the Sioux. Of course, the Sioux went into Canada, and that

25

was the end of that. Joe got too smart for his officers though, he had to take it alone. The way Giles Crane told it to me was the he (Giles) was rubbing linament on Joe's leg, and there were blue spots all over it and Giles asked what those spots on his leg were. Joe said it was none of his damn business what those spots were. Later, Joe told Giles that he was getting out of a corral with a bunch of stolen horses down in Wyoming, and the farmer came out and he didn't get away quick enough--he got a load of buckshot into the seat of the pants. He had a gimpy leg from that time on.

The next we knew about Joe, he was in San Francisco. He had married, and was driving a delivery van for a bakery. His wife died in childbirth, and Joe was pretty broken up about it. He returned to Montana to the first place that he had known over around Half Moon. Joe moved in with Emil Destrimin, who was homesteading 160 acres at the head of Whiefish Lake, and used that as his headquarters and trapped out there. Emil and Joe improved the land, and Joe received 80 acres, and Emil received 80 acres. Emil sold his 80 acres to the Cranes and moved away, but Joe stayed .

Joe trapped a lot of bear, Martin and anything he could get, but bear was the big thing. I believe they got $10.00 for a grizzly hide, and $5.00 for a black bear. It doesn't sound like very much, but when you know that those fellows working in the woods were working for $40.00 a month and food, they would make a living at it .

Joe got into financial trouble and deeded his place to Henry Peterman with the understanding that he could live there as long as he lived. As far as Joe was concerned, the Upper Whitefish Valley was his, and was going to run anybody else out that tried to get in there. He didn't live long enough to get that accomplished--development came too fast.

Joe died in 1933. There are two notes in the historical files that he wrote. One tells about how they came to name Werner Peak, and the other is the note that he had written the day he died. Besides copies of the notes, his German immigration papers are also in the historical files. I am not sure what else is in the files, but there are some pictures of him. They later used those pictures in the book called "Stump Town." Joe's rifle is in the Whitefish library, hanging on the wall.

Joe Bush was a nickname--his real name was Joe Werner. An engineer who was doing survey work in the Upper Whitefish stayed with Joe. Joe packed their supplies around, and doing one thing and another. He said to Joe one day that he thought they ought to name a mountain after him. Joe evidently didn't object. Well, they went out in front of the house, set up a transit, and pointed it due north, and the mountain it fell on they called Werner Peak, and it is Werner Peak today. They just picked it at random.

Joe got the name of Bush because of the life he lived--he lived in the bushes all his life, and of course, with the troubles and

26

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background that the man had, you can see why he would like to be alone. His troubles with the military, loss of his wife and child, etc. He was probably a bitter man. He evidently lost his child, because no one knows anything about it.

The reason we know so much about Joe after he left this part of the country was from a man named Jack Creon, a retired railroader here in town. Jack was raised in 'Frisco, and it was his dad's bakery wagon that Joe was driving. That is how we got to know where Joe was and what had happened while he was in California, because Joe never told anyone.

Henry Peterman died, and the place was left to Henry's son and daughter. They owned it for years. Bill, the son, was living there, and he had given Joe a bad time about paying rent for living there. Joe was pretty despondent. Years before, he gave Giles Crane $500, with the understanding that Giles was to keep the money for him to take care of his funeral. One day, in 1933, when they went to Joe's cabin, Joe was dead. They previously had taken his guns because they were afraid he might shoot himself, but they missed some coyote poison. Joe left a note explaining what he had done, and not to blame anybody but himself. He just couldn't take anymore. The note mentioned to see Giles Crane and that he would take care of all expenses. The sheriff went to Giles who had an account in the bank in such a way that it was separate from his own private account. He took the $500 and bought a lot, paid for the funeral and a marker for the grave. Joe had quite a history of problems and troubles. Like all the fellows in the end, he didn't know what to do with himself.

A photostatic copy of the note Joe left is in the historical files in Missoula and Kalispell, along with a copy of Joe's naturalization papers and several other pieces of writing that Joe left behind. Gary Moon had asked me to gather all this material and put it in the files. I am not sure whether or not there is a death certificate in the files or not. Giles Crane had all the originals, but I don't know where they are now--I wouldn't be surprised if Jess Underwood has them. I made photostatic copies of the original materials that I had and returned them to Giles Crane, but I don't know whatever became of all the originals.

The Crane brothers lived on the Destrimin place. They still live there, but have sold it to Squires. Squires is the brother-in-law to Bill Peterman. He bought Bill Peterman's interest and he bought the Crane place, and now he has the old Destrimin place all in tact again. The Crane bothers moved in there right after World War I with their father and mother. The two boys always lived with their parents until they passed away. I know one time I went there and Mrs. Crane came to the door and we were visiting as usual. I asked about her health and she said, "oh, I'm doing pretty good--I ain't as active and chipper as I used to be, but then when you get 88 years old you can't expect to be quite as active as you were." These people lived to an old, old age--they were good people.

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Ward Skiles had an adjoining farm. He homesteaded it, I believe. He was a businessman here in Whitefish. He had been a telegraph operator either with the Great Northern or Western Union, I can't remember which.

The next rancher would be Charlie Swaney. Charlie lived west of the Vista Tunnel on a ranch. His father was an early pioneer in the Flathead Valley, but I don't know just exactly when he came here. Charlie's father, Andrew Swaney, came to the Flathead Valley in 1860 and lived at Ashley. In later years, he lived at Charlie's place in DePew. They were some of the earliest pioneers in the Flathead Valley. Charlie was sent away to be educated, I believe to become an engineer, but he never did anything with his education. He was a surveyor, but never made a business of it. He just lived on the ranch. I knew him real well. He lives in California and I think he is still living.

Charlie worked for the State Forest a time or two. He was well educated and it showed in a big way, but as I said earlier, he did absolutely nothing with his education. All he wanted to be was a rancher. I worked with Charlie when he worked for the State. He was a musician along with everything else. He played in the first orchestra in the Flathead Valley as a drummer.

Charlie liked to live the life of a gentleman, and take life easy. He and his wife had no children.

Not far from Charlie's there was a ranch with a German on it, who we called Dutch George. George Hilgert was his name. Some of his ancestors are still around here. George was a German immigrant who came to Minneapolis and went in with some other Germans with a bakery, and learned the bakery trade as a boy. He was a baker and a cook par excellence. In his day, it was nothing to cook three meals a day for 150 men. They speak a lot about George and his work. He would take a pile of bread dough 10 make biscuits, reach in the dough and get a handful, and start cutting out biscuits with his knife. When they raised, there wouldn't be a biscuit a fraction of an inch higher than the others, and he would roll out two biscuits at a time, one with each hand, and slap them in a pan.

In later years, George got to drinking. He was always more or less an alcoholic, but in late years he drank to a point where he lost everything he had. He died in Kalispell in a rest home or the poor farm, I don't remember which.

George married J. Q. Weber's ex-wife, and had a daughter, Alice, and a son. Teddy, Bill, Jim and George Weber were half brothers to the Hilgert children. His son, daughter and nephews are in the Olney area. They came up the hard way--pretty poverty ridden.

One of the Weber boys is in the soldier's home in Columbia Falls. He got hurt in a logging accident and received a brain injury. I saw him not too long ago. His family couldn't take care of him, so they put him in a soldier's home in Wyoming. He did get better, and was moved back to Columbia Falls. He didn't know how he got

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there, and had no memory of the past from the time he got hurt until then. He is not physically able to work or anything, but he can take care of himself and get around. I wouldn't have recognized him if he had not recognized me first.

The adjoining ranch to the north was Herb Roskie's. Herb was a radical solcialist, but he was a good neighbor. They were good people to get along with, but you didn't want to talk politics with him, that's for sure. Both he and George had been together, and homesteaded on Good Creek originally. Herb died in a rest home in Hot Springs, I believe it was. The original homesteader, now at the Stillwater Inn, was a man by the name of Gallenger. In late years, I worked with his son in Idaho who was a lumberman. Gallenger started the original Lake House, or Road House. There were a lot of other people involved later, but it was Gallenger ' s homestead, and the Lake House was originally his. I never knew the original Gallenger, but I knew his son when I worked for the Diamond Match Company.

The townsite of Olney was originally started by Guy White and the original settlers, but the majority of them homesteaded up Good Creek directly after World War I. They were supposedly the misfits, the undesirables out of Kalispell, Whitefish and Columbia Falls. They were gamblers--we called some of them misfits--it was as good a name for them as any.

There were even con men that lived around the bars. When I came to Olney, there was a bootlegger in every house in town. They had been in the Post Office, but they got a little afraid of the Post Office because it was a federal agency, and it might be a little more serious if they got caught bootlegging there.

Carl Green was the railroad operator there. He had been a fireman or an engineer on the Great Northern, and he got his arm cut off in an accident in the roundhouse. He lost his arm from the elbow down. He was actually dispatching whiskey over the railroad wires. It was no secret as to what these fellows were doing--they did it and that was all there was to it. They were shipping coal from Furney, and they would load booze, maybe beer, maybe whiskey. They would load it under a load of coal, and they would tell Carl which car it was, and he, in turn, would tell the train crew that such and such a car should be put on the siding with a hot box, and the boys on the ground would move in and load it--sometimes on pack horses, sometimes on trucks, sometimes on automobiles, and away they would go with it.

Dad Lewis used to pack whiskey from Radnor and Olney, across to the head of Whitefish Lake, and then they would bring it down the lake on a boat and peddle it here in Whitefish. Nobody would pay any attention to them. In the prohibition days, people got to the point where they didn't pay any attention to it.

Guy White and his wife started the Olney store. They had a store and a boarding house in connection with it. They ran a clean, good establishment, and were good people. They didn't stand for any

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foolishness of any kind. I remember one time coming in the store, and Charlie Bryan came in so drunk he could hardly walk, but he was still a travelling, and Mrs. White would say, "Charlie, I told you never to come in this store in this kind of shape." I'm going, Mrs. White, I'm going, Mrs. White, Charlie would say. Mrs. White told him to get out and not to come back. Out he would go--very simple .

Mrs. White had two sisters, Mrs. Maloney and Mrs. Johnny Johnson. Their mother came to Olney with them, but she died early. They were all the same kind of people--they all worked around those kind of places. But, they all worked like anyone else. I worked with their husbands--they worked with the brush crews and did anything that there was to be done. The bootlegging was fast getting to the point where they couldn't make a living at it. There were so many bootleggers that they didn't have any customers left. Mrs. White tells about the seven of them, her two sisters, herself, Guy White, Matt Maloney, Johnny Johnson, and their mother. They were operating in Burk, Idaho and the law was after them, so they left town. They didn't go by road, they went cross-country through the timber and came out at Thompson Falls, on up to Kalispell, and set up shop there. Guy White was a well educated man from a well to do family from Colorado. But his family disowned him, kicked him out, and he was on his own. Playing poker and playing the piano was his long suite. When Tonapaw, Nevada had its big boom, he went to Tonapaw and worked for a gambler that had been in Kalispell. He worked several years down there, then came back here again. He was a professional gambler, that was all there was to it.

Lew Spencer was a professional gambler, and his wife was a Malotto. They tell about the boys at Lew's house, drinking beer, and having a big time, telling about this fellow being a Frenchman, and one being an Irishman, and some bright lumberjack looked up and said, Mandy, what nationality are you? She was about as black as. . . Don't you know what nationality I is? I is Irish. But these people shouldn't be downgraded--they were good citizens and they didn't do anything in Olney that was out of the way. They did bootleg, sure, but what the hell, in those days, there was a bootlegger around every corner. If anyone was in trouble or needed help, you can bet that they were right there and they didn't ask any questions, and they weren't worried about anybody paying them for it. They were there to help, if anybody was sick or if there was anything that they needed, they would all turn out and help.

Another of the early families was Clair Bush. His son, Neil, the last I knew, Neil was a principal of the high school or one of the grade schools in Columbia Falls. His sister, Marion, is living in an old folks home near Eureka.

There was Vance Willifred. He was a con man deluxe. One time he had a shingle out at Troy--Dr. Vance. All he had was an electric blanket. He used to grow vegetables at Good Creek and sell them and we used to buy produce from him.

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Sam Nelson was also from that country, and homesteaded at Good Creek. The logging camps were in big swing, and Sam used to do laundry for the camps. The fellows used to call him Chinese Sam. His house was on top of the list for any lumberjacks to come along--he fed them all, took care of them all, and that was the way he made his living--doing laundry for them, and he did all right.

There were a couple of brothers who homesteaded up Good Creek, and were around Olney a lot. They were the Gergen brothers. They were musicians along with everything else. I don't know where they came from. Nobody knows where they came from, but they claim that somebody threatened to kill them, and their life was in danger and all this jazz. I thought part of it was mostly BS. Anyhow, they always wore 45s strapped to them, and they never walked together--they always walked 20-30 feet apart, one behind the other. It was so conspicuous that it was noticeable. They maintained that because somebody had threatened to kill them, they had to watch out for their lives, but that was just to add a little color or something, I think. Nobody knows where they came from or where they went--they just vanished. I used to see them quite often and you couldn't help but notice that one would walk 20-30 feet behind the other walking down the road with six shooters.

I can't remember all of the names, but there were two lumberjacks in a cabin that were bootlegging for years--Charlie and Gus Bryan. They were their own best customers. Just a part of the characters in the town. Bill Zimmer came over one day, and Charlie went down to the store and bought a couple dozen oranges, and had them in a paper sack coming up the street, and the sack broke and the oranges fell on the ground. Well, Charlie didn't try to pick them up, he just got down on his hands and knees, and rolled them up the street in the dust. He would be rolling along, and he would look behind and find one that he had missed, and he would say, why you little so and so, what are you doing back there, get back up here, and he would roll it, and that was how he brought the oranges home.

There was another woman, Ida Linn. She had a cabin in Olney, and her folks had a restaurant here in Whitefish. Ida was coming off shift and walking up the path by Gus and Charlie's to get to her home, and they ran out of booze and were drunk. Charlie went out to get some more, and he only got probably 20-30 feet from the house and he couldn't make it anymore, so he grabbed on to a tree and the snow was knee deep against this tree. He had his rubbers on, and they were not laced up, and they filled with snow and came off. He just had a path worn around this tree where he walked round and round. Ida saw him, and he saw Ida, and he said "I'm all right lady, but I need some help." Ida knocked on the door and the rest of the crew was in the house drinking, went out and pried him loose and carried him away. Charlie lost his boots, lost his socks, and went barefoot going round and round in the snow. This was typical of all the people in those days. I could tell you stories that are a hell of a lot worse.

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There were 200 lumberjacks in logging camps right at the foot of the hill from the store, and on the 4th of July, and Labor Day, they all had to celebrate, and I know one particular case where a fella had one of those old Chevy's with a rumble seat. Well, they were out drinking, and there was a fella by the name of Charlie Trotter with him. He was in the rumble seat and went to sleep. The seat fell over on him, and he was hollering and yelling, and the fellas were all laughing. They drove around town and left him in there most of the day. I heard one of the lumberjacks say afterwards, "God Damn, when we had old Charlie in that rumble seat, we sure made him holler." But those kinds of things were typical of that town, they just happened many, many times. Of course, to some people, it would be kind of disgusting, but to me it was funny to listen to those guys and know the tricks and capers that they would pull when they were drunk, or half drunk even. But, that was Olney in the early days.

Clair Bush, who I mentioned earlier, worked for the State Forest, first in 1928, and then later when the war came on, he worked for the railroad and was killed in a railroad accident here.

The people that I am talking about were the kind of people that we had around here, and there wasn't a one of them that wouldn't give you the shirt off his back. I never considered them different, just considered them a hell of a lot better than some of those so called good people we have around now, doing things that they wouldn't have the world knowing that they are doing it, but they are doing it all the time.

