Old Missoula

Blackfoot Ranches – 1926

Prosperous Ranches, Country Homes Dot Blackfoot

Pioneering Days Still Retain Hold On People Of Long Valley

Lively Little Towns Coming Into Their Own as Railroad and Automobile Roads Bring Them in Closer Touch With Rest of World. Beautiful Lakes Abound on Whose Shores Are Attractive Summer Residences. Large Flocks of Sheep and Cattle Are Grazed.

By John Hutchens.

While the valleys which lead from Missoula may generally be said to radiate prosperity via the civilization route, there is probably no one of them other than the Blackfoot which combines that prosperity with a certain tang of the romance and the primitive as does the country which lies beyond the canyon opening at Bonner.

Nor is there any other which offers the diversity of landscape, of visual impression, at the same time that it suggests the many forms in which a degree of wealth is to be obtained out of things that grow; crops and trees and livestock. There are, it is true, what are regarded as “big outfits: The huge ranch of Paul Greenough, lying beyond Sunset hill, the 32,000 acres of Frank Nelson this side of Potomac, the 32,000-acre Kelley ranch beyond Ovando and near Helmville. But there are, too, the “little fellows”, whose places are less ostentatious, but no less suggestive of the story of the valley. Their cabins, of logs with white chinks between them, are often to be seen from the road; around them are the rail fences of pioneer days, enclosing workshops and out houses and disguising not at all the fact that the owners are in the habit of doing a deal of plain hard work, and are not at all ashamed of it.

For nine miles out of Bonner, until McNamara’s landing is reached, the auto road loafs along under the shadow of large hills to right and left, seeming to go a great deal farther than it really does, crossing the Blackfoot river and the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul tracks in bewildering fashion until it reaches the sudden pitch leading down to McNamara’s landing, three or four houses that squat under a cliff. Still in the shadows. Then, unless your car is extremely good, you go into second gear till you top the pitch on the other side . . . where you and the real Blackfoot get together.

The Valley Opens Up.

If until this point the Blackfoot has seemed to you a canyon of some mystery (and, of course, this mystery is enhanced if you drive in the shadows of the night), then the new vista, the sweep that leads to Potomac, takes your breath in quite another manner. The river, which you do not meet again until you reach the Clearwater country, is no longer at hand to force your road this way and that. It gets down to business, running on a tolerably straight line on the left side of the road, obligingly giving you a chance to take in all of the new country on your right.

This road; it has not always been thus smooth and affable. You pause a little way above McNamara’s landing at the home of Frank Nelson, rancher-legislator, and you learn why Frank’s place lies a good half mile off the road; to reach it you open and close assiduously three gates until you are at his home; eight or nine houses, mostly of logs, are scattered with apparent laziness over a small enclosure, but the location of each of them has its real reason.

There are a lot of pioneers in the Blackfoot, fellows who have seen the country grow from a place of mere promises to what it now is, and who expect to live to see it become a great deal more. They are still pioneers. They never want to be anything else.

Frank Nelson’s Ranch.

Well, Frank Nelson is one of them. He stands at his anvil, putting a sharper edge to a plowshare, and above the noise of the process, he shouts at you, “A man has to be everything now!” – as if Frank hadn’t always been able to do pretty much what was necessary on a ranch! And he tells you how, over a space of 42 years, his place has come into being; how his original homestead has developed into a ranch of 1,400 acres of pasture, and 600 acres of irrigated land – altogether, three sections and 160 acres besides. Something new learned out of experience every year. Like this: “No, this isn’t a wheat country, except back on the benches; here it’s mostly oats and hay.” This last summer he put up 600 tons of hay, he tells you, and 6,200 bushels of oats, much of the latter running 90 bushels to the acre.

His next development will be sheep and dairy cows. “The dairy game is good. I KNOW it!” There is no gainsaying his positive tone in the matter. Mrs. Nelson knows about sheep too. Forty-five orphan lambs, (i. e., deserted by their parents) he has raised, and in coming seasons there will be more of them.

Early Days.

