Old Missoula

Below is a link to the Old Sawmill website:

I hesitate to tell you how much time I spent in this area while growing up in Missoula. If you included the area to the east, all the way to the University along the tracks and even about half way to E. Missoula, this area was special to me & my friends. It included walking to the river and across the river, with some others, under the Orange Street bridge, not on the bridge, but using the cross beams under it, on the way to the movies at the Fox, with a Bon Ton wrapper & 35 cents.  I caught a nice Brown trout right under the bridge once, while the dog swam for his decoy, and watched the channels change course from one year to the next where you couldn’t recognize it anymore. When I was really young suddenly it was different, so that I can’t hardly remember it. No more Indian teepees camping on a little island right under Higgins bridge. No more spitting in the river from the Wilma building. With a small group of kindred spirits we killed fish and muskrats with rocks in the ditches under the ice in the middle of the winter and skated on ice in the ditches when there wasn’t anything else to do. Skating at McCormick Park’s pond seemed to be a little too organized, but we did sometimes. Building a small fire next to the ditch warehouse earned us a trip to the police station and a visit with policemen who had a lot of questions. Somebody must have been building a little bigger fire there. Pelting hornet nests with rocks along the ditch bank wasn’t a good idea, either. Swimming at McCormick was another matter. What a blessing for a kid in the middle of a hot summer! One of my brothers was a lifeguard, me trying to swim off his back. Finally I would spend a whole day there, even while getting showered with ash from the teepee burner right over the Bitterroot tracks at the saw mill. Skirting the hobo camp next to the tracks on the way to the river was interesting even though I saw them getting harassed by kids who didn’t know any better. Some of these men made it all the way to my mother’s back door for sandwiches – how they knew this I can’t say. It included catching pigeons at night under the Bitterroot railroad bridge. Shine a light at them and they wouldn’t even move. Or fooling around the sugar beet trains as they dawdled along. Easy to hop on them. Sure enough, we left stuff on the tracks just to see what it looked like later. There was no trail or ball park there until a long time later. The city dumped snow, dirt, busted up asphalt and concrete, and other refuse where the skate board park now sits. What a change from one extremity to the next. I could hear the saws and shift whistles from the mill in the middle of the night and thought  that place doesn’t stop. It is always driving on whether you’re asleep or not. We could sit on the railroad tracks and watch them unload log trucks at the mill. A heavy smell here, diesel smoke, burning wood, grease and sawdust. Men in a hurry. A log pond sat right over the tracks. Messing around the hoist would get you yelled at in short order. Barrels and rusted outs boilers still laying around where Hart oil used to be. Ram field now. Who was he and how in the world did he arrive in Missoula, this man who invented tractors. Wickstrom’s store just off the tracks to the west on California street. A friend worked there. Knowles mansion on 1st street gone before I came along, but one of my brothers picked flowers there. You could walk out to the University, go right onto the campus, and walk in main hall if you liked and nobody bothered about it. There used to be a real museum there that had a mummified Indian child. Surely they were watching but it didn’t seem like it. Was it always that way. Norman Macleod said he was doing the same thing 40 years before that, boldly through the main hall. Not anymore, I’m sure. Or walk up the mountain using the cliffs, where I didn’t belong. Not fearless like some others.  For many it always involved a BB gun & lord they raised havoc. Not me, of course. An old abandoned house on River Street and we were picking through bins that held samples of ore and rocks that were put there for a reason. Interesting rocks from who knows where, he must have been a miner or a geologist. I can’t say who the owner was or why he left them, but they were from another time.

http://oldsawmilldistrict.com/news/