Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: nature

  • Trego – The Years of Change

    1960 is the time when I can start to describe details of Trego’s history – the people and the technology. Off and on, from 1960, I was there to see it. On our trip moving up, I was expected to direct Mom to the place – but what is now Ant Flat Road was new, and the exit had changed. We drove to Dickey Lake and then followed that road (still the same).

    The Peters family moved to Trego around 1955 – and Mary Louise still lives on their ranch 70 years later. She’s been here for most of Trego’s history. In 1960, Trego was basically a strip, running up Fortine Creek, with places running up other creeks.

    Technology was changing. While Jack Cheevers drove a 4×4 Jeep pickup, and Edgar Nelson had a 1953 Dodge Power W2agon, Frank Davidow drove the community’s first modern four-wheel drive – a pale blue Ford pickup Virgil Newton and Alfred McCully opted for Volkswagen Beetles. Electricity had arrived in time for the fifties – and television, in the form of a repeater on the mountainside, brought 2 channels to Trego. It was some sort of cooperative venture. Then the early sixties brought in telephones – first in party lines, followed quickly by single lines.

    A glimpse of the people that affected the community in the mid-sixties – the school board members who brought in the new school were Yolanda Nordahl, O.V. McCurry and Earl Meier – Yolanda Vizzutti’s marriage to Paul Nordahl was arranged by her father. Earl Meier was, so far as I know, the last Trego Valedictorian at LCHS. O.V. McCurry, like Jack Peters, Jack Price and Robert Openshaw were World War II veterans looking for their farms. Jack Cheevers, a few miles up the creek, ran sheep and was the community’s sole socialist (maintaining a connection with the early IWW unionists. Leona Ritter, the school clerk, was married to Walt Ritter, stepson of Octav Fortin, the last link to the original rancher. Again, relatively typical people dealing with social change to keep it from overwhelming their community.

    Again, outside forces brought change to Trego and most of Lincoln County. Libby Dam removed forever the Kootenai River communities. Trego grew, practically overnight, with over 200 trailer homes added to house the folks working on the tunnel.

    The railroad relocation changed Trego utterly – most of the small ranches were cut by the new rails, and reduced cattle numbers left what were once marginal commercial ranches down to a handful of cattle. The entire strip of land along Fortine Creek now hears the sound of the freights, the whistles at each crossing – and new, smaller places across the tracks provided more places to live. Fortine Creek Road went from gravel to paved. The school board, anticipating the population impact got another acre from the Opelt family and saw a new, federally funded school go in. Kenny Gwynn built a service station, and Howard Mee operated it. Keith Calvert went for a tavern at the Westwood Acres trailer court. The post office went from being a small, contract post office in the Trego Mercantile to getting it’s own postmaster. The Ranger Station moved to Murphy Lake, and Ant Flat, after 60 years, took a secondary Forest Service role. The mid-sixties changed Trego.

    Unlike the rest of the county Trego became closer to the county seat – a paved road over Elk Mountain, following the new railroad down Wolf Creek, then through the lower stretches of Fisher River brought Libby 8closer. Filling Lake Koocanusa, eliminating the small towns along the Kootenai, effectively left Eureka more isolated from the county seat. That change would affect how the county operates over the next half-century.

    Next: The Hippy Years

  • Watching Predators and Prey

    Off and on, I’ve been watching the interplay between predator and prey on this place for 65 year. In 1960, and through the mid-seventies, the hay field had a serious gopher (Columbia Ground Squirrel) population. A lot of the farm activities fell in my realm as I entered the teenage years – I recall poisoning the critters, first with strychnine, then with compound 1080. My most memorable year was the year when I caught a badger in a gopher trap. I saw she was a lactating female, worked the trap loose, cleaned all the traps from the field, and was surprised as hell the next day when she showed up to hunt gophers with me. The partnership lasted maybe six weeks – but is a memory to revisit – she had decided that gopher hunting could be a lot more successful when I assisted with the 22.

    Thirty years later – around 2000 – the gopher population dropped. With less grazing on the field, natural predators – a few weasels – were driving the gophers out. Apparently the gophers were more vulnerable to weasel predation than the voles were. Sam and I shot few ground squirrels in 2004 and 2005 when we visited my parents – the weasels controlled the population well over about 15 acres.

    By 2008, a feral cat population began growing in the trailer court a quarte-mile away. By 2017, I saw my last little weasel – feral cats were now the predator, controlling weasels, ground squirrels, and voles.

    So now, cats – whether feral or housecat – have became the prey species. When we built the house, we had a resident pair of coyotes that caused us no problems. They’re gone now – hopefully painlessly after living lives that caused us no problems. With the resident coyotes gone, three packs are edging into our place – the game cameras show one pack from the west, one from the north, and a third from the southeast. One pack has coyotes that specialize in hunting cats – the game cameras have shown coyotes walking down the trail with a cat in the mouth.

    Over time predators and prey roles can change. But you have to live quite a long life attached to the same piece of ground to notice it.