So elsewhere in the Blackfoot does this pioneering go on. Miles farther on – 58 miles from Missoula – is Ovando, and presiding over the stove of its general store in the pre-pioneer days of October, 1885, Mr. Kilburn came, and went, and came back again to own the leading store in the town and to become a figure of real importance in the upper part of the valley. And like all old timers he is wont to talk of the days that were, but with the progressive idea that good as they may have been, there are still better ones ahead. The first logging on the Blackfoot is a favorite theme of his, in the days when “we outfitted in Missoula, shipped to Bearmouth, loaded there on two six-ox teams, and followed a trail over the hills from there to Camas Prairie (Potomac), made by one of our first settlers, Dick Richards.

“We cut a road from Camas to Fish Creek that year, built our first camps, and banked seven million feet of lumber ready to float down to Bonner in the spring at three dollars a thousand!”

On Christmas day, after an open fall, George Hammond, later a famous Montana man of wealth, and Kilburn rode to Nelson’s place “in our shirt sleeves.”

Little Snow Then.

“After New Year’s there was a little snow so that we could haul logs on sleighs, but it lasted for only six weeks. In those days we logged with ’go-devils’, making a short haul to the river. There wasn’t a bridge between Missoula and the North Fork then, nor a wagon road. Joe Young, an early settler, hauled grain to our camp over an old Indian trail, and had to ford the river four times in 20 miles to do it.

“Joe grew those oats, mowed ‘em, raked ‘em with a horse rake, threshed ‘em in a corral with horses, cleaned ‘em with a fanning mill, and delivered ‘em to us – for $2 a hundred pounds and made money doing it!”

Mr. Kilburn chuckled, “And now you will find farmers kicking about not making money by any means at all, when they made it in those days with what crude instruments they had.

“The whole Blackfoot had less than 12 families in it then. From Ovando to Sunset it was 35 miles, over public range. The ducks were not thicker then than they are today, in spite of people who say differently. The difference is that no one killed them then as they do today, and they were mighty tame. But although there were a lot more game in the valley then than now, there were no more in the hills.”

There is, then, the inkling of something not quite gone that you may still catch from the road, no matter how fast a clip you may be hitting. You can not avoid the sense of prosperity lying across the land that opens up a good six miles south of Potomac, a prosperity that comes hard, but is permanent; a prosperity which flourishes well surrounded in a beauty that emerges in the burgeoning spring and dies slowly in the haze of the fall.

“We’ve 640 acres,” says a lady who lives with her husband on a typical ranch that grew from land homesteaded in 1892. “Fifty head of cattle, and hay’s our main crop. Oats were mighty good this year, and so was the fall wheat. And our wood comes out of the hills.”

Prosperous Potomac.

On to Potomac, where all is traditionally quiet – past the Morris place that stretches from the roadside through the far meadows to the right side of the valley. Potomac, 23 miles from Missoula, retains the air of a trading post designed to serve the ranchers around it. There are two roads through it; take your choice but the one on the right leads past what is a fine bit of evidence to prove that with the beginning of almost every Montana town there is a deep desire for education that finds its culmination in the tangible form of a well-built schoolhouse. Thirty-five children attend this brick school, from Twin Creeks, below to a line five miles north, with two teachers to instruct them. In the morning a bus brings the children to school; in the evening it takes them home again. When the bus can’t make it, a sleigh does. There is no joke here about the business of education. The spirit of it came to the country when the first child did.

At the last general election there were 77 registered voters, which, of course, included those who live on the ranches nearby, and consequently not an accurate figure of the population of the town itself. Fifty-five is its approximate population, according to Bonita Hayes, the district school clerk. A well-equipped general store, hotel, laundry, and garage serve the needs of those living outside the town, besides those whose fenced meadows run to the edge of the village. Such a place is that of Mr. Hayes, which comes up from the south side like Sheridan from Winchester.

To Swanson’s Place.