Pete DeGroot and two other men came into this country during the oil boom in the North Fork to work in the oil fields. In the winter time, of course, they couldn't work in the fields, so they hired out as United States Marshals, and were looking for illegal Chinamen. They would go out and find an illegal Chinaman, but didn't bother to arrest him, they would just bore down on him, and make him pay off in gold, and this gave them money to live on for awhile. When they ran out of money, they would go out and catch another Chinaman. Pete actually tells about doing this.

In the summer, they would go back up the North Fork locating oil claims. They even had a drill rig of their own at one time, but it all played out. When they created the forest reserve, Pete tried out for Ranger and he got an appointment. They had a Ranger School, which was held in Missoula. Pete had a pretty good education. He was a surveyor, and knew how to use a transit and all the other tools of the trade. He was sent to the school with the rest, and when they got him down there, they considered that Pete shouldn't be a student, but should be teaching, so he taught surveying to the other Rangers.

The big thing to be a Ranger in those days was to be able to pack a horse and be woods-wise. That was the first item, and the other things came along behind it. Pete was a Ranger until World War I when he quit the U. S. Forest Service and went to work in the cedar camps at Radnor. He bought himself a piece of ground from the State

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at Olney and made his home there. After the war, he went to work for the State of Montana. I think MacLaughlin was the State Forester he hired out under.

Pete’s first wife was another colorful character. I have read articles on the history of Wallace, Idaho, and she is mentioned in there. She used to carry mail from DeMersville to Ft. Steele by packhorse, and they say that she could put mail on one side of the packhorse, and whiskey on the other. They speak of her in the history of Wallace as "Bronco Liz." I have her death certificate here in the house someplace. She was killed in a train accident at Olney. It was just around Christmastime, and she boarded a train to come to Whitefish to buy some things for Christmas. She got off rhe train and was walking up the tracks at the Olney Ranger Station, which was the only way you could get there. It was snowing and storming, and a train hit her. When she wasn't home the next morning, Pete went out to find her. He found her. The rrain had cut her in half. The upper half of her body was sitting up on top of the snowbank, just like she was asleep. Pete just about went crazy.

A year or so later, Pete married a Miss Foote. Her two brothers were lawyers--one was Attorney General for the State of Montana, and the other was Assistant Attorney General. I knew her quite well. She raised two girls, one of them is over in Havre, and the other is out in Roseberg, Oregon. Pete lived to be 90 years old. The last time I talked to him about this historical material, he was 88 years old. He was just a redheaded Dutchman--Hollander , not a German. He came out of Wisconsin. He and his brother then came to this part of the country. His brother was an operator for the Great Northern Railway. He had a sister, but she stayed in Wisconsin, but did come out for a visit now and then. Pete's hair was just about orange--thick , heavy hair, and he had the disposition to go with it. It caught on fire every now and again.

Another rancher that we had at Olney when I came, was a man named Charlie Rupple. He had worked for the fire department in Kalispell for many years, and they told me that he didn't have but a short time to go until he could retire on pension. But he got mad and quit, and homesteaded at Olney. He was about as colorful as any of the rest of them, and in the habit of doing what he pleased, when he pleased, as he pleased.

There is a story about Pete DeGroot hauling a bunch of lumber to build a house on Dog Mountain, and Pete came up one day to use it and it was gone. He noticed some wagon tracks, so he followed the tracks right down to Charlie's place. Pete asked Charlie what the hell he was doing with the lumber. Charlie said that he didn't think anybody was going to use it. Pete was swearing at him and told him to take it right back up to his place. Charlie loaded it up and took it back.

Charlie died just before we left Olney. They found him not able to get out of bed and pretty near starved to death. They took him to the county hospital. He got so that he couldn't get around to get

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any food. Mrs. Otha Isaacs was working at the county hospital at the time, and I guess it was quite a job getting him cleaned up enough so they could just put him in a bed. He never was much about washing anyway. Mrs. Isaacs tells about what awful shape he was in when they brought him to the hospital. I guess they had to pretty near scrape him first. Charlie didn't live long after he was admitted to the hospital.

Another character that we don't want to forget is George Van. George was either of Polish or Russian descent. He was an out of this world woodsman. He could neither read nor write, had a violent temper, and had an awful aversion to guns, and used them quite freely, which was his downfall in the end.

George got involved in drinking and playing poker at the Stillwater Inn, and evidently, they took his money, and George figured the way it was done just wasn't fair. So, one Saturday night, he came back and got in a poker game again, brought his 30-30 rifle with him, and went and sat in a corner. He set his rifle down behind the chair. The proprietor of the Stillwater Inn at that time was a Mrs. Halvorson, and her husband, Oscar, was also at the Inn. It is not clear just exactly what took place, but evidently, some of the poker players were doing something that George figured wasn't quite right, so he grabbed his rifle and called them on it. Mrs. Halvorson said "you wouldn't dare shoot anybody" and George promptly shot her. Her husband made a dash to get out of the door, and George shot him. There was a dance at the Stillwater Inn that night, and a lot of people were there. They heard the commotion, of course, and they all came out to see what was going on. There were people running and hollering in every direction. There was a salesman from Hamilton who had made a dive to get in his car, and George saw him and shot him in the leg. George didn't intend to kill him--he figured that this guy was going to get away and warn people, and he just wanted to stop him, so he shot him in the leg. Nevertheless, the man bled to death before they got him to the hospital in Whitefish.

George went on up to Olney intending to take to the woods . He went to his cabin first, but found that he had lost the key. He tried to pry the lock off with his rifle stock, broke the stock off his rifle, but he did manage to get in. He had another rifle in the cabin, but no ammunition. George went to the Olney store to get some, but there wasn't enough at the store to satisfy him, so he went to several houses in town looking for ammunition. He talked to the people and didn't make any bones about what he had done.

George then went to Leo Livingston's house. Leo was the operator for the railroad. He wanted Leo to take him to Charlie Sweeney's at DePew, and Leo thought that this was rather strange, especially in the middle of the night, but he took him. George got some ammunition from Charlie, and by the time they got back, the sheriff, undersheriff, and all the law officers were in Olney and had been talking to Guy and Mrs. White. In fact, I think Mrs. White gave them a picture of George. The officers were standing on the platform in front of the store, and Leo drove right by, down

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the street into his garage, and the officers decided that they would go down to see what Leo knew. They hadn't noticed that George was in the car with Leo. When the officers walked up to the garage door, George met the sheriff with a rifle sticking right out in front of him. George said, "get out of my way." He did--he ran backwards, fell over a log and hurt his back. George went around the end of the building and into the woods and up into Radnor.

Sam Nelson had a homestead in Radnor. This is a different Sam Nelson than the one that lived on Good Creek. George had breakfast with Sam, and then took out over the hills for God only knows where. As far as the people knew, he went over Stryker Ridge. He walked over Stryker Ridge, down Sweed Creek, over Haines Pass, over to the North Fork Road, up the North Fork Road, and into Canada to the Corbin Ranger Station. He stayed there a day or more and rested up. He traded his rifle for a lighter rifle. There was a shop there and he took a hacksaw and cut the end of the barrel off, and put it in his packsack and showed up at Crow's Nest. He went in the store to buy something, and the storekeeper recognized him from the photos that had been circulated. George had gone over into the sandhouse at the railroad track, laid down in the sand and went to sleep, and when he woke up, the Mounted Police were poking him with a gun barrel telling him to wake up. They took George back to the United States and he got life imprisonment. The last anybody knew, he had written to Mrs. White telling her that he had learned to read and write. Finally, when they let him out of prison, he went to a home for these type of prisoners--I believe someplace in Missouri, and as far as I know, that is where he died.

Before I went up there to work, there was another murder at Richenberg Camp. Bruce Guy, who was just a little boy at the time it happened, was there. I have talked to him about it and he remembered, but that is about all. Jack Richenberg 's brother was foreman of the Richenberg Cedar Camp. He got jealous of a teamster that was hauling supplies and figured he was spending too much time in the cookhouse. Mrs. Richenberg was the cook, and there was no argument about it or anything like that. One night he went out--the fella was taking care of his horses in the barn, and he shot him. He walked a few hundred feet away from the barn and shot himself. He did a poor job, it was a heavy rifle, and he held it under his chin, and blew his jaw and the side of his face away. When they found him, he was still on his feet walking around. That man lived to ride the train to Kalispell, and then died in the hospital in Kalispell. After things had cleared away, his brother Jack married the widow and they settled there and lived on what you call the Richenberg Meadow on Dog Creek. They had a two story house, and I remember one time when we were logging there, I found root cellars with stills in them still in tact. I know I was scaling logs in the winter time, there was snow on the ground, and I was crawling around over the logs, and I fell right through the roof of a root cellar and here was just the hooks and the rotted down wood of the barrels. The coils, copper tubing, the whole apparatus was still there.

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The following summer I found one or two other places that had stills set up, and you could see where they had their barrels. Sometimes the barrels were there and sometimes the coils were left behind. It goes back to the same old thing, making moonshine, and bootlegging got to the point where they couldn't make a living at it, so they quit.

Another one of the famous moonshiners was Blackie Dixson. Blackie had a ranch out of Lupfer. I know he was raided several times, but as far as I know they never ever caught him with any whiskey; however, they found his still. He and Sam Boyd were making moonshine. They had milk cows, and when they shipped cream to the creamery in Whitefish, they would put the jugs of moonshine in the cans of cream before they shipped them. The bar owners would come and fish the jugs out of the cans. That was the way it was done back in those days.

Blackie got into an argument with the county commissioners over his road. One of the commissioners was a pretty hot headed man, and words came to blows. He grabbed Blackie and slammed him up against the wall, and when he let him go, Blackie was dead. He cracked his head against the wall. Nothing was ever done about it, it was just an accident that happened.

Sam Boyd died a natural death just in the last few years. I knew Sam real well. He was a man that travelled with the carnivals and circus. He was a penman deluxe, and he would make business cards free hand. They were just beautiful. That is what he did as a young man. Sam, like anybody else, did everything there was to make a living--any way to make a living.

Another character that was in the country was Jack Tracy. He took the last name of Tracy. He got into some kind of trouble back east and changed his name. I have heard several different versions of what his name was, but nevertheless, he had changed his name. He was another one who couldn't make a living selling whiskey, so he had to do something else. Jack still has a daughter around here yet .

One of the comical things that happened while I was there was that Jack had a bunch of chickens, and his neighbor, another bootlegger by the name of Gwynn, lived in the next house down the road. Well, a bunch of the boys were drinking and having a big time at the Gwynn' s. They decided it was time for a chicken dinner, so they went down to Jack's and appropriated his chickens. They picked the chickens right in the front of Gwynn ' s house. Heads, feathers and everything scattered all over. Both Gwynn and Jack were working for the U. S. Forest Service on the brush crew at that time. Gwynn said, God Damn, I told these fellas to leave Jack's chickens alone. In the meantime, Jack had been out getting some wood, and he found a keg of whiskey cashed out in the woods. He came home with his team and wagon with a keg of whiskey sitting on top of the wagon, and him sitting on the keg. He brought it right home, but Gwynn later complained about losing his whiskey. Jack heard him carrying on about this, and he knew exactly what was going on. Gwynn was a

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little man, probably weighed about 135 pounds, and Tracy was 6’ 2" or 6 ’3", and beef to go with it. He walked over to Gwynn and picked him up by the shirt front, lifted him up, looked him in the eye and said Gwynn, you know your whiskey? He said, yeah? Well, it went the same damn place my chickens did. He put him down and that was the end of that.

I have talked a lot about Giles Crane and Jess Underwood. Jess was raised here in Whitefish and was alternate ranger at the old Olney Ranger Station at one time. He worked as an inspector of some kind for the CCs, and then when they built the Hungry Horse Dam, he was representative of the Forest Service, a liaison officer, between the engineers and the Forest Service to keep peace in the family and settle their problems.

When the Hungry Horse Dam was finished, Jess went with an engineering firm and was working for them on the St. Lawrence Seaway. His wife, Dorothy, was a girl raised here in Whitefish, and Evelyn, my wife, went to school with her. Dorothy worked for the Forest Service in the Tally Lake Office. She was a stenographer for years, and when Jess retired, he came back here and they made their home here. He trapped mink, martin and coyotes in the Upper Whitefish, Lazy Creek, and Swift Creek area since he retired. He just has been an outdoorsman of the greatest kind. He has been a man of considerable authority in the federal forest, and with the engineering firm that he worked for on the St. Lawrence Seaway project. He lives here in town and, as I say, is quite interested in the Stillwater Forest and the Upper Whitefish because it has been his playground since he was a kid.

Just the other day, he called to tell me that the Indians had shot a moose in the Upper Whitefish. He said he saw them up there and he was telling me he didn't like it one bit. He said the gamewarden told him that they couldn't do anything about it because the Indians had to the travel rights and they could hunt in that country anytime they wanted too. I told him that I didn't think that was so, but we would wait and see. There has been a lot of Indian trouble that way recently all over the northwest. On the coast they are really giving trouble over fishing rights. About two weeks later, I see in the paper that the Indian was fined $500 for killing a moose in the Upper Whitefish. His Indian rights didn't last as long as he thought they were going too. That's the way it is with Jess--this has been home to him ever since he was a little kid--his playground. He knew all the old ranchers like I did .

Jess went to work for the Forest Service, and when the Olney Ranger Station was abandoned, he went with the Falls Ranger Station in Idaho and was there for quite awhile.

When Gary Moon got his appointment as State Forester, at one time, some of the lumbermen wanted to appoint Jess to that job rather than Gary Moon. He was competition for Moon. I don't know whether Gary knows this or not, but he probably does. Some of the

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lumbermen figured they ought to put Jess in there instead of Gary, but it didn't work out that way.

We have also talked a lot about Giles Crane. Giles was just another typical character. Giles and his brother came in right after World War I. They were odd boys. They lived in a bunkhouse separate from the big house. They lived with their father and mother until their parents died, and then they moved into the big house, and stayed there the rest of their life.

Their father was a real craf tsman--carpenter , machinist, that kind of thing. He did things you wouldn't expect to do. One time, he needed a big nut for a bolt that was probably an inch in diameter, and he had to have a nut for it. He melted down shell brass and cast a nut, put it in a lathe and cut the thread to it. He did a beautiful job of machine work. He had a little crude machine shop, but when it came to building their home, he did all the work on it--log work, carpentry work, everything. He also had a little sawmill, and steam engine. They were the kind of people who believed in depending upon themselves. If they wanted anything, they made it. They had a herd of cattle and raised their own hay, their own gardens, and of course, like a lot of the oldtimers, they believed that if it was possible and they needed anything, they made it. Their ability was something to behold. Lloyd is pretty good at that type of thing, but he is so bashful, and Giles was never much of a hand at that kind of work. He could do a certain amount of it, but never did it. He just liked to be out and prowl the woods, ride his saddle horse through the woods, and so forth.

Not too many years ago, the cattle wouldn't leave the barnyard, and Giles was going to take a ride in the country on the old trail, and started up the river on this trail, and pretty quick the horse refused to go. Giles knew that something was wrong, and he started to look around, and across the creek, he spotted a bear laying under a tree. He turned around, went back home, and he and Lloyd got their rifles and went up there and killed the bear. It was a grizzly. It had been chasing the cattle, but never caught any of them. The grizzly chased the cattle to a point where they were afraid to leave the barnyard. Giles' horse had spotted the bear and was afraid of it. They have the grizzly hide on the wall at their place today. It is a big prime grizzly. They practically killed it in the yard. They used to see grizzly at the ranch quite often, especially in the spring of the year. They would come out in the hayfields and eat grass. Bear can survive on grass about as good as it can on the other kind of food. In fact, they are pretty much a vegetarian, but like man, they will eat meat or anything else they can get. They can, however, live and thrive on grass, roots and clover.

As I said, Giles was just a man that liked to be in the woods. Of course, when I told him we were building logging roads, he pretty near fainted. He just didn't like it that's all.