  • Climate Change and Screwworms

    The United States eradicated the New World Screwworm back when I was in high school. I’m reading about a guy in Maryland diagnosed with screwworm infection – but he had been in Honduras before the diagnosis. According to Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flesh-eating-screwworm-parasites-are-headed-to-the-u-s/ “The pest is marching northward at an alarming rate and has now moved some 1,400 miles from southern Panama to southern Mexico in about two years. Screwworms are disastrous for ranchers, whose cattle can become infected when the flies lay eggs in cuts or wounds, after which their resulting larvae burrow, or screw, into that flesh. The northernmost sighting is currently about 700 miles south of the U.S. border. ” For years, the NW Screwworm has been controlled by releasing batches of sterile male flies into the Darien Gap region – but that technique and location is no longer adequate. “That invisible wall holding the screwworm back has crumbled, however. “I don’t know how it got away so quickly,” says Maxwell Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, who studies genetic methods to control populations of the fly. “There had to be some movement of infested livestock, particularly through the middle [of Central America]…. It just moved too fast,” Scott says about the swift speed of the screwworm spread. “

    I’m not particularly concerned about screwworms, since I live just below the 49th Parallel – but this old map does a fairly nice job of showing where the damned things could overwinter in 1952 – and the line correlates with a combination of altitude and latitude. In other words, our dates of first and last frosts may also show where the screwworm can overwinter.

    Pesky Little Critters https://peskylittlecritters.com/how-climate-change-influences-the-distribution-of-screwworm-flies/ concludes their article with “Climate change is reshaping ecosystems worldwide—including those influencing pest species like screwworm flies. Through rising temperatures, shifting humidity patterns, altered host distributions, and more frequent extreme weather events, the range and population dynamics of screwworms are changing.”

    It’s not a huge drama – but it is interesting that the actual effects of global warming may first be measurable in insect ranges.

  • Mowing Hay

    I stopped mowing when a young hound decided to come close and check out the operation. A comment from Renata made me realize that most folks haven’t mowed hay, and haven’t seen, first hand, the danger a mower is to small animals. Then I thought of the differences in mowers, and what makes the old sickle bar mower more dangerous to small animals.

    Add the tall grass and alfalfa to this photograph, and it becomes obvious how the cutting blade is hidden from small animals – and many of us who have used one have had the experience of hitting a fawn with it. It’s less common to get a dog’s foot – but it can happen.

    I’m using a drum mower – and I suspect it’s a bit safer than the old sickle bar mower, but I’m not sure, and I’d much prefer to stop and waste a few moments than hurt a dog. Here’s what a drum mower looks like:

    The cutting takes place by 3 small blades that rotate quickly with the drum. It’s probably as dangerous to small animals – but the drums rotate quickly and are loud. The sound, added to the height of the mower, makes it a lot easier to see. Mine, has 2 drums, and covers only 4 feet to the right of my tractor – sickle bar mowers usually run 7 feet, and I’ve used 9 foot mowers – far harder to see into the tall grass and alfalfa we mow.

    I think it’s a good year when all the fawns get away. As an old man, I now watch for turkeys – small animals that weren’t there when I first mowed hay. So I got to meet a nice little hound as I mowed hay, and took a break to minimize the danger. I think the noise and the profile of the machine already minimize the risk – but coming to a complete stop until the little dog found something more interesting was in her best interest, and mine.

  • Trego’s History Is Twentieth Century

    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

  • A Rough Year for Fawns – and Skunks

    The first two fawns we saw this Spring were in the mouths of coyotes on the game cameras. It’s a data point, not necessarily proving any trend – but it does support my hypothesis. Coyote predation has changed – and here’s the story as I see it.

    For several years, we had a pack of two elderly coyotes on the hill. He was buff – several times I had folks who glimpsed him tell me of a wolf. I had better views – for some reason of his own, watching me on the tractor was a worthwhile activity for him. I don’t know why -with his deep chest there may have been a little bit of dog in his genetics. Makes no difference – he knew he coexisted with humans, and left the house and my little dogs alone.

    His consort was missing an eye – the sort of thing it takes a lot of observation and trail camera time to observe. When they hunted, he was invariably to her left. If she did any tractor watching, she picked better concealment than he.

    I don’t know what took out the old coyotes – it could have been someone with a rifle, but it is probably just as likely that it was old age. If he went first, the wild life would have had no place for her disability. For whatever reason, my small pack of neighborhood coyotes is gone.

    In the absence of a resident pack, the trail cameras show that we now are included in the overlapping ranges of 3 larger packs – one group comes from the north, a second from the southeast, and the third from the west. Where we once had a pair of coyotes making a living full-time, we now have over a dozen hunting on the edges of their expanded ranges.

    The prey species has changed – the trail cameras show that the new packs have all focused on feral cats. Non-ferals, too – we don’t know how Cream disappeared, but circumstantial evidence points to the west coyote pack. And the population of feral cats living in downtown Trego is declining on the trail camera. I don’t know which pack has developed a taste for skunks, but fewer skunks are showing up on the cameras (I can’t believe we would have three packs of skunk-eaters.) I suppose that reducing the skunk and feral cat populations does help keep the area free of rabies.

    I kind of miss the old pair of coyotes that coexisted well with us – on the other hand, an uncontrolled population of feral cats pretty much calls for something to start preying on them. Studies in Chicago show that coyotes keep cat populations confined to residential areas.