“A mile beyond Potomac, and you turn down a lane to go to John Swanson’s place.” Those are the directions given you to reach the home of another Blackfoot old timer, arrived there but a scant four years after Mr. Kilburn and Mr. Nelson in the far-off, ancient days of ’85. Not quite as big as the place of the latter, Mr. Swanson’s ranch nevertheless bears the same earmarks of prosperity: A commodious white house with a little stream running past it; barns, cattle and hogs in the yard; and a sweep of country beyond.

It is a sharp indication of the diversity of the Blackfoot country that a few separating miles can change so completely the methods of two men as the miles between the ranches of Frank Nelson and John Swanson.

“This is not a wheat country,” Frank Nelson had said, at the same time implying that he didn’t bank on cattle very heavily either. But John Swanson has 250 head of beef cattle, upon which he depends largely for a living; 275 acres of irrigated land; 30 acres given over to dry farming and some 500 more besides. And on his land he raises barley, oats and wheat, besides six to seven hundred tons of hay a year.

Barley, oats, hay and a little wheat thus far. Mr. Swanson’s cattle are only an indication of what is the real standby over Sunset hill, a few miles to the north. For with that hill the topography of the country changes decidedly. The valley narrows down again. The road slips across a creek or two and commences a climb through the timber, up a slope so gentle upon its southerly side that you are not really aware that you are climbing to a point of some eminence. But it is a hill – no doubting that when you come down upon the other side, slipping swiftly through the woods toward the place of Paul Greenough, the newly installed camps of the Anaconda Copper mining company at Sunset, and a new country of broad brown hills.

The Great Greenough Ranch.

Beginning with the Greenough ranch the Blackfoot thereafter and to Ovando takes on a strange atmosphere of what the old range must have been like in the days of the “big outfits.” No more grain, garden truck, or such diversified agriculture. Where the country opens again at Sunset you will find the ranchers concerned with livestock, and positively enthusiastic about the possibilities of raising sheep.

What persons experienced and inexperienced alike in ranching operations are likely to call an ideal “outfit” is to be found on the 3,800 acres of Paul Greenough, owner of the Sunset Valley Ranch just north of Sunset hill.

Eleven buildings, including dwellings, barns, sheds and outbuildings, all stand on concrete foundations and are shingled and painted. And over his sizable holdings, which include parts of the old Martin, Boles, Clem and Griffin ranches, 350 head of range cattle are run, supplemented by “feeder” steers in the fall. A small herd of dairy cattle and 250 hogs complete his outfit of stock.

Of the 3,800 acres of the Greenough ranch, 700 are under irrigation and about 200 are devoted to dry land cultivation. The main crops are hay, timothy, clover, grain, barley, oats and wheat, of which hay and grain are used for feed. The crew working the property runs from four men in the winter to 16 in the summer.

From the Greenough ranch the road leads east and then north again until the joining of the Clearwater and Blackfoot rivers – the former coming from the lake chain of the north, the latter from the northeast.

The Big Blackfoot River.

Elsewhere in this sketch is a note on the course of that stream which starts near the headwaters of the Swan river, winds southward through five lakes and comes into its own at the foot of Salmon lake as the Clearwater river. Just as interesting is the birth of the Big Blackfoot river, which first heads along the Continental divide, twenty miles below Helmville. They proceed together until two miles below Ovando, where their volume is augmented by the north fork of the Blackfoot, which heads against the Continental divide in the Missoula forest, 25 miles northeast of Ovando. West, southwest, west, southwest, it winds on until it reaches Bonner, picking up the Clearwater at the red bridge. Seventy miles is a minimum estimate of the distance it travels, though the auto road goes only fifty between Bonner and Ovando. In spring a great volume of water, dropping 800 feet, gives the stream a mighty impetus that was once used to float down logs from the camps, a use which the new branch railway line has taken from it. It remains, however a beautiful and fantastic stream, ever changing and winding through country which alters unbelievably in its contours and appearance.

And here by the “Clearwater bridge” is a last chance at auto supplies and refreshment before going on to the lakes or to Ovando. Before you reach it, however, there must certainly catch your eye one of the most unusual country houses anywhere near Missoula. High on a hill, looking down over the Clearwater country, is the striking home of Mr. and Mrs. O. W. Potter of Chicago, built originally for a sporting club of Great Falls, and now famed as a home of beauty and extraordinary hospitality with woods and farmland back of it that are invisible from the road.