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I never knew Giles to do any work away from home other than being a smokechaser for the State Forest. He was a smokechaser for several years. Giles was a good man, but as far as going out and working anyplace, I never knew him too.

I didn't know what their financial situation was--they are evidently well to do. They don't live that way, but they seem to have plenty of money whenever they want it. There is no doubt in my mind that they are well to do. Giles told me at one time that when they sold their ranch, they put their money into purchasing morgtgages on real estate, and I presume that is where it is. They live very conservatively, but on the other hand, if they need anything, they get anything they need, whenever they need it. If they need a new pickup or something like that, they just go and buy one .

Giles' brother, Lloyd, is living on the ranch now, and a cousin is living there with him. The cousin is a younger man, and is living with Lloyd, taking care of Lloyd and so forth. They told Jess Underwood the other day that Lloyd got his finances in order, so when anything happened to him, there would be no big problems. I imagine that that trait of living alone, and by themselves, depending on the family, and depending upon themselves only, is characteristic of all his family. I am not sure how many is in his family, but I do know they don't live around here. I believe they have relatives either in Wisconsin or Michigan, because if there are any problems, some of the family show up to help take care of it .

Giles never married. If a girl looked at him, he would fall down three times and start running. Not a normal way to live, but with these oldtimers, it wasn't uncommon. They liked to shoot, had lots of pistols, rifles, etc. He used to shoot in the rifle matches in town. In the wintertime, after the shoot was over, he would walk home on the lake on the ice seven or eight miles. They were bashful, timid men in ways, but in many ways, the aren't afraid of anything that walks. Socially, they just don't get out and associate with people.

NOTE: Maurice had a tape of Giles Crane being interviewed by Mel Costello and Jess Underwood. This tape has been re-recorded from the original tape, and made a part of this history, but not transcribed. The tape will be available for anyone to listen to if they wish. Maurice said that this tape would give a slant of what other people thought of the country.

Giles, if he had been here today, would have been a conservationist, no doubt about that. He didn't want the world to change, he wanted it to stay the way it was. I may be an odd man, but the world can't stand still, and you can't stop it to get off. Our resources are there to use, and we should use them and proceed to replace them. They won't last the way they are. They are pretty and all that, but they will deteriorate, be gone, and nobody will get any. I have seen a vast deterioration in our old stands of timber in the 50-60 years that I have had anything to do with

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it. It is like old people, they don't get any better when they get older, and trees do the same thing. They mature and die, and you might just as well harvest them when they are ready. Just because they look pretty doesn't help matters a bit, and it doesn't help the wild game any either.

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LOOKOUTS /RANGER STATIONS /NORTHWEST AREA

Stryker Peak was named after a man named Stryker, who had a ranch at the town of Stryker. It was the highest peak around, so they decided to name it after Stryker, and Stryker Peak it is.

There is also Herrig Peak, north of Stryker, which was named after Fred Herrig. He was one of the colorful foresters in the early day. Fred, like Joe Bush, was a little bit on the aggressive side, quite quarrelsome, and had his own ideas. He would do what he pleased, when he pleased, as he pleased, but there had to be plenty of Schnapps around to keep him going.

Fred had one son. The last I heard he was living in Libby. He worked for the Forest Service as a Dispatcher. He had three stepsons, Bert Wilke, Tom Wilke, and John Wilke, who was with the railroad in Whitefish. Bert still lives in Fortine. I was talking with him not too long ago. Bert is the rugged one, but just a little bit of a guy.

Fred was Teddy Roosevelt's orderly in the Spanish-American War. He was at San Juan Hill, and he liked to brag about the "rough riders." After the war, he worked on Roosevelt's Ranch in North Dakota .

When the Forests were created, which were still under the Department of Interior, Teddy Roosevelt gave Fred a permanent appointment as a Ranger on the Ant Flats Ranger Station. The appointment could never be taken away from Fred, he had that job as long as he lived.

Fred married a widow woman by the name of Wilke. She had three sons, and they set up the Ant Flats Ranger Station. One of the Wilke boys is still around, and I saw him not too long ago. He must be about 87-88 years old, somewhere along in there.

When Fred was on the Forest Reserve as a Forest Ranger, he was always getting in a fight with the supervisor, and his supervisor would fire him. He wouldn't even leave the Ranger Station, he would stay right there and his paychecks would keep coming, and pretty quick, the supervisor would be back giving him orders and going on about his business. This is what I mean by the permanent postion--nc matter what, it could never be taken away from him.

Fred and Pete DeGroot didn't get along too well. The oldtimers tell about Fred having a goat, and Fred called him Peter. He kept it staked out in the yard, and whenever Pete was around, he was always talking to Peter the Goat just to aggrevate Pete. Fred liked to fight and get into squabbles, and he would go into Fortine and get: in a fight in the bar and get thrown out. He and Herb Bissle were going back and clean up the bar, and they tell about going in first with his 30-30 rifle, and Herb right behind him. They no more than got in the bar until they came out end over end.

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In the late '30s, they had a Ranger in there called Shorty Fleming. He was 6 '6" tall at least. I know he had to stoop over to look at you. Shorty was going to bring the Dan Flats Ranger Station right up to a real snappy military outfit. He had a habit of going up on a Lookout unannounced, and just raising holy hell about the conditions of the cabins and so forth. Old Bert got to watching him, and when he would see him start out and figure out where he was going, he would get on the telephone and call up the boys and tell them they had better cleanup, the lousy SOB is on his way up. This particular time, Fleming had decided that there was something wrong, so he headed up the river. He had just gotten out of sight of the Ranger Station, and he plugged a field telephone in the line, and sat down to wait and see what happened. Well, Bert came down to work for the State of Montana for the next couple of years--Fleming had heard him call ahead and warn the boys.

Bert worked with me all one summer, and there was never a dull moment with him. The next summer they put him back to work, and he worked there until he retired. Bert was the kind of guy who was just as full of hell as a man could be.

There was no reason in the world why Bert hadn't been killed a half a dozen times. As a young man, he went hunting up on Clarence Creek and he was dragging a deer, and one of the Marshelton boys saw it, thought it was a deer resting, and took a shot at it. He hit Bert right in the elbow and the bullet came out above his wrist between the bones. The elbow and arm were stiff, and he had to open his hand by turning it one way, and then turn it back the other way until it closed.

After he was shot, they bandaged his arm up, and he walked out from Clarence Creek, and got on the train at Fortine to Eureka. An old pioneer doctor. Dr. Bogardis, was doctoring in Eureka at the time. By the time Bert got there, he was at a point where he needed a transfusion, and they didn't know what the hell to do. There were no facilities like there are now, so his brother, Tom, volunteered the blood--they made a direct transfusion from Tom to Bert, and saved his life.

Bert used to say his arm was better than it was before he was shot, because now he can pack a bucket of water and it doesn't get tired because it can't bend.

Later in life, Bert got appendicitis, and when they operated on him, the doctor claimed that his appendix had ruptured at least twice, if not three times before that, and he never knew a thing about it. Then about 15 years ago, he was putting up a TV antenna, and while he was wrestling with it, it got away from him, and it tipped over into a 7200 volt powerline. When they picked Bert up from the ground, the electrical current was strong enough to kill all the grass where his body laid. They picked him up and brought him to the hospital. He only lost some fingers and some toes, but hell, he came out of it just as cocky as ever. Just imagine a man living through something like that. If Bert had been a normal person, he would have been dead a half dozen times.

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There was no Ranger Station at Radnor as such. Radnor was a siding on rhe Great Northern Railway and it is still there. The closest Ranger Station was Point of Rocks. There was another Radnor, Montana on the Post Office files, so they called the Post Office at Radnor, Mock. It was called the Mock Post Office, named after John Mock and his brothers, who homesteaded around Radnor. The Mocks had three homesteads there. Radnor is where the majority of the cedar poles landed that came off the foot of Stryker Ridge. That was the landing point for most of them.

The Post Office was run by a Mrs. Wiggins, whose husband homesteaded on the mouth of Sunday Creek. It goes back to the history of the same people that founded the town of Olney. The same type of people, and she was one of the crew. She married Pete Wiggins, and they had a shop at Radnor along with the Post Office, and also took in boarders.

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The Stryker Fire started over on the Fortine , and it was a half acre fire for several days. It wasn't manned heavy enough--there were only two or three men on it. The big interest was containing it, they were not trying to put it out, just trying to hold it.

It was just too much for them to put out. A high wind came along and a change in humidity, the atmosphere changed, and it took off. In one day, it came over the hill, burned out the town of Stryker, and went clear to the Whitefish Divide. It took an estimated 90 million feet of State timber in one day.

The State Forestry employees maintained that it was not properly handled, and they claimed that just token foresters were put on the fire, and that no concentrated effort toward putting it out took place .

The State Forester and the Board of Forestry decided that the State of Montana would have to go into the firefighting business for themselves. At the same time, a second fire started over by Keith Mountain, west of Olney. It came into the State Forest and burned a large area west of Stillwater Lake. It burned along the Stillwater River in some places, but stopped there. There was one small piece of the fire that carried over into the Stillwater Lake, and was burning east of the railroad track south of the Stillwater Station. That part of the fire was probably seven to eight acres. The State lost between three and four sections of timbered land in that fire. These two fires put the State of Montana in the firefighting business. In 1928, we were going full force as a fire protection unit.

I am not sure of the exact date that the Northwest Area went into full swing. The State of Montana had a forester in Kalispell for years, but they never had an office. If the public wanted to see one of the foresters, he would be told that he is at such and such a bar sitting at a table having a beer or something to eat, and they would conduct their business with him there.

When Mr. Anderson took over, they rented office space. This was shortly after World War I--around 1920 I would say. He had an office, but only enough money to keep a stenographer part time, about six months a year. Those fellows had an office to work out of, and they had a mailing address and the whole bit. Before that time, it was always who the forester was at his residence. But, as I say, he had a place he would go where the public could find him, and it happened to be a bar room, but nevertheless, it worked all right. I used the same tactics in Eureka years ago. That was the start of the Kalispell Office. The first office was located in the Whips Block, and then it was moved just across the street. They had rented a place with three rooms, but it was a headquarters, and later they rented warehouse space, and had a small shop set up in Kalispell.

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When Gary Moon got situated as State Forester, he moved the shop, warehouse, and everything to Stillwater. Moon wanted to build a building of his own, and he told Otha Isaacs, Herman Schultz, and the rest of the boys to get busy and find a site where they could build a permanent office so the State could own their own building. They would not pay any taxes or anything like that, and they would have a place of their own.

There wasn't any action on constructing a building for about a year, and Don Drummond came along one year and told the fellows in Kalispell that they had better get on the stick, because if they don't, the old man is going to come up and tell them what to do. In about two weeks, the boss came up and said he wanted a set of plans drawn up for an office building in Kalispell. He told me what he wanted and asked me to draw him a set of plans to work from, so I got started with a set of plans. I was just finishing them, and Otha Isaacs came into the Station and asked what I was doing. I told him, and asked him to come and look because he would be interested, and I wanted to know what he thought of it. Isaacs said, "Jesus Christ, I'm satisfied where I am." I told Otha that I was just showing him to see what he thought of it, and I showed him two different sets of plans--same floor plans, but different styles of buildings. He was in favor of the little flat top roof, the one that is there now next to the new building.

Gary Moon acquired a site on a section of school land and we constructed the office. I got the shell and roof up, but then the union complained, and we wound up contracting the rest of the building.

We were having a little trouble with the mechanics on the Area and Moon wanted to move the shop to Missoula anyhow, so the shop was moved. When the shop was moved to Missoula, Lloyd Messner, the Chief Mechanic, went with it. There was no shop as such at Kalispell until the new Northwest Area building was constructed in 1977.

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SWAN RIVER YOUTH FOREST CAMP

Between Mel Mohler, (Superintendent of the Swan River Youth Forest Camp) and myself, the shop at the Swan was built. Mel was like having your own money bag. He had money available to him through the Crime Control Board and that was how we purchased a great share of the equipment. The State bought some of the equipment, but not a great deal.

The camp was so successful that the Crime Control Board stated that we were one of the only places in the United States that were using the crime control money the way it was designed to be used.

I had started the Carpenter Shop at the Swan, and Mel knew that this money was available for equipment when he took over the Camp, and he bought more machinery for the Carpenter Shop. To this day, they are still updating the Shop. I don't think that there is a better Carpentry Shop in the State of Montana. They have everything imaginable, and some things you wouldn't imagine. Most of it was purchased with crime control money, and the same way with the shop on the hill. I bought the initial start of the equipment, but this money was available again, and Mel was eligible to get it, and they purchased lathes, milling machine head, etc. I couldn't begin to go into all the detail of parts that crime control bought. The Carpenter Shop could get anything they wanted, there was nothing too elaborate for that shop, and they have some of the finest tools that money can buy. It really is unbelievable, but that comes from using the money the way it was intended, and management is highly pleased with what is going on.

I don't know whether or not it is mentioned in the Missoula Office, but they tell us that the success rate of the Swan River Youth Forest Camp is the highest of any place of its kind in the United States. We normally say 85% of the boys never return to an institution. There is a lot of things that have a bearing on it. One is that if a boy is not desirable, he can't go there, and if he doesn't behave after he is there, he won't stay there. That way, you weed out the bad ones, and you have the best left, but that is saying quite a lot just the same. When they leave the Youth Camp, they are equipped to fit into society.

When I first took over the Swan, the first thing I did was build the station. I designed the buildings and did most of the construction work on the original four buildings there. The residence was built by a contractor. A short while after I was in the Swan, the machine shed burned, and rebuilt by a contractor. I went to the Swan to work when the Youth Camp was set up. I started six months before they brought any boys in there. I moved to the Swan and laid out the work program. The boys started arriving at the Youth Camp July 1st, and that is when we started the workload.

The workload at the Youth Camp consisted of forest stand improvement, roadside cleanup, working in the carpenter shop, and later on the mechanic shop. When I went to the Swan, my instructions were not to ask for tremendous production. We wanted

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what was best for the boys. The boys came first and the forest came second. It is actually a rehabilitation program--even though we didn't call it that, that is what it was. We were not after great production but good and reasonable work. The volume of work doesn't count at all. It was good work and work that was good for the boys. We didn't want any harrassment or anything of that kind. And, I, in turn, told my foreman that we are going to get boys in here that are not physically able to do a day's work, and we will have to grade these boys everyday on their work. A boy that is not physically able to turn out as much work as the boy alongside of him, but his effort was good, he would get a higher grade than the man alongside of him who would turn out as much work, but is capable of turning out a lot more. That was the rules and regulations that we worked by when I was there.

I had one boy that was partially paralyzed--he didn't have control of his hands. You knew that he couldn't do a lot of things that a normal boy could do, but nevertheless, if he would try and do good with the ability he had, he was graded higher than the other boy that could do everything, but wasn't too particular whether he did or not. That was the philosophy that we used. It was handed down to me by Moon, and I in turn, carried it out. We weren't running a training school to make foresters or woodsmen out of them. The idea was to get the thinking of these boys straightened out, and to see what ability they had. If there was one in there with outstanding ability as a mechanic, for instance, it was possible to send him ro a vocational training school after he had served his time. It was entirely up to him whether he made it or not. We didn't pretend to train them.

When the camp was first started, the boys were all processed in Miles City beforehand, and had to be beyond the age where they had to go to school. There wasn't work at Miles City for them, so they put them in the Youth Camp. That was the idea of it, to have a place for those boys who had a desire to behave themselves and do right, where they could go and live without strict supervision like they received at Miles City. A boy who gave them too much of a problem at Miles City, more than likely would be sent to the Youth Camp. We were just as smart as they were and when we got one of them and realized what we got, we sent him back. There was a lot of that done. I had one of the men at Miles City tell me one time, "hell, you can't expect us to give you the good ones all the time, we gotta have someone to do the work around here." But, we had several that we wouldn't monkey with.

