Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: travel

  • The Lady Wore Mink (or remodeling the gas station)

    As I unloaded material into the old service station, I had a visitor. A lady wearing a mink jacket – interested in what we’re doing there. I have a soft spot for ladies wearing mink, and it isn’t a common apparel in scenic downtown Trego, so I showed a bit of the unfinished project.

    Part of the deal with furs was my aunt Fay. Over half a century ago, she had examined yard sales and thrift stores for large women’s fur coats – which she would disassemble, and rebuild into vests for me. Afterall, it was the sixties. Later, after Renata and I married, I offered to get her a mink coat kit. She was less than impressed by a singe trap and a small skinning knife. The morning I drove to work and spotted a roadkill winter mink, I didn’t dare call her and ask her to pick it up for me. Sometimes discretion truly is valor’s better part.

    But back to the shop. We are remodeling it. The first step was replacing the leaking corrugated roofing – you can’t remodel when the roof leaks. The next stage is fixing the ceiling damage, and moving the stuff that has been stored there out of the way. I’ve built a 20 unit storage building, and one of those units is going to be full of stuff that is in the way when I work on remodeling. It’s easier to move boxes than to make a permanent decision about things we haven’t used in ten years.

    The service station was built to serve the population involved in building the tunnel. After that population changed, Retha McCully got the idea of changing it to a Convenience Store. When she died, Dad kept the store going – and took out the parts that made it a garage. I’m not remodeling the building for my ideas – at 75, my task is to remodel it into a building that fits with my daughter’s ideas. Today we brought a mini-split on line. Tomorrow, we bring back the wall that separated the gas and oil from the barber shop when it was built. By the time we finish, the building will include spaces for four small businesses.

    Then comes the other tasks – the southernmost building (that Dad put alongside the gas station) was originally a logging camp cook shack. If it can be restored, it will be moved another 20 feet south and be back looking like it did when it was part of a logging camp. The northernmost building was a logging camp bunkhouse. There is too much community history in those two logging camp buildings. The old service station is from the boom town days of the middle and late sixties, while those two portable buildings are from the logging camp days – two distinct times in Trego’s history.

    The center building looks like an old log building – but isn’t. Back when the railroad was relocated, and Libby Dam was built, a guy named Goldsberry bid in the task of salvaging railroad material from the area that was soon to be flooded. He figured that the cedar telegraph poles (installed in 1904) would still have value – but by 1970, they had spent their effective lifespans as telegraph poles. While the telegraph was high tech in 1904, by 1970 it was ho-hum. In the eighties, Dad set up a small mill and had Pat Eustace mill the telegraph poles and turn them into a small building – representing, in its own way, the first railroad relocation and Trego’s first initial boom. The first part of the remodel was taking off the handcrafted doors – unique, but so heavy that opening and closing them damaged the structure.

    As the new walls go up, it gets easier to see what’s coming in with the remodeling. You don’t need to wear a mink jacket to come by and see what’s going on – or to figure out if your dream business might fit into the old service station and downtown Trego’s future.

  • Chesterton’s Fence

    As I move toward my 76th year, I have a fence to remove – mostly because I’m the last one left who knows why it was built about sixty years ago. It still has the original barbed wire, all the wooden posts have been replaced, and it’s not in a place where a fence should be.

    https://theknowledge.io/chestertons-fence-explained/ tells of Chesterton’s paradox on fences: “He once wrote: “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

    In other words, don’t be so quick to tear down things you don’t understand. That fence may have been put up for a very good reason, even if that reason is not immediately obvious. To ignore that reality risks unintended and potentially negative consequences.”

    That’s why I need to remove the fence. I know that it was put in when a cat skidder ran a line in to separate the ranchland from the trailer park – basically to solve a temporary problem. A problem of no more than five years duration. And if I leave it, my grandkids will be looking at Chesterton’s paradox – looking for the reason the fence was built. It’s in a spot where it’s downright inconvenient to maintain. It makes several acres of forest virtually impossible to keep thinned out and use. And, as the last person around when it was built, I owe it to the future generation to remove the dilemma. It briefly provided a solution to a small problem, was maintained to provide that solution when the problem no longer existed, and once it’s gone, the old cat line can provide a good firebreak for the next half-century.

    I don’t find any enjoyment in taking down a fence, rolling up barbed wire, pulling the metal posts and clearing things out. It’s an unpleasant task fraught with barbed wire knicks on my body. But it needs done – and Chesterton’s paradox reminds me that the work needs done in my lifetime – mostly because I know it was a bad solution installed because Walsh/Groves had a cost plus contract for the tunnel, and they made a profit whether the fence was put in a good place or a terrible one. And I don’t want the toddler to grow up and have to face Chesterton’s paradox without the necessary information.

  • Trego – The Hippie Years (and an occasional remittance man)

    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.

  • 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

  • We Have Documents of Different Quality

    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.

  • 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