Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Author: michaelmccurry

  • Watching the Protests

    Most of the protests I see are in Whitefish. Sometimes I drive by protests at Eureka’s historical village – but those are relatively infrequent, of short duration, and generally, I know they happened because I see photographs and comments on Facebook. Facebook provides an improvement over the sixties – where you can look to see who is protesting in the security of your living room, instead of attending and being dragged into a counterprotest.

    I still recall the counterprotest at a Viet Nam protest – most of the protesters were walking down the street (and inexperienced) while trying to chant in unison “Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” Some of the ‘heys’ ran into the ‘J’s – I recall thinking that some of our schools must not have taught how to sing rounds. And through it all, an old woman (probably younger than I am now, and less than 5 feet tall) was hopping up and down chanting “You’re all cowards.”

    When I drive through Whitefish, I occasionally encounter abortion protests in front of (what I assume is) a clinic. Sometimes the car in front of me, or the car I am meeting, responds with horn blasts and flipping the protestors off. Sometimes the protestors get friendly waves. Often, a single female stands quietly across the street.

    Once, returning home from Kalispell, I saw a demonstration outside the Border Troll offices – people dressed casually, with a sign that I read as “Free Beer.” Remember, I was driving, so misreading the sign is more understandable – as I got closer, I realized that two letters were obscured by a light pole, and that the sign actually read “Free Beaker.” I have no idea why Beaker needed freedom, nor why Beaker was incarcerated.

    On the other hand, free beer might be a way to attract more participants at protests.

  • Trego History – The Middle Years 1926 – 1945

    The Depression came early to northwest Montana – including Eureka and Trego. This section of Trego’s history is fragmented – while I met and knew people who had the information, I was young and not inclined to write the histories their stories covered. This section is important – but I am hoping that other people will provide more details.

    Again, Trego’s history is a story not of great men, but of social trends. Basically, the Great Depression hit Trego and Eureka early – when the big mill in Eureka shut down. Instead of a major employer driving logs down Fortine Creek, stacks of hewn ties, and ties milled by small mills, began to stack up near the railroad sidings – instead of the single large employer, it was individual entrepreneurs, often owning only a double-bit, a broad axe and a crosscut saw. By 1931, small sawmills had pretty well replaced these low investment entrepreneurs.

    Wylie Osler explained the tie shack as housing – the switch ties (longer) went to the back wall, while regular length ties went for the sides and the front, leaving enough space for a door. Stories told of tie hacks who could turn out a hundred ties in a day – a 7 inches per tie, a dozen ties could stack up and make a seven foot wall, so a day’s work would produce a crude cabin that could be disassembled and sold when the tie hack moved out. Unfortunately, I didn’t make notes of what those older neighbors said when I was a kid. I remember mention of the Pinto Swede – but not what his accomplishments were. The name “Wobbly” Johnson tells its own story about membership and believing in the Union – the Industrial Workers of the World.

    The sawmill camps had standardized bunk houses and cook shacks – we still have a couple stashed close to the old service station (it was 1966 construction, but the logging camp buildings were of a previous era). The camp numbers and names remain attached to locations that were once remote. Today, the best examples of the buildings associated with logging camps are sold to go with model railroads.

    There’s a shift in the population that began in the mid-1930’s. The influx came from the prairies, several families from the area around Great Falls. The post-World War II influx came in from 1945 to the early sixties. Octav Fortin’s family (direct line and collaterals) gradually diminished – I recall two Fortine girls and a boy in Trego school in 1960, but by 1963 (when I graduated 8th grade, the name Fortin(e) was gone.

    Those middle years showed School District 53 responding to the needs of the community in an unusual manner. Homes and stump ranches stretched up the creek, and the roads were mostly dirt. During this time, District 53 included a school at Stryker, an Edna Creek School, and a Swamp Creek School, along with Trego School. Before electrification (1948) it was more effective to build a one-room school than run the long bus routes of our modern era.

    Stryker was accessible by road, and had a railroad crew working there (still does, but the priorities have changed). The railroad employment, school, and Post Office kept the small town in the loop. (Stryker school closed in the late 1950’s, Edna Creek school after the end of World War II) The record is incomplete here because Trego School burned – and was replaced, complete with electricity, running water, and flush toilets after Lincoln Electric brought power in.

    Any information that can fill the missing spaces between 1925 and 1950 will be appreciated.