About a year ago, there was an Indian boy out of Coeur d'Alene driving the wrong way on the highway, and a highway patrolman stopped him. The boy stepped out of his pickup with a rifle and killed the patrolman. This boy's name was Dixon Curley, one of the boy's from the Youth Camp. The last I had heard he was in death's row, but we didn't monkey with him- -we had him at the Camp for awhile and didn't fit into the program at all, so we sent him back to Miles City. That was the way we handled it then, and that is the way it is still handled.

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There aren't any bars on the windows or fences around the property. The kids can run away anytime they want. There aren't any Miles City boys at the Camp anymore. It was always automatic--if a convict ran and we caught him down the road 100 feet, he went back to Deer Lodge. They want to give these fellas 3 0 days in Deer Lodge and then send them back to the Camp. Well, it may work, but it will have a bad affect on the kids that don't run away. If I don't get away, I will only get 30 days in Deer Lodge, stand on my head for 30 days, and then I will be back at the Camp so what difference does it make. That is the attitude that the juveniles have. They feel that the authorities won't do anything with them if they do run away and get caught. They will just get sent back to Miles City--most of them would rather be in Miles City than the Youth Camp anyway, so it didn't make much difference.

When we were handling juveniles, runaways was very, very common. It was happening all the time. I don't know how many runaways I had, but I had plenty of them. I used to tell the boys that day life around the camp was nothing, but boy, have we got some night life.

This one young fellow stole a fire truck out of the shop at the Swan, and away he went with it. Of course, the State of Montana was painted all over it, and the whole bit. It showed up the next morning in Helena. He had been around and was acquainted, knew the ropes, and he had his Montana hardhat on, went to a used car dealer in Helena, and told them that he was working out at the station on Montana Street, and was thinking of buying a new car and asked to try out a demonstrator. They said sure, so he parked the fire truck on the lot and took the demonstrator and drove off. Come evening, he didn't show up, and the next morning they called the station and mentioned that one of their men had left a truck and took a demonstrator, and wanted to know if he was around. The people at the station didn't know what he was talking about. The car dealer explained that this man had left the fire truck and said he was working out there at the station. I think it was Larry Pyke who asked what kind of a fire truck it was. Pyke told the dealer that the truck was stolen, and he had just lost a demonstrator.

The kid that stole the car went to Shelby and was on the street in Shelby and was picked up and brought back. I have known kids that have run away and come back to the Camp by themselves.

There was another Indian boy who had one into Canada--ended up in Calgary. He and his buddy were on the street in Calgary. I don't know why, but the police picked up one boy and left the other one. This other kid is standing there watching the whole show. They took him in, and the one they picked up, they took him down to the airport the next morning. They called the Youth Camp and said that we have so and so under arrest here, and we are putting him on the plane to Great Falls at such and such a time, and the plane will land there at such and such a time. We want you to meet the plane and take the boy. The boy that they didn't bother with didn't stick around to see what was going on, he started for home. Well, we went to Great Falls and got the one kid and brought him back to

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Camp, and that night the other Indian boy was knocking on the door asking to get in. He hoofed it all the way back from Calgary. The Canadian authorities handled it just right--they put him on the plane and the plane didn't land until it got to Great Falls, and our people were there to take him off the plane.

When the Youth Camp was constructed there was a great deal of public sentiment. I personally didn't get in on the arguments, but I knew what was taking place. The public had a deputy sheriff down there telling the people how those kids would be running around to the bars, always be underfoot, and would be into everything, stealing, and so on. Of course, he didn't mention the fact that the boys wouldn't be allowed out of camp, period. He had them doing everything imaginable and he just knew that that was what was going to happen. Why shouldn't he, he was the deputy sheriff.

There was a woman who circulated a petition around the community to keep the Camp out, and Mr. Moon and some men from the Department of Institutions held a meeting and told the group how the Camp was going to work. After the Camp was built, the woman that circulated the petition to keep the Camp out, was one of the first one's that applied for a job at the Camp. She got the job and worked there until she retired. Of course, the deputy sheriff wasn't involved, but several of the ring leaders who tried to keep the Camp out, was one of the first ones to ask for a job, got it and went to work. I personally wouldn't have nerve enough to do anything like that myself, I would have been too ashamed to, but they did it. Mrs. Wilhelm and her husband worked there until she retired, and he died. They were good employees. They had a little trouble adjusting to what was going on. They were busy looking for things to complain about, but they got over it. She worked there for ten years at least. It was nothing like what the people thought it would be like.

The Camp that was being proposed in the Stillwater is the same story. People telling things that were not so, and what makes me more disgusted than anything else, they knew it wasn't so. They knew better than that, but they got the public all stirred up. What it finally boiled down to was about 18 people that actually objected. On the final meeting that was held, about 18 people showed up. The rest of the people accepted the fact that it was going to be, and had no idea in the world but what it would be, and then the Governor decided that they didn't need it. The Governor had been told by experts what the conditions would be. They told him what the prison population would be as of today, and the fella that told him wasn't off over four or five people, one way or another. Of course, they immediately had a bunch of other experts that jumped around telling him that the figure wasn't right, and that wasn't so, and so on and so forth. Now they are in trouble, and it will take four years from now to get anything to relieve the pressure on the state prison. The pressure on the prison is going to continue to grow at the present rate as far as we can see ahead. What they are going to do, I don't know. They have raised the capacity of the Swan Camp to 56 men rather than 50, and I really don't know what they are going to do.

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I was at a meeting in Kalispell not too long ago, and the Governor and the Department of Institutions told the men in the business that something had to be done in the next session of the Legislature. The Director said that he would not go for building anymore prisons at Deer Lodge, that they had to figure out another system. From where I stand, it looks like they have eyes on building another work camp of some kind some place else. I know of two other locations that are acceptable as far as the State of Montana is concerned for work camps. One of them would hold a big camp and hold a small camp. Thompson River is one of those places. The State needs a station anyway on Thompson River, and they can combine the two and make a good deal there. They were talking about making one on Clearwater, but it would be a small campsite. Stillwater has the most work of any--the most concentrated work. It is the one that needs it the worst. I don't know whether we are going to be able to get by the Senators and Representatives who know so much more about the business than we do, however.

There was one legislator here that disgusted me. He knew all about building such a place within ten miles of a Girl Scout Camp. They sometimes use a Girl Scout Camp six weeks during the summer. It would be just a horrible thing to have it within ten miles there. Hell's afire, ten miles from that camp, you would never know it was there, you know. But they are sure those fellas are going to run away, and that would be where they would head, and they would be there with the girls, and oh, God all the horrible things, you know. Stood right up and told the public that. I cut the buttons off his vest. When Francis Bardonouve got done with him, he knew he had been someplace.

The other Legislator, Mrs. Curtiss, she was just a hoopin' and hollerin' about what a horrible thing it was. There was only one thing that bothered those people, and one thing alone--they weren't consulted in advance, and allowed to be the Big Sky bringing the improvements into their community. Nothing else but. They knew better than that, but that is the way it goes. It is like the leasing bill. Somebody read that clause that had been in there for years, and interpreted it, and told everybody what it was, and nobody had a chance to investigate it, and they all believed him. So, they all signed a petition. They signed the petition on something that I know has been there for 50 years, and has been in existence, and I never knew of anybody to lose their lease over it. But leave it to a politician to twist things around the way he wants it to look.

The possibility exists that they would expand the Swan Youth Camp. That would call for more buildings. We have the right number of people in there for the work that is there. They could handle that workload and would be continuous for the next 100 years. You get too many, and there is more men than there is work to accommodate. The best thing to do is build someplace else. I feel sure about that. They should build someplace else. The more men, especially that type of men, that you get into one group, the harder they are to manage. The more apt you are to have them work around you and so on and so forth. In other words, troublemakers, the bigger the

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group, the harder the troublemakers are to find. If you keep them in small groups, they aren't near as hard to control. that is what the trouble is with these big prisons--you know where your ringleaders are, but to pinpoint them and bear down on them, it is too hard. Like the trouble in New Mexico. There were three men who engineered that riot. I think some of them have been tried, and I think got life in prison. So what, they were serving life in prison before, so what does that mean! I believe they could expand it some, but not a whole lot. The best way is to build more and keep them separated.

In 1967, I was assigned to the Swan River Youth Forest Camp. I actually started in 1963 , and moved to the Swan January 1st of 1968. The first boys arrived there July 1, 1968.

Mel Mohler and I took the boys out on a trip in the hills for the fourth of July, and one of the boy's got lost. Everybody and his brother was trying to find him. He wasn't a runaway, he was just lost. What happened was he got separated from the rest of the group-- just playing around and got separated from the rest of us. The harder he tried to get back, the more lost he got. Mel and I sent two crews out to start looking for him, and Mel and I went to the base of the mountain where I guessed that it was a good possibility that would be where he would come out. When we came around the bend, there stood the boy in the road. I had the sun in my eyes when I came around the curve, and I couldn't see him, but Mel saw him and said "there he is." When I came around the curve and the sun was out of my eyes, there stood the boy 50 feet in front of the car. He had no underwear on, his shirt was all tore up and his pants was half tore off him from climbing through the brush. He stood there and blinked a time or two like he was dazed, his eyes rolled to the back of his head, and down he went, kerplunk in the road. Mel was half way to him before he hit the ground, but he passed completely out. We loaded him in the car and took him back. He hadn't had anything to eat for a day, so we gave him something to eat to get him going, and he snapped out of it okay. I can say that the boy kept his wits about him, he knew what he was trying to do and didn't panic, but when he saw us it was just too much. He just blinked about twice, and down he went just like a sack.

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CUSICK FAMILY HOMESTEAD FIRE

^ The fire was an incendiary fire, and I was one of the first

firefighters to arrive on the fire of the Cusick family homestead. A truck driver stopped at the Stillwater Station in the middle of the night and woke Pete DeGroot up, and told him that he had seen a fire from the highway west of Twin Bridges. At the time he spotted the fire, he was hauling a truckload of horses to a fire at Deer Creek in the Yaak. The country was literally alive with fires.

Pete DeGroot got the crew out of bed, and since I knew the country, I got in the driver's seat with him, and we drove right to the fire. We arrived about two o'clock in the morning. We went up on the hill above the fire and could see three fires along the creek. One was about a half acre in size. Pete took one look and mentioned that this was an arson fire, that we had better get back to our own baily wick before somebody sets it on fire.

We didn't fight any fire at all on the homestead. Instead, we drove to the nearest telephone, called Johnny McDonald, the Tally Lake Ranger at that time, and told him what was going on, and he started the firefighters coming from everyplace.

By daylight, I imagine there were about 75-100 men on the fire. By this time, there were five fires going, and were pretty well under control. Then came a change in wind about noon, and the fires went out of control. In an hour's time it was a thousand acres. The fire travelled to the north and east, and then another change in wind came, and the whole front went straight east and a little south. The fire travelled right down into the farms and settlements .

Our house burned, the posts and fence around the yard burned, and there wasn't even any ashes left from the post hole. You could see the prints of the knots right in the clay where they had burned out just red like a brick.

We lost all of our buildings except for a barn and hayshed. My mother and my brothers made a run for it, and my dad had gone to help a neighbor because they thought the fire was going in his direction. My mother did manage to get all the clothes and bedding out of the house, and she threw them in the well, and covered the well with boards. The building alongside of the well caught fire, and burned up, and the top planking on top of the well caught fire, and it fell into the well. The well was dry, and the clothes and all the bedding burned up. When I cleaned the well, I suppose I took a bushel basketful of nothing but buttons out of there. All the clothes we owned went up in smoke. My dad did manage to save the piano, a sewing machine, a clock, and heating stove.

The fire never did burn the neighbor's house that dad went to help save originally, but they did load quite a lot of their belongings on a truck. The fire had caught up to them before they got to our

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place, and all they could do was throw everything off the truck and let it burn up.

One neighbor just abandoned his house and ran when the fire went by his place. His house and barn were still standing, but all the out buildings were burned. He had his summer crop of grain stacked around a hayshed out in an open field. His machinery was parked around there, and it all burned up. There were trees leaning over the barn that the fire crowned out and hay hanging out the doors almost to the ground, and it didn't catch on fire. Just one of those things.

There was a sled with a pile of lumber on it setting out in a bare yard and it burned completely up. There was nothing left but the iron.

Another set of buildings also burned. They were nothing spectacular, just all shacks. The fire went around the schoolhouse, but the building itself didn't catch on fire. Everything else around it, though, burned.

We knew who set the fire, and the law knew who set the fire, but that is secondary--you have to prove it, and the only way you can prove it, is see the person actually do it. There were footprints in the dust and all that, and the authorities knew who the two men were that were involved, but nothing could ever be done about it. One fellow was brought in for questioning, but he didn't know anything, and you can't get a man to convict himself.

The other fellow, a rancher, had a bunch of cattle that he had mortgaged. He had been selling them, and he claimed that the cattle burned up in the fire. Everytime he found a piece of bone someplace, that was where another cow had burned up. We knew that wasn't true, but how were you going to prove it.

By five o'clock the first day, the fire was between two and three

thousand acres. We held it under control for about two days, and

then we got a change of wind, the weather conditions were just right, and it took off again. When it was finally stopped, it was right in the town of Whitefish.

The Park Service sent down 200 men, plus the equipment, and the men were stationed in the southwest part of town. They were the ones that actually stopped the fire.

This was in the year 1931, and my family homestead was located in Section 19, T30N-R22W. My mother never moved off the palce. We put up tents, and I finished harvesting the crop, cut logs, rebuilt the house, and we moved the tents in on the rough floor of the house on Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day, we had the house

liveable .

I think that this fire had a lot to do with me following the

firefighting game as much as anything. I was far enough along in ) the business that I knew what could be done and so on. Like I

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said, it was an arson-caused fire, no question about it. The reason I suspect that it was arson-caused is because of the man with his mortgaged cattle. As I said earlier, everytime he saw a I bone, it was another cow that had burned. I have seen many deer

that burned in fires, and the worst that will happen is that their feet will get burned off, their ears will get burned off, their hair will get scorched, but other than that, they will be in tact. They won't burn up. You can't get a body to burn in a forest fire. In the worst of fires, like the Mann Gulch fire, I know the men that had picked up the dead on that one, and some of those bodies were burned pretty bad, but none of them burned to where you couldn't tell who they were. On some of the bodies, they had to use dental records to be sure, but they could tell who they were.

When we were fighting fire back in the '30s, they didn't have such a thing as rankers. We did everything the hard way. We didn't even have bulldozers to fight fire with. All the trenches were done by hand. You can imagine 5000 acres or thereabouts in one day is a lot of trenches. Of course, we used roads and that sort of thing, and where the ground was flat, we used horses and plows, but still a tremendous amount of fireline to build by hand.

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RAILROADS

Around 1900, the Great Northern Railway decided to build a railroad through what is now the Stillwater State Forest. They decided to build from Columbia Falls to Rexford, and hook up with what was known at that time, as the Furney Branch. The Furney Branch was a branch line constructed from Jennings to Furney, to bring coal down for the Great Northern Railway. At one time, the coal fields in Canada were practically all owned by the Great Northern Railway. I am not sure who owns them now.

Shortly after 1900, they decided that they would build a road from Columbia Falls to Rexford and hook into the Furney Branch, and go down the Kootenai River that way, and it would be less hill. They were having trouble borrowing land for a roundhouse and yards, etc., into Kalispell, so they bought the Whitefish townsite, and constructed the railroad through Whitefish.

In 1904, the railroad was completed from Columbia Falls to Rexford, and it was done mostly with hand labor. There were Chinese, Japanese and foreigners of all kinds working on it, and they actually made those big cuts with shovels and dump cars and big fills were made that way. They had a headquarters camp at DePew, and also a hospital and all the trimmings.

