I see that the phrase ‘undocumented’ is going out of fashion – and illegal alien is going back in. I suppose it’s like Shakespeare wrote about what’s in a word – if we accept the changed word, we accept a different reality.
One of the words I understand is ‘mojado’. It’s a Spanish word that translates simply to ‘wet’. Always seemed a bit more polite than ‘wetback’ – it shows something when you insult someone in his own language. But I should get back to the topic – I have a US passport. I think that’s close to the highest quality of documentation one can have – though mine needs a new replacement before next year. My drivers license is of lesser quality – it specifically says “not for federal identification.” Still, it tells folks that the state of Montana trusts me to drive a car on public roads, and no traffic cop will put that same faith in my passport. A bill from Lincoln Electric, showing my street address, can be a supplement to either the drivers license or the passport. A voter ID card is another supplement.
Citizens or not, we all have documentation. It’s just that some documentation is better than others. Time was when my drivers license could have a post office box number – but that wasn’t good enough to buy a pistol. It had to have a street address. I think that’s because we have a bunch of people who can’t figure out the rectangular coordinate system that has been federal law since 1785 – yes, that system was before the constitution. Still, that day I didn’t have good enough quality identification to buy a pistol. The folks at Cabelas insisted that my ID had to include a street address.
I met a hitchhiker who was undocumented and homeless – he explained that his wallet was stolen in Oregon and, since he had no address, he was traveling to Vermont, to get a copy of his birth certificate and begin the process of recovering his papers.
Still, generally speaking, there are very few who are undocumented. There are many who lack the quality of documentation they need.
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
Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 covers two things – the Census and apportionment of representatives in Congress. Here it is:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.
The last sentence doesn’t count anymore. The critical terms are that the “respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons,” “and within ten years.” It doesn’t say citizens. On the other hand, we quit excluding “Indians not taxed” back in 1924. We quit counting slaves as 6/10ths back in the 1870 Census. https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-citizenship-status/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D will take you to the individual states populations listed by citizenship.
Six or seven percent of US residents are not US citizens – but the number varies by state. Over 99 % of Montana residents are citizens. Almost 95% of Californians are citizens. The average congressional district has about 761,000 people (2020 Census) – Montana’s population in 2020 was 1,137,233 and we have 2 congress critters. Basically, we don’t have any complaints about being underrepresented this time around. Before the 2020 Census, we only had one congresscritter – and were extremely underrepresented.
So there are a couple questions about Trump ordering another census. The Enumeration clause says “within 10 years.” I suspect that five out of nine Supreme Court Justices will agree that 6 years is within 10 years. (I won’t guarantee that they will agree with me, but they should) Then there’s the question of whether illegal aliens should be counted. That’s going to be one for the courts – but if a guy can’t be there legally, I can’t see why he should be counted as a resident.
By choice, I’d see congressional seats apportioned by number of citizens – but that isn’t how our founding fathers wrote the Constitution.
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.
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
I was reading an article that described several reasons why the government doesn’t work. It was a generalized article, and as I thought of the additional challenges our three county commissioners have – beginning with the geographic challenges – I realized that it was time to develop a few articles that explain the challenges to good government that our county faces.
It isn’t that we have bad county commissioners – as I was retiring from SDSU and moving back home, Lincoln County had one of those rare elections for commissioner . . . one with two good candidates, Mike Cole and Steve Curtiss. Mike won – but whichever way the vote had gone, the county would have had a good commissioner. After a single term, Mike Cole lost his bid for reelection to Josh Lecher. This year, after a single term, Josh lost the primary to Noel Durum. And whether he does a good job or a poor one, Noel is unlikely to win reelection at the end of his first term.
To understand why Lincoln County’s government doesn’t work well requires a bit of study. I’m going to start in 1909, when Lincoln County was carved out of Flathead. Things started with a good, logical base. The problem in function came 60 years later, with a change in geography.
Lincoln County was created to duplicate the Kootenai’s drainage – and along with that, the county was connected by the railroad. In 1909, the county towns (excepting Yaak and Sylvanite) were connected by the railroad. A slow train, stopping at each station, connected what had been isolated communities. It wasn’t a bad idea.
Sixty years later, the gates at Libby Dam closed, and Ural, Warland, Rexford and Gateway were flooded. The railroad was relocated to a spot where it runs through Stryker, Libby and Troy, stopping only at Libby. Still, the railroad served as central to the county for a short time – but the link was the ranches and towns along the Kootenai. When Libby Dam was complete and Koocanusa filled, the commercial link between north county and south county was severed. J. Neils had linked lumber workers from Libby through Rexford for 60 years – but the Dam ended the railroad, the social linkages and the commercial timber connections.
For the past half-century, Lincoln County has been disconnected, with a nearly unpopulated area that exists from Jennings Rapids to the mouth of Pinkham Creek – connected by the lonely highway 37.
Next issue – why our elected county government lacks control over our hired bureaucracy.
Since it’s that time of the year again- it also seems time to revisit what we’ve said about the origins of the word.
Origins of the Word Rendezvous
One of the reasons that English is described as difficult to learn is the number of words- over 170,000! Of those, the majority are loan-words, words taken from other languages.
The word Rendezvous is one such word. It was appropriated from the French, around 1600 (during a brief period in which Britain and France were not at war- as a result of competition with Spain). The original usage appears to be a verb: rendez vous meaning present yourselves. This then becomes the noun describing the place of meeting we are accustomed to.
English has borrowed from different languages at different times. At the time Rendezvous joined the English vocabulary, a significant number of the new words were coming from French.
About two centuries after Rendezvous was appropriated from the French, William Ashley held the first trappers’ Rendezvous. These lasted for only fifteen years. Some of them were so large as to create temporary towns. Other gatherings in the same time period are occasionally given the same name. Our local Rendezvous has outlasted the original.
Trego's Mountain Ear 