    Next Chapter: Electricity, Modernity, and a Boomtown Again

  • Long Time Problem Area

    I was sent to Sunday School as a small boy. I’m fairly certain my parents believed it was part of a process to civilize the young – but at the other end of life, as an old man, I’m realizing that it taught me about areas that have been filled with strife and conflict since the dawning of civilization. In general, my Sunday School lessons showed that the mid-east is an area with a long record of strife, war and conflict.

    Gaza, as I recall, was the place where Samson went to see a girl, and left town ad midnight, taking the gates to the city with him. At age seven, I wasn’t real sure what he was doing with the girl, but I was definitely old enough to realize that he was violating the code of the west: leave all gates as you find them. It’s downright un-neighborly to haul a guy’s gates – and gateposts- to the top of the next hill. I could understand how Samson had PO’d the town elders.

    Later in the Samson story, I learned how the guy got a haircut, was weakened, and the local constabulary gouged out his eyes. It left me cautious about haircuts for years, and thinking that some folks just don’t have any sense of humor about people who mess with their gates. At 75, I’m not sure that Sunday School was intended to teach me to leave all gates as you found them.

    On the other hand, there was the way the Israelites were treated in Egypt. The story didn’t totally make sense. When I hashed my way through it, and figured it out, I came up with the idea that the Israelites came down on irrigated cropland with their sheep and goats, and that the Egyptians’ courts sentenced them to labor to make up for the damages the sheep did to the wheat fields. That still makes sense to me.

    There was a bit of a problem in keeping tribes straight as a little heathen in Sunday School – I didn’t know any Philistines – but I knew quite a few Filipinos. Tough little bastards. I came out of that lesson knowing that Samson had kicked ass on 10,000 Filipinos. Probably not the intended lesson – particularly since I liked the Filipinos I knew.

    So I’ve never been surprised by wars and atrocities in the mid-east. And I don’t expect any of the players to wear white hats. The record they showed me in Sunday School suggests that staying out of the middle east, and making a specific effort to avoid Gaza, makes for a healthier, happier life.

  • When Pig Barns Were Exploding

    About a dozen years ago – just as I was starting to look into retiring – hog production facilities in Minnesota began blowing up. I had moved from Extension to the department, so it wasn’t really my topic – but it was interesting. The first correlation I heard was the change in feed – from the total grain to dried distiller’s grains. Folks were looking for an explanation, for the Pig Bang Theory. Some of the explosions killed 1500 pigs in a single incident. It was pretty easy to figure out what was exploding – something in the hog wastes was creating natural gas and hydrogen sulfide. But it was a problem.

    The Smithsonian covered the topic ((https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/mysterious-exploding-foam-is-bursting-barns-124424083/ ) back in 2012. “Why these explosions happen is well understood. As manure ferments, it releases methane gas, which bubbles to the surface of the pit. Normally this methane doesn’t pose a risk. The gas seeps out of the pit, and the barn’s ventilation fans carry it away. But when thick, gelatinous foam covers a manure lagoon, the methane can’t rise. The foam acts like a sponge, Jacobsen says, soaking up the gas. Jacobsen and his colleagues have collected foam samples that are 60 percent methane by volume. When a farmer disturbs the foam by agitating the manure or emptying the pit, the methane gets released all at once. In barns without adequate ventilation, the concentration of methane can quickly reach the explosive range, between 5 percent and 15 percent. A spark from a fan motor or a burning cigarette can ignite the gas. An explosion in southeastern Minnesota raised a barn roof several feet in the air and blew the hog farmer, who was on his way out, 30 or 40 feet from the door.”

    Nautilus (https://nautil.us/the-curious-case-of-the-exploding-pig-farms-234669/ ) explained the solution: “With no known cause for foaming manure, there’s no going at the root of the problem. The best short-term solution farmers have come up is antibiotics. Rumensin 90, an antibiotic normally used to prevent bloating in cattle, has been repurposed to prevent gas in pig manure pits. It works, though no one knows why. Scientists have hypothesized that shifts in the microbial community—either from DDGS feeding or from another cause—may have a role in foaming manure as well.”

    So near as I could understand it, the shift to feeding dried distillers grains created a situation where the natural gas could build up, and adding the equivalent of cow tums to the ration stopped the explosions (or I moved further from Minnesota, Iowa and swine production and quit hearing about it).

  • And a Few More Charts

  • a few more graphs