There was another headquarters at Dickey Lake, around Trego. There was also a hospital and a doctor there, and of course, there was a lot of heavy rock work right close. There was a cemetery there, and I had been told that it had 13 graves in it, but it has been lost, and no one has been able to find it. I had one man tell me it is under the highway, but I happen to know that it isn't under the highway, but farther back from the highway. I have talked to men that did see it, but it is grown over, and the markers are all gone, and we can't find it now. There are 13 graves around there someplace .

Camps were set up wherever there was water along the track. There was quite a large encampment at the Stillwater Station in the fields east of the building. When I first went up there, I think there were three or more of the big stone ovens, where they would pile stone and clay, put a big door on it, build a fire and get the rocks real hot, take and scrape the ashes out, slide bread in it, and the heat of the oven would bake the bread. There is only one at Stillwater yet that you can recognize. You can see the rings in the dirt where the various buildings were.

The engineers had a building that they later used for a schoolhouse. It has since burned down, but all along the railroad track, you will find these camps. You will find an old forage where they built it up to sharpen their drill seal, etc. You can tell where their quarters have been, and you can tell the camps that the Chinese used, because you would find little viles about an inch and a half long. They were opium bottles, and you would always find these viles around where the Chinese camped.

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INSECT AND DISEASE

I In my day, we had insect and disease problems, the same as today.

This is nothing unusual--it is nature's way of doing business. The lodgepole tree is a short lived tree. Seventy-five years is considered the age of the lodgepole. When it gets old and weak, it can't pitch out the bugs who are always present, the bugs build up and become an epidemic. All they do is kill the old growth, and naturally, when they get to that proportion, they will flop over and kill the young growth as well, in the area where they are at. When they get in a lodge stand young growth, they will soon pitch out and disappear. This happened 50+ years ago. The bugs came out of Yellowstone Park, went up through the Big Hole, up Sula, and up Sleeping Child. They tried all kinds of things, cutting the trees ahead of time and so on, but a bug doesn't care, he doesn't have to sit down on his own tree in his neighborhood--he can fly another ten miles and sit down there and keep going.

It is a hard thing to tell the public, but this is just a natural phenomena going on--nothing unusual about it at all. After the bug epidemic ran its course, they just vanished. They immediately came back to lodgepole again and grew up in there. The old dead lodgepole fell down, and made one hell of a mess. Then the

Sleeping Child Fire came in behind it, burned this mess up, and

actually it was a blessing in disguise. It did a cleanup job. The

next stand of lodgepole won't have a mess to grow up through.

There is nothing unusual about this as I have said.

The white pine beetle will do the same thing. He will work in the old growth, not in the young growth. When the trees get weak, they can't pitch him out, and the bug builds up to epidemic form. When all the old is dead, he will disappear, and the young growth will thrive again until it gets old enough and decrepit. What I am talking about is 400-500 year old white pine. I saw this in Idaho. The way it will appear first is that there will be a patch here and a patch there.

When I was working for the Diamond, we were in heavy white pine. A forester and I were doing some surveying just before I quit, and they were telling me how nice things looked and how he couldn't find any trace of bugs. We were cutting bug killed stuff all the time wherever we could find it in order to get it all cleaned up. I told him that there were bugs right at a section point about 200-300 feet from us. Oh, no, he said, that is last year's tree. I said no, it isn't, it is this year's tree. We went over there and found that the bugs had attacked the top of the tree, but the lower part of the tree was alive. The tree next to it had pitch running out of it all over the ground. We took an axe and split the bark, rolled it back, and there were bugs by the millions. Before we were through that day, we had found a solid section of white pine that were killed by bugs that year. Carl said he didn't know if he wanted to come over in this country and build me a home or not, he didn't think it would last that long.

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Then there is the fir beetle that works a little different, in the fact that he will take a few trees every year, but he won't take everything. He works strictly in old timber. We have them in the Swan. They will take a couple thousand feet here, a couple thousand feet there, but next year, they will be someplace else. This again, is nature's way of doing business. Then fire comes behind and cleans up the mess--that is, if man doesn't interfere first. Gary Moon and I have both talked about it, and he is of the same opinion I am. When we had the Goat Creek Fire, it looked like a possibility of it going into the Bob Marshall. We both agreed that the Bob Marshall ought to burn. You can't say that publicly, but that is the way we felt about it. Damned if he or I wanted to be responsible for it burning. If big areas of it burned, it would be better off. Your wildlife would be better off, everything would be better off.

I am kind of hard nosed about wilderness areas. If they don't want to keep people in there, they should salvage that timber before it dies, but if they don't want to keep roads open in there or build roads in there, don't let the public in there, if that is what they want. But I think it is a horrible waste to let millions of feet of timber lay there on the ground to rot, which is taking place up there right now. There is a lot of people who will tell you it isn't, but I can tell them that that is what is taking place. You can't get through with horses or anything else. Even an elk won't stay in there, it is so crowded.

What is taking place now is nothing new. I have seen it happen 50 years ago. It will take place, you can't stop it. The system they are using now, going in and salvaging the timber, is the only thing they can do. The epidemic wouldn't have been so bad if they would have salvaged the timber when the bugs first hit in Glacier Park. But, inevitably, it will come, you can't stop it. When the timber gets to that stage, it is going to go. It would die naturally if it wasn't for the bugs. This slopover, as I call it, where good healthy green trees get taken along with it, it is just natural. There are so many bugs, and so many bugs will attack a green tree, then they can't fight them off. But a continual stand of good healthy timber, the bug situation will run out in a couple of years. It pitches it out. What I mean, is a good healthy tree, when the bugs start a working, pitch will flow out heavy enough that he can't survive--it will drown him. But the old trees can't do that. It is just nature's way of cleaning up.

1910 FIRE

1910 was a bad fire year. There was no organized fire organization built up big enough, and no men experienced enough to cope with the volume of fire that they had. Once a fire situation gets out of hand, it goes in leaps and bounds, and putting it out, soon becomes a case of when the fire stops--you can keep it from going anymore, but you are not going to stop it while it is moving. In 1910, in this country, we had the military here fighting fire, and again, you get the same situation--we have the same thing today.

Pete DeGroot had soldiers fighting the fire, and one Lieutenant came in with a company of men, and they immediately all started fighting fire. Pete tells about using the military in 1910, and he tells about this one company, a young Lieutenant who brought in the company men, and they all immediately went to fighting fire just like regular everyday firefighters. They got another company in--I don't know what the Commander was--he was a Captain or above--and the first thing he announced was that he had to set up a field headquarters, and had to take men for this, and had to take men for that--that kind of trick. It all boiled down that he would have 40 or 50 men that they could use to fight fire with out of a company. It was the military attitude, that's what it amounted to.

In 1910, they used anything that was available, but as far as experienced men, there just weren't any. There were a few woodsman that had an idea what to do, but there were a lot of people that t didn't. Those old fellas that could fight fire and knew how to

fight fire were worked to death. But, the occurrence of fire was so great, and once they got out of control, there was nothing they could do to stop it.

In Idaho, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of acres burned up. I have been over miles and miles of the 1910 burn. In Wallace and Kellogg, they moved the people out of the town by the trainload to get them away from the fire. The volume had built up so great from the lack of manpower to fight it, that there was nothing anybody could do--it was just going to go, that is all there was to it. There were fires everyplace, and many thousands of acres had burned. The old experienced men had done the best they could, but there just weren't enough trained people to take care of a situation of that magnitude.

The 1910 fire brought the Forest Service to realize that what they had was bigger than just a token forest. They had to have trained crews and lots of men.

Pete DeGroot tells about having a crew up on Good Creek, the fire was in the process of blowing up, and the crew was going to run. Pete and George Bowan, informed them that anybody that was going to run, they were going to floor him, so they went back into action and let the fire go. After it had run its course, Pete left, after he felt that George could handle the men, and went to the fire camp to see what the cook had left. When Pete got there, George had

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left and there were a couple of puppies that had been left behind. Pete threw them in the packsack and ran with them. He got out and got away. Some of the other firefighters were determined they were % going to leave, and slipped away at night and tried to go through

the firelines. They got through, but were burned pretty bad. The majority of the fellas didn't get hurt at all. The volume of fire was just too great for the manpower and the equipment that was available .

We have had just as bad fire conditions as 1910 since then, and probably worse. Pete DeGroot always said that 1919 was much worse than 1910, but I couldn't tell you about that because I wasn't there. Fighting fire was a new program at that time, and there were just not enough people to take care of the situation. If they had enough people to take care of the fires while they were small, we wouldn't have had them that big. But everytime your fire doubles, your manpower takes four times as much to take care of it, and it can't be done, that is all there is to it.

The Goat Creek Fire was in 1974, the year before I retired. I knew

the possibility of a blowup was good. There were places that I

wouldn't put men in--there were cliffs, rocks, and just a continual stream of rocks rolling down the cliffs. I've seen rocks the size of a pickup coming down the sides of the mountains, just skipping like a baseball rolling down the hill, and you just couldn't put men in places like that. I wouldn't let them go in there. If it had died down, and the weather had changed, we would go in, otherwise, if it was going to go, it was going to go. Well, it . went, and when it did, I just sent word to Jim Gragg to tell the

Forest Service that they had a fire because we have more fire than

we have supervisory personnel to handle, and we don't have the help

to take care of a fire of this volume. We had a hundred men and three or four foremen out rhere. At the height of the fire, there was about 750 men, and we didn't have anybody to supervise a crew that size, and of course, right then, there was a 5000 acre fire all around the Missouri, and fire everyplace else, and just didn't have the supervisory men to take care of it.

The Forest Service brought in a crew from Flagstaff, Arizona, consisting of 25 or 30 supervisory personnel, and we even had a Youth Corps crew from Fort Knox, Kentucky. They were Negroes, and only stayed a day or two because it was cold up here, and they had never seen such horrible mountains, so the Negro boys didn't last very long, let me tell you.

The whole nation was concerned because of the disaster in 1910, and that is what really made the Forest Service. The reserve was set up, of course, with the idea to hold this timber in reserve for a time when we would need it, and the general public figured that it shouldn't fall in the hands of private industry. The private industry at that time, couldn't afford to handle it, so the Forests set up what they called the Forest Reserve. Gifford Pinchot and others, were responsible for this. After they had set it up, they discovered a lot of problems that they could not have foreseen. I ► don't remember the exact dates when they transferred from the

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Department of Interior to the Department of Agriculture, but I think it was along 1910-1911, or it might have been 1909 when the transfer was made from one Department to another. It was the beginning of building what we have now, and if we go another 100 years, it will change another 100 times. Public opinion will do that, believe it or not.

In 1911-1912, the private industry realized that they had to protect themselves, and they started fire organizations, and have been built up into what we have now. Right after WW I, the Northern Montana Forestry Association ( NMFA ) was expanding, and I knew men that were hired because of their ability as a woodsman. They started to enlist the help of the small landowners to help them carry the burden of fighting fire. This went on until a few years back when they saw the handwriting on the wall and realized that the financial burden would be too great if anything major happened.

The NMFA was orginally organized by Maurice Boorman's father, 0. B. "Bert" Boorman. The Bigfork Unit didn't want to join the NMFA, so the ranchers got together and formed their own organization, and asked the State of Montana to represent them. That is what made the Bigfork Unit--it was the people in the Unit that didn't want to be included in the NMFA because it represented the big lumber companies. They wanted to protect themselves, so they organized and asked the State to head up their organization. We fought the fire in the area for years and have a man there every summer. The first person I knew that was there was Fred Metcalfe, Harry > Hopkins, and the last man was Floyd Ohman. Floyd worked there

until Dick Sandman took over. Dick wanted him to act as a per diem guard and only pay him when he went on fires. Floyd told him he didn't think he wanted to fight fire that way, and that was the end of that. The first year I was in the Swan, they fought fire from the Swan. I went down with a crew several times to put out fire in Bigfork using the boys from the Youth Camp.

There are a couple of people in the Stillwater area that I haven't mentioned, who should be mentioned. There was a homesteader at Stryker Lake, by the name of Kitchen. He had the first fish hatchery there, and he had a special lease on Stryker Lake, using it as a breeder pond for his fish. He was raising eastern brook trout, and had a contract with the Great Northern Railway to furnish fish for the diner. Pete sold out shortly after I came up to that country. Jay Edmonds bought the setup and operated it for awhile and then he sold it. The fish pond and everything else is now just a thing of the past. Some Canadians bought it just recently for a summer home and they live there. It is a real nice spread.

As I mentioned earlier, the town of Stryker was named after a man named Stryker. Stryker moved away and Julius Burg bought the place and settled there. Julius is now gone, but his son-in-law. Tommy White lives there now. Tommy was raised up Sunday Creek and his father homesteaded up Sunday Creek. Tom started out working for * the Forest Service and worked for the Fish and Game, and wound up

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at the State Highway Department. He is retired now and even older than I am, but he is a real oldtimer in the country. The Whites were the real early people in the country and had a lot to do with shaping of the country up here.

1930, through World War II, the Kinshella brothers and their father were cutting ties on the Somers Lumber Company land, from Lupfer north. I don't know how many thousands of ties, but they had a camp at Lupfer, and about 150 men worked there.

All during the Depression they worked cutting ties on the Somers Lumber Company land. They got as little as 134; a tie for cutting the small ties, and just a little bit more for cutting the large ones. They were paying their laborers $2.00 a day and charging 904; a day board. I have seen the men come away from the office on payday for a month's work of $15.00. But, they had something to eat, and that was better than a lot of people had during the Depression.

By 1933, when the CC program came on, a lot of those men that were working there came and signed up as experienced woodsman for the CC Camp at Olney. There were Nels and Swan Lindstrom, and some of the Humes boys, Ted Burke and his father, Alfred. They all worked for the CC Camp and the following winter, they all went to California to work in the CC camps there.

Swan and Nels Lindstrom went to work for Hans Larson of the American Timber Company; Humes went to work for himself, and the Burkes got other work. In 1933, things were pretty tough.

The Christmas tree industry was a product of the Depression. Again, it was something to do--a way to get money so you could eat. A discovery was made that the Christmas trees out of Northwestern Montana would hold their needles and last longer on the market than any of the other Crhistmas trees. It started in a small way, but built up real fast. The principal companies were Hofferts, Kirks, and later, The Western Tree, which is a Montana organization. Kirks was Seattle operated, and Hofferts headquartered in 'Frisco. They were delivering trees as little as 18-204; a bale. But, again, it was a way for someone to eat. They cut a lot of trees. Eureka eventually was the major point. Later, Kalispell shipped more trees than Eureka, but Eureka is still known as the Christmas tree capital of the world. In those days, 12% of the Christmas trees used in the United States came from Flathead and Lincoln counties. It was developed into an enormous business. At one time. The Western Tree in Kalispell shipped over 100 cars of Christmas trees out of Kalispell. Other companies were shipping as well. Then they let their quality of the trees go down to a point where the market kept falling off because they could get better trees somewhere else, and it has just been in late years that they have been upgrading their trees and getting better trees. The market is holding its own and coming back some. The old companies that handled the poor trees went completely out of business, but the more reliable companies like Kirks in particular, Hofferts, and

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Walters, survived, and are still buying trees and still brings in quite a bit of money into the economy of the country.

) In the Olney country at one time, Kirks had a lot of trees. Most

of the Christmas trees that I sold were in the Eureka country. That was where the heavy cuts were made. We sold a lot of trees right in the Olney country. The quality of the Olney trees was real good. They had special customers around Olney and they went to those special customers.

The representative of the company involved were Kirks, who had a field man by the name of Les Gelzer who did a lot of business with me. His field man was Roscoe Carney--Chili Carney, we called him. He was a red headed guy from West Virginia, and at one time he worked as a smokechaser for me at the Stillwater Station. A. J. Thomas, who we knew quite well, used to buy from the State. Michael Seed Company bought trees, and they still buy trees. I didn't sell as many trees to Hofferts as I did to Kirks, Michael Seed, and A. J. Thomas.

