Trego's Mountain Ear

If I were forced to set a date for the end of Trego’s boomtown years, it would be somewhere around 1970 or 71. First the tunnel was completed, then Koocanusa filled and the rails that had once connected the county along the Kootenai were picked up. The last construction project finished was highway 37, connecting Libby and Eureka. As the reservoir began filling, 37’s completion was less essential because there was a paved Forest Service road on the west side of the Kootenai – or Koocanusa. The boom ended with many of the construction boom workers moving north for jobs along the Alaska pipeline, and others becoming locals. Mike Brandon married Peggy Hilliker, went to work with a chainsaw in the woods, and became as much (or more) a part of Trego as any of his neighbors. Sam Chaney married Keith Calvert’s daughter, and lives his life on what remains of the Calvert ranch after the rails took so much away. But as the construction boom ended, Trego, like the rest of Lincoln County was left with a housing surplus. Through the seventies, the cheap housing of Trego, indeed all of Lincoln County, along with rapid population growth beginning in the Seattle area, was pressed into a new group of people.

Anthropologists use the German term “volkswanderung” to describe the movement of groups across Europe during the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Those wandering groups were barbarian tribes who found a better, possibly easier life in declining Rome. Our ‘volkswanderung’, again comes with social change – rapid population growth in northwest Washington state, accompanied by rising land values and rents, followed by the migrations – in this case, gradually and eventually to Lincoln County. Unlike Europe’s ‘volkswandurung’, ours had a physical end to it – the Canadian line and Glacier Park meant that people couldn’t move further in search of cheaper living.

To be fair, not every newcomer was a hippy – some were straight as they could be. But low cost rentals drew in the hippie lifestyle, and they were a bit more distinctive. Some of these new residents more closely resembled the classic ‘remittance man’ of the old west. (Wikipedia gives a description: “the “Remittance man” is defined in The Canadian Encyclopedia as “a term once widely used, especially in the West before WWI, for an immigrant living in Canada on funds remitted by his family in England, usually to ensure that he would not return home and become a source of embarrassment.” ) Relatively inexpensive land, often off-grid, provided a spot where families could set up the modern remittance man. Others made use of government support programs until 1996, when the Welfare Reform Act changed the game. Still others – probably more common – found places to buy and work on the local economy, little different than their neighbors with a possible exception of being a bit more likely to use ‘illicit chemicals’.

Following Lincoln Electric’s member revolt in 1988, powerlines were extended up Edna Creek, resulting in fewer off-grid homes. While Lincoln Electric Cooperative’s return to expanding electric power was short-lived and incomplete, the Interbel telephone cooperative took expansion of telephone and internet services as part of their mission, and many homes that are otherwise off-grid are served by fiberoptic lines and have full modern communications.

This is the time when Edna Creek and Butcher Creek lands were sub-divided, mostly into parcels that could be described as a portion of a section and sold without a survey. While fuel cell technology has not provided an acceptable alternative for these off-grid residences, solar panels have created a power source that has moved the off-grid homes and residences far beyond the typical home of 1945. Likewise, the portable gas and propane generators have improved the quality of life off-grid.

This is the time when a single individual affected Trego’s composition – for most of the 20th Century, Trego’s growth and development was an outgrowth of national trends – in the late seventies and through the eighties, Al Luciano’s Land Store sold and financed parcels of land – particularly raw land around Butcher Creek.

After the Great Timber Strike of 1917, Trego spent nearly a half-century regarded as a place filled with socialists and IWW supporting unionists (despite the fact that our only self-identified socialist was raising sheep). Butcher Creek has merely became the part of Trego that continues that external perspective – in a smaller area (or at least my conversation with a Whitefish resident suggests that to me).

If I had to set a time when Trego’s Hippie Years began to end, I’d pick the middle of the 1990’s.