Trego began in 1904. There was a dam being built about a mile upstream from today’s bridge across Fortine Creek (then it was still Edna Creek – one day I’d like to learn more about Edna). The route where a railroad could be squeezed between the Stillwater and the Point of Rocks had been discovered, and the first railroad relocation – which would create Stryker and Trego – was coming. It was all part of Flathead County at that time.
Timber was the industry that would support Trego – crossties could be hewed with a broadaxe. Trees were cut with axe and crosscut. Despite the story’s popularity, the town was not named for the Swede loggers inability to yell ‘Timber’. Trego, Wisconsin is still a stop on the Northwest Great Northern line. Trego (county) Kansas, was named after Edgar Trego, a former Union officer who settled there. The most credible story for Trego’s naming is that a Great Northern employee wrote it on the map to improve his relationship with his girlfriend’s father. Sorry if that isn’t as entertaining the story about Swede loggers yelling “Tree Go” because they couldn’t remember the word ‘Timber.’ (saw that story repeated at least a dozen times when a dead grizzly became newsworthy on the Internet). Personally, the true story sounds a bit more romantic. As an aside, Fortine was named after Phillipi Fortin who homesteaded land close to Jerry’s par 3 golf course. Fortine replaced the earlier Harrisburg.
For years, the crosscut saw was the mainstay of logging. In the fifties, it began to be replaced by the chainsaw. The dam on Fortine Creek (pretty sure the creek was renamed after Octav, not Phillipi) transported logs to the sawmill in Eureka for about twenty years, and was replaced by trucks.
After Eureka’s big mill shut down (the depression came earlier to the Tobacco Valley than the rest of the nation), the broadaxe and small tie mills loaded ties directly onto flat cars. At the same time, J. Neils was railroad logging in the Kootenai valley upstream from Libby. (This is kind of personal for me – we have one of the old railroad logging bunkhouses and the old cookshack by the old Trego Service building that we’re getting back into shape. The logging buildings’ restoration will follow that completion.)
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