There were numerous other companies, but these were the principal ones that I had dealt with buying trees off State lands. I don't know what the most volume was that we took off in one year off of State land. The fall of 1955, I sold $25,000 worth of Christmas tree stumpage in the Olney/Eureka/Libby country. It is quite a business and it always will be.

The plantation grown trees, even though they are nice trees, their popularity isn't as great because the cost is prohibitive. A wild tree can sell for 50% of what a plantation tree would cost, and a good wild tree, to some people, is better than a plantation tree. The business always handles a lot of plantation trees because there is always a good market for them, but as times get tougher, the wild trees come back. I know the company that I work for every fall, the manager made a visit to his buyers throughout the country in January to see what the need year would be, and a lot of the buyers doubled up their orders for wild trees in preference to plantation trees.

I don't know how long it will last or what it all means, but they have developed a plantation tree to where it looks artificial. If you want an artificial tree, you can buy one and use it year after year. There is no aroma or anything like that. When you bring a Douglasfir tree in the house, they put out a pleasant aroma all through the house, and they don't drip any pitch on the floor. The Scotch pine will drop a lot of pitch. If you put Scotch pine on a rug, you better put a piece of plastic down to catch the pitch.

As I said before, the Christmas tree business was quite a business, and still is. Now, it is farmers with tractor land that will grow Christmas trees. They cut them year after year. I know pieces of ground in the Eureka country that have cut Christmas trees off of them now for 50 years, and is cutting more trees per acre today than it was originally when they started, and the quality of the tree is better because the farmer takes care of them. He keeps

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them thinned, and lets them take their own form. It has developed into quite a business, and there are people in the Eureka country with farm trees. Just like a farmer would raise wheat, the return on their investment is just as good as wheat.

I would like to comment on dealing with our Justice of Peace and so on. We use to have a Judge in Whitefish, Tom Stacey. When you took a man in before Stacey, you got justice the way he saw it. It might not be exactly to the letter of the law, but nevertheless, you got justice. He was quick, sure and there was no argument.

I know some people that moved into another man’s cabin in Olnev. The cabin was State-owned, but the man had it leased. They were drinking and making a public nuisance of themselves, and the neighbors complained because they couldn’t sleep at night, and wanted me to do something about it. I went over and looked the situation over, and they had been cutting green lodgepole trees around the cabin, sawing them into wood, splitting them on the stump and letting them lay out in the sun to dry a bit. That was what they were using for wood. I told the neighbors that if I pick that man up, the owner who has the lease is going to lose it--the only way I can stop it is to have him arrested. If you have to do it, you had to do it, so go ahead. I went down, but I didn't find the one I wanted to find--I found the other one. There were two of them that were involved, and I never ever made an arrest--I just talked to him and told him that I was going to have to get a warrant for him and have him arrested for cutting the green trees around the cabin. If he wanted to, he could come along with me, and it would save me sending the sheriff out after him, and also save him the expense of paying for the sheriff to come out after him. He was congenial enough, so I took him down to the judge's chambers at city hall.

The judge wasn't in, and young Ed Trippit was busy, so I left the man in the judge’s chambers. I went down the street where they told me the judge was. I found him and told him that I didn't want to prosecute the man or anything else, but I had to get him out of the cabin before they destroyed it. The only way I had was to get a conviction. He said we will take care of that--just as simple as that. We went back up and got out the law books and looked up the trespass law, I signed the warrant and the guy was sitting there. The judge read the warrant to him, and said you have 2 4 hours to make your plea. You can plea now, or you can take 24 hours. The man said he would take the 24 hours. The judge said he would put him in jail, and set his bond at $50.00. The judge asked him if he had $50.00, and he said he didn't and the judge said, okay, downstairs in jail you go. The guy started to stutter and stammer around, and the judge looked at him and asked him if he cut that tree. He said yes, but the top was broke out of it. The judge said that the law was very clear, it doesn't say anything about the condition of the tree. If the tree was a green tree, it was a green tree, and that was what the law says. It doesn't matter if it was a bush or a big tree, you cut that in trespass--and you cut it, didn't you? Yeah, I cut it. Well, you must be guilty then. I suppose I am, he said. Well, said the judge, I find you guilty. I

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fine you $50.00. You got $50.00? No I don't, he said. Well, the judge said, Mr. Cusick will take you to jail. That was the kind of justice that Tom Stacey dealt out.

Another time, I had a man who cut the telephone line at Stillwater, and I was out until two or three o'clock in the morning trying to find the break. This was right in the middle of fire season. He cut a chunk out of the line about 150-200 feet. I had to get additional wire and fix it. A week later, I will be damned if he didn't do the same thing again. In the same place! We had a good idea who it was, and we went to have a look at his truck, and there was telephone line and the chains all over. He had gotten stuck and had taken the telephone wire and tied it to the chains on his front wheels. He had a four wheel drive outfit, and he put the front wheels in drive, and used the wire to keep his wheels from spinning. In other words, he walked out on the wire. That's a serious crime. We sent Ernie Baker out to get him and when he brought him back in, he was pleading guilty as he was coming in the door .

The judge asked if he did it, and he said, yeah, he did. The judge said. Cal, I don't think you know what you are saying. He said you don't realize what you have done. Cal's eyes got big. The judge read the law to Cal. Breaking lines of communications, the law calls for not less than a year in the State Penitentiary, and not more than five, and a fine of $500, but not more than $1000. Both fine and prison sentence can apply. The judge said. Cal, you just don't realize what you have done. I have talked it over with Mr. Cusick, and he has agreed that if you didn't want to plead guilty, we couldn't settle this in this court, it would have to go to district court, but will change the charge to something we can settle in this court, and settle it right here and now if you want to plead guilty. Cal said he wanted to plead guilty, and he changed the warrant to malicious destruction of property. Tom read the warrant to Cal, and Cal said, yes he was guilty. Fine--$200 . Do you have $200? Cal said he could get $200. All right, we will take you down and you get the $200.

Cal started on me, and I told him doing it once, that's one thing, but you do it twice in a row, and I am getting tired of going out there and fixing my telephone lines in the middle of the night. He started a blubbering and old Tom looked at Ernie and said "get him outta here." That settled that.

That was the cooperation I always got from a Justice of Peace. These fellas today, a lot of them worry what if he does or what if

he doesn't, and all of this. All I can say is my experience with

the JP--if you are reasonable with him--don't go there and try to tell him how to run his business. Tell him your problems and the

kind of results you desire, and he will look into it. If you are

right, you get the proper results.

In late years, we had a man who camped in the spring Creek Campground. This didn't pertain to me , I was just watching this ordeal. The fellas, instead of figuring out what they could do, were

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all worried about what they couldn 1 t do. They couldn't figure out any reason that they could move him, and he just literally made his home right in the campground. He put up a tent, stove, and had just everything in there. He had a workbench fixed up with a vice, etc. He was a hossler helper here at the roundhouse. He had been a machinist, but they cut back the force, and there wasn't another job available, so he took a hossler helper's job. Anyhow, he informed the boys that the Lord had told him to go up there and stay, and that was the place for him to stay, and he was going to stay there until the Lord told him to do otherwise.

Dick Sandman, Herman Schultz and Jim Gragg were in on this too. Jim Gragg was second in command then, and this went on for 11 months. I made a mistake of mentioning it to Bob Arnold. God Damn it, can't they do something with that guy sitting up there in the campground? He was getting to the point of telling people what to do in the campground, and so on and so forth. I didn't say anymore, and I should have kept my mouth shut, but I didn't.

I was sitting in the office and here comes a personal letter for me. I opened it, and it was a letter from Gary Moon that said it was brought to his attention that there was a man living in the Spring Creek Campground, and had been living there for the past 11 months, and for me to take whatever action was necessary, but move him. Well, here was Dick Sandman, Herman Schultz and Jim Gragg, and I read the letter. I passed the letter around and eyes got big! What are you gonna do? Well, the first thing I am going to do is go down and talk to the county attorney. Dick Sandman asked if he could go with me, and I said yeah, you can go along. So I went down and talked to Dean Jellison, showed him the letter and told him what was going on. I said, here I have been thinking it was funny, and the boss caught me at it, I guess. He laughed, and I told him that I thought I had evidence enough to get him for trespass. He had done enough damage in there that I could get him for that, and we could get him out that way. Dean said that there was another way, but we will try your way first.

I went and talked to the guy, and asked him when he was going to move. He wasn't going to move. I said if you don't move, I am going to have to move you. "The Lord told me to go here and stay, and that is where I am gonna stay. There is something horrible gonna happen in this world, and this is where the Lord wants me to be if it happens. I'm gonna be there, that's all there is to it." I told him that he didn't give me any choice and would have to get a warrant for him. I went down and swore out a warrant for him, and they picked him up. Dean Jellison was a little curious, he wanted to see just how crazy he was. Maybe he would have to commit him, so he had the officers bring him right into town and put him in jail. He went down and talked to him there. He said, "Bill, do you think you can serve the Lord in here?" No! Well, if you don't move out of there you are going to have to. "The Lord told me to stay up there." Dean said that he had better get out of there. Finally, he agreed to move out, no trial, they just turned him loose to move out. He moved right back and stayed there for two weeks. I told Dean that it looked like we were going to have to

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have a trial. Bob Wills was the JP at the time, and I told Bob that I didn't want to prosecute the man, but he had to move out and I had to get some evidence to move him on.

We went and picked Bill up and brought him to the judge's chambers at city hall, and the policeman had him by the arm. The policeman stayed there and the first thing, he got up, ranted and raved because we didn't have a Bible for him to swear on, but the judge told him it wasn't necessary. I stated the case as to what he had done. They brought him up to speak his piece, and he wasn't even rational. He started giving the judge hell, and Bob Wills was high up in the Masons. Anyhow, Bill got around to accusing Bob of swearing allegiance to the Pope, of all things, and the judge reached out, grabbed both sides of his desk, and started pulling in on it and his cheeks got red. He fined him $100 and six months in the county jail. Boy, I tell you, things got rational real quick.

The judge said he would suspend six months in the county jail if he moved in 24 hours. Bill said he couldn't move in 24 hours. I told him that I would help him move. The judge said to Bill, that Maurice has offered to help you move, now you get moved. I told Bill to be up there tonight when he got off shift, and I would have a truck there and move you out. Bill agreed. I had the truck there, and Monroe Spinks was with me. Monroe knew him from years before. We took down the tent, his bed and everything else, and put it in the truck. He was screaming and wanting to stay there, and we told him he was in real serious trouble if he tried to stay there .

We got everything loaded up, and I took him down to the station, and Monroe pulled in there before he went down to where his home was. He had a good home down in Evergreen--a nice home. His wife was a nurse and he was a pretty respectable man. Anyhow, he got out of the truck, shook hands with me and said, "you know, I always did have to learn the hard way." Never was bothered with him anymore .

But that is my experience with Justices'. You get justice from the JPs--you don't get law, you get justice. It is true that some of these shysters can make trouble for the Justice of the Peace. But, the average man doesn't want any part of it because the rules of the JP are flexible enough that he can make a man wish he had never seen him. That's how it should be. These fellas that are afraid of what the judge will do, should go and talk to the judge and tell him the problem. Not tell him what he has to do, but get his opinion on what they ought to do, and they will get results. I have taken more fellas before the judge than any man in the Department, and I had them looking in the doors of the prison. I have never had but one man ever resent what I did to rhe point of where he would try to give me trouble.

I had one man in Eureka who I caught stealing. I slapped his hands real good. He never operated on State land, but what he would try it again. He was a minister of all things, or claimed to be, that is. That was all that was to it, claimed to be. He claimed that

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someone had stole a bunch of trees off of him at Warland, and wanted me to take them off my list after I checked him. I said no, that when the trees were stolen, they were your trees, not mine. I told him that they were there when I counted them, and I am not taking anything off my books. Boy, he got mad about it. Then he wasn't going to pay the cutter for cutting, and the cutter happened to be a man that I knew real well. He came to me and asked me what he was going to do. I told him that I couldn't tell him what to do, but I could tell him what trees were there and it wasn't his fault if they were stolen. They sued him, and he paid for the cutting of the trees.

The Snowline Christmas Company got suspicious, and the next year they caught up with him for stealing from the company. He had a Christmas tree yard of his own, and he would steal baled trees out of a yard, take them to Spokane, and then take them to his own yard, and the company was paying for them. I was counting some trees one day, and Matt Boyd, the manager of Snowline saw me and told me he had some good news for me. Bob Arthur isn't with us anymore. I told him I wondered how long it would take to catch up with him. I never had him on a job where he didn't try to steal trees. Everytime, he would try to steal them. The last time, he got pretty rough about it, and I had to tell him I don't care how you lost your trees, you lost them, I didn't, and if somebody stole them after I counted them, that is just too bad, I am not going to take it off my books.

In administering Christmas tree sales, the customary practice was to make field inspections during the day. To find the cutters was pretty near impossible. They all came in at night. It was a customary procedure, when I was in town, I would go to a restaurant and bar (Jim's place), and he had a specialty, a big kettle of Mulligan on the back of the bar, and I would get a big bowl of Mulligan, sit back at a table and spread out my papers. I would probably be there until about seven-thirty or eight o'clock at night. Different buyers, when they would come in, would know that if I was in town, they knew that I would be there, and they would come to look for me. If they had any problems, we would settle them, and if I needed an extra deposit or anything like that, they would give it to me. That is the way we handled our business. During the day, you couldn't catch up to these fellas. From dark on, they would come to town, and if they knew where to find you, they would come and look you up. That was a lot better than running to this ranch house, and that ranch house after dark to see this man and the other. They would all cooperate, and that is the way we handled it.

I did much of my financial business at seven or eight o'clock at night--more business than I did in the daytime. I even sold trees that way. It used to be that a man would come to me and wanted to buy a section of Christmas trees, and I would tell him what kind of a deposit I needed and he would give it to me, and I would take his money and tell him to go ahead and start cutting. I would take the money to the office and they made out a permit and we were in business. I sold them over the hood of the car at night, or in

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Jim's place, or maybe the Kalispell office, but I made a lot of sales after hours and late in the season. There would be some buyer that would be short, and there would be some State land close by where he could get the stumpage that he wanted, and he would get hold of me, make a deposit, and start cutting his trees.

Time was gold to these fellas, you had to move fast because a Christmas tree isn't worth anything on the 26th. I have even with some of the more reliable cutters, at the end of the season, tell me what they needed and they would go cut them. I would take their count for it and go from there. But, that was a rare occasion--I always wanted to count the trees before they were taken away, just to keep anybody from accidentally making a mistake. The oldtimers that I knew, and knew were reliable people, at the end of the season, I would do that for them. I sold a lot of trees in the last two weeks of the Christmas tree season right through November--f rom the 1st through the 15th of November, I sold a lot of trees. We can't do that now, they want it all done ahead of time, because they need environmental impact statements and the whole bit. But, the oldtimers knew that I could do that, knew that I would do that, and they depended upon me to do that. Like I say, you can't do that anymore.

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As a matter of record, Maurice mentioned the State Foresters and their term of office:

First State Forester Second State Forester Third State Forester Fourth State Forester Fifth State Forester Sixth State Forester

Charles Jungberg, 1910-1914 John C. VanHook, 1914-1921 Robert P. MacLaughlin, 1921-1926 Rutledge Parker, 1926-1954 Gareth C. Moon, 1954-1981 Gary G. Brown 1981-present

Maurice also mentioned some of the people that he had worked for whose contributions have been of interest.

I didn't know any of the first two State Foresters, Jungberg and VanHook, but I know a lot about the work that MacLaughlin did towards developing the forests.

He had big ideas. He wanted to consolidate the forests and manage them as forests, and the politicians didn't see it that way, consequently he had one term of office and that was all.

