Old Missoula

O’Brien Creek “City” – 1958

 

Faint Traces of O’Brien Creek ‘City’ of Half Century Ago

By John A. Forssen

The valley of O’Brien Creek, which stabs deep into the Grave Creek Range on the western edge of the Missoula Valley, is virtually uninhabited today.

Half a century ago, it contained a bustling town supported by a sawmill. It had two railroads, a narrow gauge line connecting to Hayes Spur and a standard gauge road with a Shay geared locomotive that fed logs to the mill.

Only the faintest traces of the town remain among the waving grass of the only wide spot in the O’Brien Creek Valley. And barring the way to the scene are fences which mark private property.

The foundations of the school, leveled to the ground, can be distinguished, and the broken stub of the school pump remains. Depressions in the ground along the edge of the bench show where outhouses of the town’s residences stood.

A few persons remember. John W. Cook of Seattle, who was a child in the unnamed town, wrote The Missoulian a letter giving some of the history of the place and sending the old picture reproduced on this page.

Charlie Graves, dude ranch proprietor, remembers. He was a boy there, too, and with some of his playmates just about destroyed the Shay engine as the result of some innocent fun.

Deputy Sheriff Clark Davis remembers. He was fireman and later engineer on the “dinky” engine of the narrow gauge railroad.

The town grew up with the Harper & Baird Lumber Co.[1] mill, operated by Bill Harper and Tom Baird. They first set up a mill in O’Brien Creek around 1905, about three miles west of the Maclay Ranch.

At first the logs were carried to the mill on chutes. Remains of the chutes are still visible in some of the side canyons. Logs were placed side by side and end to end with hewn faces tipped toward each other to form miles of chutes. Among the lowest grade woods workers were chute greasers, usually youths, who swabbed heavy grease on the chutes. Of a higher grade of workers were those who threw dirt on the chutes near the lower end to slow the logs enough so they wouldn’t tear down the mill on their arrival.

Later, the mill was moved to a site farther up the creek and a new system of chutes was constructed. In about 1907 the mill was moved to its final location, which became the site of the town during the eight years the mill operated there. The mill, which cut 30,000 feet of lumber a day, employed about 30 men, and another 30 worked in the woods.

The narrow gauge railroad was built by Harper and Baird to haul lumber to Hayes Spur, a siding on the Northern Pacific Railway at the site of the old Buckhouse Bridge, about a mile west of the present Buckhouse Bridge.

The distance of about five miles represented quite a trip for the dinky engine and five or six small cars of lumber, even though it was downhill out of the gulch, Davis recalled.

Getting back up with a train of supplies was even more of a problem. Davis said the engine burned lots of slab wood to make the trip and recalled that the steam pressure had to be just so.

The engine and rolling stock occasionally jumped the track but there was no need to call a wrecker. Davis said the crew would simply get a heavy timber and use it to pry the locomotive and cars back on the rails.

When the mill was moved to its final location, a standard gauge railroad was built 4 1/2 miles up the creek, with spurs up some of the hillsides, to haul the logs to the mill.

This railroad was powered by a locomotive driven by gears instead of the piston and rod arrangement which was familiar when steam locomotives were in use. The engine was built by the Shay company, the other common type of geared locomotive used in logging being built by Heisler.

Graves recalled that he and some other kids used to have fun by pushing a small handcar up the grade from the mill and then coasting back down, using a stick thrust down against the roadbed as a brake.

On one occasion, the stick broke and the car rolled free down the grade, faster and faster. One by one the boys jumped. Graves, aged about 8, was afraid to jump. Harry Cook, who was watching over young Graves, finally talked him into leaping just before the handcar hit a heavy car of rails. The car of rails was jolted into motion and it rolled down and hit the Shay engine, shoving it out onto a trestle.

Tom Baird was watching the incident from the mill and had visions of the $20,000 Shay engine being run off the end of the trestle.

But the engine was stopped by the timber bumper at the end of the trestle, and long afterward the marks of the wheel flanges showed in the bumper.

Did Baird whale the far out of the boys? He did not – he had brakes put on the handcars.

O’Brien Creek had been settled long before it had its short-lived town. Ed Hayes[2], at the age of 19, filed a claim on land in the valley and extending south in the 1860s, but he was below the required age of 21 and couldn’t hold it. Soon after the valley had one of the first sawmills in the area.

David O’Brien, for whom the area was named, was one of the early settlers, and he lived there until 1888.

Later residents included some colorful characters. Louis Vaughan, who ranched in the valley, reputedly was a Jesse James rider. He never came right out and said so, but he often told children of neighboring ranches of detailed adventures of the James gang, adding more than once that the notorious outlaw “had feet under my table.”

Graves remembers seeing him “fan” a gun. In this maneuver, used by gun fighters of the old west, the heel of the left hand was used to strike rapid blows on the hammer of the pistol held in the right hand. It was regarded as a faster way to empty a double-action revolver than by pulling the trigger.

“He did it like lightning,” Graves remembered.

Among the mill employes were Black Al Fowler, the sawyer, and Long Mac McDonald, who wrestled logs onto the saw carriage. The bull cook was Tom Sparks, who afterward was for many years elevator man at the Masonic Temple and became widely known.

Cook, whose letter reveals an amazing memory for detail, said the first school was a log structure at the foot of Haggerty Gulch, at the east end of the open portion of the valley. This was replaced in 1908 with an unpainted board school farther up the valley. The teacher there in 1910 was Miss Laura Cool, who has been Mrs. I. A. Haswell[3] of Missoula for the past 40 years.

This building was replaced in 1911 by one of planed lumber which was painted white. Cook recalled that it had a new world globe, a dictionary on a stand, four reflector style oil lamps and a new water bucket, all remarkable for the community.

Going into the real luxury class, the school board had a well dug, eliminating the trip by older boys to get buckets of water from a spring. The stub of this pump still remains among the waving grass.

Attending the school quite regularly was Zeke, a giant Great Dane, one of two pups of a dog purchased by the Cook family from an Uncle Tom’s Cabin troupe in Missoula in 1907.

Cook started school at the old Willard building in 1906 with Miss Minnie Spurgin as a teacher. Miss Fannie Robinson taught the second grade. The Cook family lived in a cottage in the orchard of the Prescott place, near the State University, and moved to O’Brien Creek in 1908. They moved back to town in 1911 after spotted fever had killed several O’Brien Creek residents.

Now, nearly half a century later, spotted fever and the unnamed town in O’Brien Creek are gone. Vaccines produced by research have ended spotted fever, and the inexorable processes of time have wiped out the once-thriving community.

 

The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian on October 5, 1958.

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