Trego's Mountain Ear

I’ve been encouraged to research and write Trego’s history.  This first section basically covers 1900 to 1925, from a Sociologist’s perspective rather than a historian’s.

Trego’s history begins with social and economic events – there is no individual responsible for building the community, despite the fact that Octav Fortin was the first settler.  The first official institution was the school – School District 53 was created by the Flathead County Commissioners in 1904, as they looked at a location with a single operating ranch that had development barreling down on it – from the southeast, railroad reconstruction moving the mainline through the area that would become Trego, to the southwest was construction of the logging dam on Fortine Creek (though in those days, it was Edna Creek all the way down to its juncture with Grave Creek where the two streams joined to become the Tobacco River) and, to the North, where the Forest Service was beginning construction of the ranger station at Ant Flat.  Simply enough, Trego started as a construction boom town, and the official focus wasn’t the town, but the elementary school.

A drive to Kalispell shows the narrow passage between stream and stone as you travel past the Point of Rocks – a name that preceded the restaurant that burned several years ago.   You can note it as you drive between Eureka and Olney – a place where the rock wall almost pushed the early travelers into the Stillwater River. The first ten years of the 20th Century opened travel to Trego – partially with the railroad pushing a line through from Whitefish to Eureka, where it joined the paths down the Kootenai River from Canada.

For those who want to look at history as occurring due to exceptional men – there were exceptional men.  John F. Stevens was the engineer who relocated the Great Northern main line to run through Trego (he also located Marias Pass and the Panama Canal.  “Big Daddy” Howe headed the Eureka Lumber Company, and was responsible for bringing the logging dam into existence and its twenty-year operation.  Fred Herrig, the rough rider who tracked and recovered  Teddy Roosevelt’s lost mules during the Spanish American War in Cuba,  became the Fortine District’s first ranger.  And, of course, Octav Fortin who was here first. The reality is that Trego was twice a boomtown, both times due relocation of the railroad and building of a new dam.

The most credible story I’ve heard for the town’s name is that a Great Northern employee who was courting a girl in Minnesota or Michigan, named Jeanette Trego, assigned the name to get along a bit better with her Father.  Then, in a predictable error, the railroad station next to Octav Fortin’s ranch got the Trego sign, while the Fortine sign wound up posted at the next station to the north.  There are other stories – if you prefer them, I won’t argue.

For Trego, commercial transportation began with the Splash Dam on Fortine Creek – built around 1905, and last used in 1924.  The remains of the dam are about a mile south of Trego School, on the Dickinson place.  This photo, from 1922, gives an idea of Trego’s early history.  (Note the logs along the bank, waiting for the next flood to transport them to the mill in Eureka)

I recall my grandmother’s concerns about playing by the creek – and hadn’t realized that the final use of floods to transport the logs occurred thirty years earlier.  And that memory brought the message home that most folks who live here don’t realize just how important the dam was in settling Trego.

A dozen years after the dam was built, Trego became the site of labor unrest.  ‘Big Daddy’ Howe ran the lumber company in Eureka, and the laborers who ran the logs down Fortine Creek and the Tobacco River were unionizing – chief among their demands was a call for hot showers as part of the working requirements. 

Waseles was known as Mike Smith – and ran the crew that specialized in the twenty-mile river run that kept the mill running in Eureka.  He died without any known next-of-kin, so P.V. Klinke (assigned as executor by the county) sold his homestead (just below the dam) and bought the large tombstone you see as you drive into Fortine Cemetery.  

Their 1917 strike grew into a nationwide timber strike, and ‘Big Daddy’ Howe refined his already existing hatred of organized labor . . . specifically the International Workers of the World, the IWW.  

When Waseles died, he was under indictment for torching a logging camp, and for sabotaging the log runs by throwing all the tools he could into the pond behind the dam.  (I am still using a double bit axe whose head I recovered from Fortine Creek, and, with a new handle, a recovered cant hook now works my small mill a century after the log runs and the great strike)

Trego was typecast as a hotbed of socialist wobblies for many years by Eureka’s more prominent residents – a view that diminished rapidly with the many union jobs that came into both communities with the railroad relocation that accompanied Libby Dam in the sixties. 

By Loco Steve, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54585133

The logging dam operated for about twenty years, and was mostly gone by the time the railroad mainline bypassed both Trego and Eureka – but the sounds of the trains still are heard in Trego in the 21st Century.  And the Jake brakes of logging trucks have replaced the floods that moved the logs down Fortine Creek to the sawmills.

The Great Depression came early to Trego – while my Grandfather kept the two homesteads that he bought in 1917 and 1918, he moved his family to a small town near Spokane in 1925.  He continued to spend parts of summer and fall in Trego, pruning and harvesting Christmas trees.  The big mill in Eureka had closed, and Trego’s industry was left to small mills and tie hacks for the next 30 years.  While the automobile age was well begun in 1925, my grandfather moved to the Spokane area with his children in a covered wagon.

Next Chapter – 1925 to 1950 – active years with few records