Then came Rutledge Parker. Parker was a fine old man, don't get me wrong, but as far as advancing the quality of the forests and the management of the forests, he wasn't too concerned. He didn't want to be bothered that much. He administered the timber sales and such things, but as far as forest development was concerned, he was not at all interested. In fact, when the CCC program came, Mr. Anderson wanted the CC camps, and Mr. Parker wasn't too interested. They didn't want any at the Missoula end. We had the CC camps up here during the CC administration, but they could have had camps in the Missoula District also, and could have done a lot of development work on State land, but he wasn't too interested in being bothered that much.

Mr. White managed the Missoula end, Emil A. Anderson managed the north end, and Mr. Anderson didn't want the men from the north end associate with the men from the south end. He wanted the kingdom ruled by him and him alone, and didn't want any difference of opinion. He was a good man, there was no doubt about it, he had the interest of the State of Montana at heart, and the way he saw it, it may not have been the way we would have liked to have it today. But, nevertheless, it was the way he saw it from the point of economics. He had his ideas, and he was very sincere in his ideas, but they don't fit with today's times and conditions.

I was the Firewarden on the Stillwater State Forest for seven years, and never saw State Forester Parker once in those seven years. Later, he came there a time or two, but he wasn't too interested. He had his little job to do, and we fellas out in the field, we did ours, and that was all right with him. If we had gotten into trouble, I presume that he would have been around, but as long as there was no one making any ripples, why everything was just right, and that is the way it went.

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Then Gary Moon came along as State Forester. He was a young man and he knew the places that we could improve the Forest, knew what we could do to develop the Forest, and knew what we should do to develop the Forest, and went about it to get the job done. I will have to say that he did an outstanding job. He bettered the working conditions, he got the State of Montana in the forestry business , not into the business of selling timber, but into the forestry business . I still think that there will be more improvements, and Gary will be there to be in on the planning of it, if nothing happens to him. His interests are in the forests, making the forests, and making the forests what he thinks it should be. I will have to agree with him, that is the way it should be done .

Again, we are going to have to, in the future, treat our forests like a farm. We are going to have to thin, plant and administer just like a farm. The old mature timber is going to have to go to make room for new. The quicker we start, the sooner the next generation will have a stand of timber. Of course, the areas like the Stryker Burn and several other burned areas, will eventually be our best forest because they have a running start on the clearcut areas and so forth. Our clearcuts are really coming back in the Swan and Stillwater. Planting is more of a problem. Regardless of the size of a clearcut, reproduction comes back to the point where thinning is a necessity rather than planting.

In my lifetime experience, I have never seen a burn, but what it came back to reproduction similar to the original stand. I have never seen one that has failed to grow a stand of timber. There are some that don't have a stand of timber on them, but you look back before the fire, and there wasn't any timber there then, and it wouldn't grow before the fire, it sure isn't going to grow after. The snowslide areas and extra dry sites, for example, there never was any timber on them to speak of. Here and there a tree, and it isn't even worthwhile to try and plant because it is too severe a site for timber to grow on.

Some of the other men in the Department that I worked was with Fred Metcalfe, who was the first foreman that I had when I came to work for State Forestry. He is 87 or 88 years old now, but still pretty chipper and pretty interested in what is going on.

Some of the outstanding men as far as I am concerned, that I worked with were Jack Hamilton and Rod Krout. They were exceptionally good men in their line of work, and they were good cooperators with the State Forester and worked to his advantage.

There was also Otha Isaacs, and Herman Schultz who were oldtimers. They did a lot of good work, but the ones that were really outstanding as far as I am concerned, were Rod Krout and Jack Hamilton .

Bob Arnold came to work for me fresh out of college. He worked for me for six months, and then was on his own for six months or a

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year, and the financial situation got so bad that he couldn't make it, so he quit the State and went to work for J. Neils Lumber Company. A year later, I ran into the same problems that Bob did, and I had to quit to make ends meet. That is when I went to work for the Diamond Match Company. Bob Arnold has done a lot of fine work for the State of Montana.

I didn't know Don Drummond until he came to work for the Department, and I found him to be a very close, reliable friend among the business. In his way, he was a real outstanding man. He gave Gary Moon a lot of advice, and when Gary was up against certain situations, he would turn to Don to get his opinion. He would not necessarily do it the way Don suggested, but he always turned to Don for advice. Don Drummond was a real outstanding man in the Missoula office.

Ruth Guinard and I worked together for many years. We had a close personal cooperation between us. I couldn't explain it. My wife, Evelyn, used to say that we could carry on a conversation and knew what each other meant, and no on else could even understand what we were talking about. But, we did have a system of communication, there was no doubt about that. She and I worked awfully close together. When there were problems in the Kalispell Office, and there were a time or two, I kept her and Serena Lee clued in to what I thought was going to happen and to hang tough, it isn't going to be this way forever. It worked out. Ruth, as I mentioned, could carry on a conversation over the radio and no one could tell what we were talking about but us, and that was the way it was.

The Olney School had enough to build a building, but not enough to build a basement, so I held community dances and socials, and one thing or another to get money to build a basement, and the community built a basement. Emil Anderson came along one day and I was working on the basement. It was a Saturday. He just threw a fit and a half, and let me understand that I was not supposed to be doing any work for the school, and I was absolutely to stay out of school affairs. We had quite an argument about it. Nevertheless, I told the people what I was up against, and that they would have to continue on their own, but I would help them in any way that I could. We did get the basement, and the school house built. Evidently, Gary Moon heard about this, and when he approached me to come back to work, he had given me to understand that it was my duty to take part in these school affairs and anything else. If I felt that I wanted to do some work for the school, or if I wanted to take time off and do it, that was fine. It isn't that we don't want you to do it, in fact we do want you to do it, and be sure that you do. That was just the difference in people again. Boy, I got a chewing deluxe for even thinking of going over there and helping the school out. It was this type of thing that added up and made me quit.

That last straw was when I got hurt one summer, and I had to use my sick leave, or a good share of it anyway. Then in the fall, I had surgery, and they promptly announced that I didn't have any sick

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leave coming, and they would have to cut me off the payroll. Well, I knew that they didn't have to do that, and I also knew that if they wanted to do that they could do that, so I put up with it. I lost a month's pay. When I got back on the job, shortly afterward, Mr. Anderson was up and announced that we were tough in Missoula. Anybody that wants to apply for a raise in pay also wants to have his resignation ready. I said that makes things really simple. He looked at me kind of funny, and I started looking for another job right there.

I had a friend who gave me some names of people to write to look for a job along my line of work. I went in the office one day, and they were talking about taking inventory. I said, well you come to take inventory at Stillwater, bring a man with you, and we will transfer this property over to him, because I am going to quit. They asked me what I was going to do. I told them I didn't have the slightest idea what I was going to do, but right now while you are paying common laborers more than you are paying me, I am not going to stay anymore.

About a week later, Mr. Anderson came around wondering if a raise in pay would make any difference. I told him it wouldn't make a bit of difference, because the raise in pay, when it comes, wouldn't amount to enough to make any difference. I told them that I have stayed around too long now, I was in a bad financial situation, and had to get out and earn some money to live on. He said that he didn't have anybody to take my place. I told him to get somebody, that's what I was trying to tell him--to get somebody to take my place. Well, this went on, and on, and on, and finally I told him Monday morning that I put my application in at the Diamond Match Company for a job--that they were coming to Montana and I would like to work for them. Anderson said that would be nice, being really sarcastic about it. Friday morning, I called him up, and told him I had a job offer from Diamond Match Company, and I was going to Newport that morning and I would see him Saturday.

When I returned, I told him that I had a job at Priest Lake. They were just waiting for the ice to go out of the lake and then I could start work. Anderson said that he wanted to let me know that he had talked to the boss that morning and he agreed to raise everybody's wages $25.00 a month, right straight across the board. I told him it was too little, too late, that I had accepted the job with the Diamond Match Company, and a soon as the ice goes out of Priest Lake, I would be gone. I told him to get somebody to take over the place. "I don't have anybody." "Well, I'm telling you to get somebody. I'm gone."

Anderson wanted to know if my wife, Evelyn, would live at the station and take care of the station until he could get somebody. I told him I supposed she could, but when I went to Priest Lake, they were going to have to move her because I wouldn't be able to come home. He agreed to do that.

Before I went, they got Virgil Weaver to come up and Virgil was

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telling me what a good deal he was getting--the big raise he was going to get and so on and so forth. "Fine," I said, "let's figure that out." "Did you ever figure out what that was going to be?" "No, I haven't." I told Virgil that we should sit down together and figure it out. You get so much raise, and you will pay $75.00 a month rent on the cabin; you will pay income tax on all that, and you will pay retirement, so what does that leave you? Virgil said he hadn't figured it out. I told him we would sit down and figure it out. It figured out to be about a $2.00 - $2.50 per month raise. God Almighty, when Virgil heard that, he went up in the air like a rocket. He thought he was really getting something, and he was getting took. He went down and the sparks flew, and he told the old man he wasn't going to work there, so finally, they decided they would leave the wages the way there were, and he wouldn't be charged anything for the cabin, and he would get the $25.00 a month raise .

Virgil worked through the summer, and he and Anderson fought all summer long, and the next fall, they moved him out, and there was nobody in the station until the following spring, when Joe Cone moved in.

There was a time when that man wasn't that way, but as he got older, his health was failing, and I don't think anybody knows why, but he was going to save every nickel there was to be saved, and he didn't care who he hurt, where, when or how. At the same time, he was just sobbing about the situation he was in--that his wages weren't adequate at the present time to live on, but he would cut anybody's throat that he could cut. As I say. Moon must have found out about this, because that is one of the first things he told me when I hired out, that hereafter if there were any public affairs, it was my duty to get involved with them, and I was not to hesitate helping the school or anybody that I felt like. Just a difference in people.

I got acquainted with Ken Nichols shortly after I came back from working with the Diamond. He was a scaler, and had been a school teacher. He had alcohol problems, but he beat it, and he was a first class scaler. He helped with building of the Swan and he helped rebuild Stillwater. He was a real fine man, Kenny was.

Ken was out with Cal Guntermann around Deer Lodge someplace, and had a heart attack on the job. Cal had to bring him in and pretty near killed himself bringing Kenny in, but he did bring him in to the hospital. Ken recovered to a certain extent, but as time went on, he got weaker and weaker and eventually had to quit. As I said, this happened on the job, and Cal was with him, and not only did it pretty near do Cal in, but Cal was scared to death from that day on that he was going to have a heart attack. I think living in fear of it probably hurt Cal's heart. He's doing fine now--I get a Christmas card from him every year.

Cal Guntermann and I worked together the first years Moon was here. Of course, my big job for years was construction and development of these various stations. Anytime that there wasn't a pressing job

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for those fellas to do, the would send them out to help me. Cal worked with me a lot. Cal ranked next to Don Drummond as far as degrees. He had a terrific education, but he told me himself once, "you know, you can do almost anything. I went to school, and went to school, and I can't do anything." He was real concerned about it. He did have an awful problem to bring his education on the job in such a way that it was compatible to everybody around him. Gary Moon used to get awfully shook up with him.

I first met Otha Isaacs in 1933. He was hired as a scaler. He did other work around the Forest, but he was hired primarily to scale. Later he did some cruising. In 1937 , I was still considered temporary, but my job was considered firefighting at the Stillwater Station, and they moved Otha in to do the timber work at the station. There wasn't enough work in Kalispell to keep him busy, and they would bring him out there, and the agreement was that he would work with me on fire and I, in turn, would work with him on timber work. We would work together. But, fire was my responsibility and the timber work was his. He was there four years, and in 1940, we had a real bad fire year, and Curly got pretty badly scared. (We called Otha Isaacs Curly all the time). Curly got pretty badly scared, and the boss saw that firefighting wasn't his dish, so he transferred him back to Kalispell. I took over all the duties of the Stillwater Station then. The war came on, and I and the wife were at the Stillwater Station for 12 years. We raised our family there. I worked there until I finally quit in the spring of 1952. Curly always worked in Kalispell.

Dick Isaacs, as a boy, was raised at the station. He went to high school in Whitefish, and when he was going to college he would work at the Stillwater Station as a smokechaser during the summer. Then he went into the Navy and became a Second Class Petty Officer, and became a Radar Specialist. When he came back after the war, he went back to work for the State of Montana for a short time. About the time I quit to work for private industry, he quit, and went into business for himself. Shortly after I came back, he came back, and worked in the Swan, Missoula and Helena. He retired in Helena. I don't know whether he got a medical pension or whether he just got is 35 years. I know he had his 35 years in because he counted the years that he worked temporarily before the war, and all the time during the war. In other words, he started building up a pension at about 16 or 17 years old. Dick did real well, and he is living in Kalispell now.

I knew Serena Lee from the day she started to work for the State of Montana. She was very good, but Mr. Anderson used to give her an awful bad time sometimes. She would speak her peace to him, and he respected her for it. She would get awfully mad at him once in a while though. I came in the office one time and they were having a round over something, and Serena said, "seems like with him that every so often you need a jerking up" -- and she got a jerking up. But she was good. When I talked to her about coming back to work, she wasn't too happy at that time, and later she had her mind fixed so she could change it. She was really pleased with the situation, but it all leads back to listening to Mr. Anderson after working so

74

9

long with him, and he was more or less bitter because he felt he should be the State Forester. I don't know whether he came out and made any such statements as that, but I do know that he family did, and I think that that had a lot to do with it in his association with other people. After Serena had been here awhile and saw how things worked, she was highly pleased with it. There was not doubt about her doing a good job. Serena was Chief Clerk in the Missoula Office for a long time.

Serena replaced Nita Beckwith, or Becky, as they all called her. Becky was quite a gal. I never have heard what really became of her. She was a character, there is no doubt about that. She worked close with Gary Moon as his secretary, but what it amounted to was Chief Clerk. Her husband was a highway patrolman and I knew him. They separated sometime before Becky resigned from State Forestry. I don't know where she went after she resigned. She was quite a gal. If she had anything to say, don't think for a minute she would hesitate, she wasn't a bit bashful. She would speak her peace. Several things stick to our mind and several of the fellas always speak of it. She smoked cigarettes, she didn't use a lighter and she didn't use paper matches--she used old farmer matches, and she always scratched them on the instep of her shoe.

I have spoken of Kharincross. He had the job Mr. Anderson had in Kalispell. The State of Montana didn't have an office in Kalispell at that time. They had a full time man who handled timber sales and whatever there was to be handled, but we use to say that his office was in a certain bar in Kalispell, and I don't doubt that that was as near an office as he could have. He didn't conduct his business at home, but if you wanted to find him you would find him sitting at a table in this particular bar, his records with him, and he would conduct his business there, and that was it. The insinuation from a lot of people was that he was a drunk which I don't believe. Necessity is the mother of invention. He had to have someplace, and he didn't want people continually coming to his house at all times both day and night, so he did his office work right at the bar. The oldtimers did the best they knew how.

L. L. White was the Deputy State Forester in Missoula. There were two brothers, and as I remember, L. L. was the one that worked for the State of Montana. I knew the man, but he was always Mr. White, no one ever called him by his first name. He handled the field work in the Missoula and Thompson Falls areas and Mr. Anderson handled the timber sales and field work in the Northwest Area. I probably shouldn't say this, but Mr. White was an ex-Anaconda forest employee, and he had drinking problems. He got a job and was able to control himself and did real well. He was a good man, but cancer finally caught up with him. He never took his retirement, he died shortly after he left the office. It was a horrible af f air--cancer of the mouth.

I worked with Herman Schultz from the time he came to work for the State of Montana. Brush disposal was his big thing. He scaled logs and did other things, but brush disposal was his main job, and he handled the brush crews for Mr. Anderson up until he retired.

75

He started in as a young boy, but I don't remember how many years he had, but he had a lot of years when he retired. It is too bad that he didn't live to enjoy his retirement. Nobody realized that he had a bad heart, and really, I don't believe he even realized it. But, when it came, it came quick and he didn't suffer.

Sherman Finch was a young forester who graduated about the time I came back from Diamond Match. He had been told it was a big deal recruiting for the National Guard, and if you joined the National Guard, you won't have to go overseas. Well, he was going to college and the Korean war was on, and he joined the Guard thinking he was putting himself in a position where he wouldn't have to quit school. Well, he hardly got in the National Guard until his company was activated and sent to Korea. He was there all during the Korean War, came back and graduated, and came to work in Kalispell .

I was the first person Sherman worked for. He was in charge of the Goat Creek Station, and from there, he was the Missoula Unit Forester. He did fine, but he married, and his wife was a native of California. Jake was from California too. His wife didn't like it up north, so he got a job with the Soil Conservation Service, and he worked in California and then was transferred to Denver on a special assignment out of the Denver office. I heard later that he went back to California and is working there. He has been gone now 20 some years.

Sherman was strictly a field man and hated office work. What a lot of people didn't know, is that he had quite a brilliant military record, a purple heart, and the whole bit. He was only a staff sergeant, but he had command of a platoon of field artillery and he had had some real rough experiences. He tells about firing artillery at point blank range at the Chinese until the dead piled up, and the Chinese were trying to climb over the pile, still trying to come. There was no such thing as running. You were in a position where you had to fight, and that is what you did. He tells another story about looking across the valley a mile or two away, Chinese coming over the hill and going into a hole in the ground. They would keep straying over there and going in that hole, and some more would come over and go in the hole, and the Lieutenant put up his transit and took a reading on it, and told them to fire one round for effect. In other words, to see where it would hit. Jake said they fired one round and it went right in the hole. That is all they had to fire.

I don't know how old Nathan Hayes was when he took retirement, but he was much older than what his records show him to be. As a young man, he came to Butte, and he ran a cordwood camp for the Anaconda Copper Company, and they were fluming cordwood into Butte, using it to retort the ore in the streets. They piled cordwood in the streets and then piled the ore on it, and it broke the ore down somehow so they could handle it at the smelter at Anaconda. But they did it right in the streets of Butte. Nathan tells about the smoke getting so bad in town that the teamsters would have to get off their wagons, and walk over to the street corner and look at

76

.

the sign to find out where they were at. They couldn't read it from the middle of the street. Nathan was there at that time.

I don’t know when he started to work for the State Forest, but it was a long time ago. He was there ahead of me. He was a fiesty old guy and a little hard to control. They were logging on State land for the Anaconda Company, and the ACM loggers and the superintendent would get called about sending in deposits for stumpage, and they would get in the red pretty bad. The Missoula Office would tell Nathan that those fellas are in the red, we have to have a payment, and the foreman would say, "yeah, yeah," but no payment would come in. So, they wrote or called old Nathan and said Anaconda is in the red, and we have to have a payment. Nathan said fine. He got a big logging chain and padlock, went over to the train and padlocked it to the rails. He said, "you ain't moving a thing until we get our payment." They paid. But that was typical of Nathan--he was a fiesty little guy, and quite a guy.

Bob Griffes laid out some timber sales and roads and so on up there. He was occupied mainly in the Kalispell Office, but he worked with us together. Practically all of the old time foresters that are there now, have, at one time or another, worked for me. Moon tried to arrange it so they would work with me.

Gary Brown "Brownie" worked for me when he was s sophomore in college. He and Jim Gragg worked for me from the time they were sophomores in college until they graduated. Jim worked one summer for the U. S. Forest Service. He didn't like working for the State too well, because all I let him do while he was up there was carpentry work, and he wanted to do forestry work. Jim is now one of the biggest supporters that I have. When he looks back on it, he learned a lot of things there that comes in pretty handy now. He knew lots about timber work, but he learned a lot about construction work and so on and so forth. Jim originally studied to be an architect in college, but I don't know what made him change and turn to forestry.

Gary Brown and Jim Gragg came to work for me, along with another big fella by the name of Craig Smith. Craig went to the Forest Service, and Brownie and Jim stayed with the State of Montana. In fact, they were really having trouble making it, and Moon rented them his basement to live in. They lived in his basement for two or three years while they were going to school. They are good men, both of them.

Brownie gets awfully mad once in a while, but he doesn't stay mad. Boy, I have seen him mad. Whew! Les Claesson, who is in the Swan now, and when Brown was Unit Forester there, what in the hell did the temporary kids do, but go out and let the air out of all four tires of Brown's pickup. I'm telling you, it wouldn't have been funny at all, if Brown hadn't gone out there and seen it. Boy, did he blow his stack. Of course, the kids knew he would blow up, and they did it purposely just to see him blow up. Les tells about it and laughs about it. I didn't see it, but Les did.

77

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Les Claesson was a freshman in college when he came to work for me. He worked seasonal until he graduated and he taught school one year. He discovered that that wasn't to his liking at all. He was a manual training teacher. He worked in Michigan and Minnesota, and wound up running a printing shop for an insurance company in Minneapolis .

I got a letter from him one day wondering what was going on, and there was either no work to do, or else it was just rush, rush, rush, to get the printing jobs out, and then you just wait. It wasn't to his liking, and my carpenter quit right about the time I got his letter. I told him I had a place for a carpenter if he was interested, and if he was interested, to get hold of the Missoula Office. I got hold of Bob Arnold and told him what the deal was , and asked him what he thought about it. I told him you couldn't beat a manual training teacher as a carpenter, and in the Swan, it would be ideal. Les put in his application, and in 30 days he was here, and has been there ever since. He is a good little bachelor, but does all right.

78

The first Rancher on the Dutch George Ranch (east of Lupfer) was a

man named Long, a renegade deluxe. When I was a small boy, I

remember him coming to dad’s ranch guite often.

He had been in the military when Yellowstone Park was created, and he was among the soldiers that were sent out to guard the Park. One of the oldtimers that knew him told me that Long and his

partner were sent out to a cabin to do guard duty for the Park, to help keep the elk packers and trappers out. At that time, elk teeth had a great value, and Long and this fella were isolated out there together, and were trapping beaver and shooting elk for the teeth.

Along toward spring, the isolation got too much for Long's partner and he went off his rocker. Long had to go out and get help to take care of him. They had a cabin full of beaver hides, which they kept in an out-of-the-way place because they didn't dare let the

authorities find them, so he had to burn them up. He did bring out

a cigar box full of elk teeth, however. He stayed drunk for a

couple of years on what he made on those teeth.

As I said, he used to come to our ranch, in fact, he had one of my

father's registered dogs. Anyway, Long and a man by the name of Burton went together on a deal, where Burton bought a bunch of cows, and had Long raise them on shares. He would furnish the cattle, and Long would feed them, and they they would split the increase. It was going all right, but he discovered that Long was selling the increase, and not only that, he was selling the basic herd, pocketing the money, and saying nothing about it. They had words about it--I don't know just what happened.

Burton was on a train crew, and when he came in at the end of a run, instead of going home, he just took his rifle and jumped on a freight, and they dropped him off at Lupfer. He walked into the Long Ranch which is in there about a mile and went into the barn in early morning. What I mean by early morning, is five or six o'clock. When Long came out to milk the cows or feed the stock, he met him in the yard. They proceeded to have a fight, and the story they tell is that Long hollered to his wife to bring his rifle, and Burton just knocked him down, and promptly shot him and killed him. He came down and turned himself in and he went to Deer Lodge.

Long's widow married a man up in Fortine. After this shooting affair, dad went to get his dog, and Mrs. Long wasn't going to give it to him. Dad told her that he thought she had trouble enough without trying to make more--he came for his dog, and he wanted it. She gave him his dog. That was all there was to it.

The Japanese section crew up there were real concerned. This fella had been going into their section house and their cabins, and if he saw a blanket in there or something, he took it and so on. He was really ruthless and the section crew maintained it was too bad Burton had to kill him because if they just gave them time they would have done away with him and buried him on the railroad and nobody would have known the difference. But once again, you have oldtimers and their idea of justice.

79

'

I don't know how long Burton was in prison, not too long, but he never came back. I understand that he has relatives here in Whitefish yet, but I am not sure who they are. I met one of them once, a nephew by a second generation, or something, but I forgot who he is. We were talking about this whole thing and he told me at the time about Burton being a relative of his. Burton was a bachelor. When all of this happened, I was probably seven or eight years old.

In Giles Crane's tape, he mentioned a Butch McBride getting lost up in Lupfer, and his body was never found. I was at Olney at the time, and I knew about it. Butch was an old man, and he finally lost his tracks every little ways, he would fall down. He was played out and just panicked.

That country wasn't logged, and when we logged that area, we knew approximately where the spot was, and everybody watched for any signs of him. He had a rifle and his bones would be there, but we never found a trace of that man. We all assumed that he laid down and died in one of the meadows, and the grass just grew over. They never could find him, but, his body is up there between Lupfer and Olney on State land someplace. I wouldn't be able to tell you just exactly where, but I would say that someplace in Section 28 or Section 21 would be the likely places that he would be. It couldn't possibly be in Section 25. If, someday, they find a skeleton in one of those meadows or someplace, and they don't know who it is, it is old Butch. We have looked and have never been able to find him. There is a rifle and skeleton there someplace. We all thought he was probably in one of those meadows, but we couldn't see him. The grass and waters have covered him over and we just couldn't find him.

80

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In the District Court of the . Tenth. . .....Judicial District, State of Mon-

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Jud$*.

In the matter of the Application of

Eudolph J* Berner

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July

this 26 til

Trrrn, A. I). 1 894

dmj of aeptenler. .

To becsitne a Cit (zen 0/ the i nited States of America I T). 1 3^4 , ns yet of said Term.

It appearing to the satisfaction oj this Court \nj the oaths of .... .ft.*.. .G* bTTfClCy

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citizens of the t nited States of America., witnesses for that por, rose, first dull, sworn and cau mined that

. < . Rudolph J# Jerner . t

a native of . . G^r^lwny . . . has resided within the limits ami under the

jurisdiction of the Cmted States five years at least, last past, and within the State of Montana for one year, last

past, and that during all of mid five years' time he has behaved as a man of »oo<l moral character, attached to

the principles of the. constitution of the United Slides, and well disposed to the aOCMJ order and happiness of the

same; arul it also up,. rearing to the Court, by competent evidence, that the said applicant has heretofore, and

more than two years since, and in due form of law declared his intention to become a citizen of the United

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Stoics; and haring now here. before this Court. taken an oath that he will support the Constitution of the I’nited Stales of America an d that Ire doth absolutely and entirely return nec ansi abjure till allegiance ntul fidelity to tvery foreign / rince, I otentate. State or Soveri£nty wluitever, arul particularly hi

. . Will ion IX .gsperor of tiexziany . .

It La therefore ordered, m/jiid fed arul decreed, that the saul . KUdolph. J. ,7em £?r

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(Citium of % Untied Stairs of America.

Hudlay. PuBaseL.

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Si£naiurt - Rudolph. J ... 7emer .

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Duplicate for Registrar STATE OF MONTANA Bureau of Vital Statistics

PLACE OF DE^JI / . °‘ »««* . _.. ..

County . '^uUcsud- - . -JT . '/ '"•" / . . .KoK»t„od ZIlIZZii

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(If nonresident give city or town and State)

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2 FULL NAME

Length of rr-idriicr in nty or town where death

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PERSONAL AND STATISTICAL PARTICULARS

| 1 COLOR OR RACE (5 Single, Married, Widowed, or

Divorced (Write the word.)

7 "yV'lL^L _ _ i,^

5a If married, widowed or divorced HUSBAND cf _ ( or) WIFE of

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_ _ MEDICAL CERTIFICATE OF DEATH

1G DATE OF DEATH VMonth, Day and Year)

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^ERTIFY, That I attended deceased from

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(!•) General nature of industry, business, or establishment in which employed (or employer)... (c) Name of employer

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CONTRIBUTORY

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9 BIRTHPLACE (city or town) •' State or country) ' 7

Lo NAME OF FATHER

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,11 BIKT1IPXACE OF FATHER (City or Town, State or CoZTtZi H

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ft! 12 MAIDEN NAME OF MOTHER

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13 BIRTHPLACE OF MOTHER (City or Town, State or Country)

Va"wh" . i . (duration ) . . .yrs . . . mos . ds.

its Where was disease contracted

if not at place of death? . .

Did an operation pi*cede death?. . . . . Date 0f

Was there an autopsy? . .

What test confirmed diagnosis?

(

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(Addross) ^

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Informant . . .Cd/L//xZ A ..... /Z \

(Address) f ,

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‘State the Disease Causing Death

: Z.fZilZ Means and Nature of Injury, and (2) wh'etA.AVcidAtM’ ■ nicidal. or Hnnncnlnl. (See reverse side for additional space. )

j! 19 Place ol Burial, Cremation or Itciuoval

Date of Burial

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20 UNDERTAKER

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Form V. S. 3

STATE OF MONTANA

Bureau of Vital	Statistics		/>
Certificate or	Death	File No .
			No. 5.P .

Village.

or

PLACE OF DEATH

County . Flathead .

Township . . . . or

Cltv . No . . . -. . . — --SW . VFard

J . (If death occured in a hospital or institution, give its NAME instead of street and number)

full name . ^„.?..?hino j.o ^ . Samurai .

(a) Residence. No.. .

(Usual place of abode)

yrs.

.SL, . Ward . . . - . ----- ; - -

(If nonresident five city or town and Slate) days llow long in U. S.. if of foreign birth? 13 Tra- _ rnos. _ Daya

PERSONAL AND STATISTICAL PARTICULARS	MEDICAL CERTIFICATE OF DEATH
3 SEX	4 COLOR OR RACE	5 Single, Married, Widowed, or Divorced (Write the word.) ma.rri ed	16 DATE OF DEATH (month, daj, aid year) About. 10 26 1R	19
m	\T	;? j HERE t-V CERTIFY. That I attended deceased	f 1 o:r

5a If msrricCJ, v,ldcw:ci. &r divorced HUSBAND of (orl WIFE of

Tad :u fakurai

6 DATE OF BIRTH (month, day, and year)

' not knov,rn

7 AGE	Y ears	Month	Days	If LESS than
	42			1 dav.	hrs.
				or	min.

8 OCCUPATION OF DECEASED

(a) Trade, profession or

particular kind of work_ .

(b) General nature of industry, business. or establishment in which employed (or employer). (v) Name of employer

Nr> Ve.

°r.

9 BIRTHPLACE (city or town) .....Ma tSU ba PS. - (State or country 1_ Japan

10 NAME OF FATHER

Faragia Sakurai

11 BIRTHPLACE OF FATHER (Cut or Town. State or Coentry)

Japan

12 MAIDEN NAME OF MOTHER

Not known

13 BIRTHPLACE OF MOTHER (Citj or Town, Sut« or Conntrj)

14 J .Higashidani

Informant . . Qlri^y "MOTlt"

(AddresB)

15

Filed . 19 . .A.jr..«Lee.s . .

Registrar

1?...

to.

that 1 last saw h . alive on..

— . . 19 .

- 19 -

and that death occurred, on the date stated above, at — m.

The CAUSE OF DEATH* was as follows:

Pe ri shea in snow storm _

possibly flu

.(duration) . . . yrs - mos.

. ds.

CONTRIBUTORY .

(Secondary)

. (duration) . yrs .

18 Where was disease contracted

if not at place of death? . . . .

Did an operation precede death? _ Date of -

Was there an autopsy? -

,mo3 . ds.

What test confirmed diagnosis? _

M. D.

(Sigrned) . Jv£ vWag-ge ner'-CoTbrie r

6-11-19, 19 (Address) Kalispell _

• State the Disease Causing Death, or In deaths from Vio¬ lent Causes, state (1) Means and Nature of Injury, and (2) whether Accidental, Suicidal, or HomicidaL (See reverse side for additional space.)

19 Place of Burial, Cremation or Removal ^

Date of Burial

Cremated on top of* Mountain 19

20 UNDERTAKER

J.E.Waggener

ADDRESS

Kalispell

(OVER)

31 ■