The Harper Ranch.

But not far beyond the red bridge that spans the Clearwater is a ranch whose size and name call for at least a mental reversion to the bygone days. The sign on the gate at the corner where the road turns eastward across the flat toward Ovando says “Harper’s V O Ranch. There is a bar between the V and O, impossible to suggest typographically, but nevertheless there and western, too. The owner, Howard Harper, formerly of Missoula, is to be found at the ranch house, nowhere in sight from this point in the road, but lying a good half mile through the trees and over a hill.

The 28 miles of fence that enclose 3,800 acres of land, of which 3,500 are pasture land, spell the charm and profit of the livestock industry in property running far back into the hills. Hills with timber towering over them in many places, and famous Montana bunch grass growing elsewhere make Mr. Harper say with some pride, “It’s called one of the best pasture ranches in the country,” at the same time granting that there is not much raised in crops on his land, and no grain for the market. But sheep! They were brought in some time after the Harper cattle were sold in the slump years around 1920 and, the owner says, are going to pay him more than satisfactorily. “The money in the sheep business is in the quick turn-over,” he states, indicating that money is to be made two ways: from their meat and wool, and their quicker and more plentiful reproduction. Somewhat different from the ranches on the south side of the Sunset hill, whose present owners have generally been there since their ranches were founded, the Harper ranch has come through three generations to its present owner, who prepared for his vocation by a specialized course at the state agricultural college. Forty or forty-five years ago it was marked out by Hiram S. Blanchard; then it was sold to the present owner’s father, the late A. E. Harper, in 1913, and more recently it came to his son.

“There’s a chance to play a little in this game,” Mr. Harper says, suggesting that life isn’t all hard work, even on a ranch. Stag heads on the walls prove that hunting is good here, as everywhere in the Blackfoot. There is fishing on the Harper property in the potholes near Salmon lake. There are cool and inviting woods on the hillside before you reach the house, 230 acres of tamarack, firs and pine.

The Lake Chain.

Leaving the Harper ranch, you must very shortly make up your mind to choose definitely between two new routes which depart at right angles to push further into the Blackfoot. North across the Blanchard Flat to the chain of lakes, or east to Ovando and Helmville.

Missoulians have long had a penchant for the beauties of the lakes, with Seeley lake proving such an attraction that many summer homes have grown up around its banks to form a veritable colony. But first in the chain which starts six miles from the Ovando road is Salmon, and beyond it in succession are Seeley, Inez, Alva, Summit, Rainey and Elbow lakes, with Placid lake lying five miles west of Seeley, quite remote among the hills.

Many years ago the fishing of Salmon lake drew the attention of such a group of sportsmen as W. A. Clark II, G. F. Peterson, Dr. T. C. Witherspoon, James H. King, Paul Greenough, Charles L. Cowell and W. M. Bickford. And so strong was its lure that at the south end of its three miles they established a “Salmon Lake club” house to insure quarters for themselves. Now a cook is kept employed there during the entire summer – 1,483 meals were served this season! – for the present members and the guests they may take there. Of the original group Mr. Clark, Mr. Bickford and Mr. Peterson remain; others are A. N. Whitlock, W. L. Murphy, Sid J. Coffee, Dr. James D. Hobson and J. M. Keith.

The outstanding spot to be seen by the tourist upon his first visit to the lake, however, is the palatial home built by W. A. Clark in 1914. The owner of 35 acres upon the west side of the lake and 22 more on the east side, Mr. Clark then built what is generally called the “big house,” and additional ones for Will Clark and W. A. Clark Jr., servants’ quarters, a bath house, bowling alleys and a pool room, a boat house and barn – 14 structures in all, beautifully finished, at an estimated cost of $40,000. Other homes now owned on the lake have been built by Kenneth Ross, Charles Hart and Thomas Thibodeau.

To Seeley Lake.

It is six miles from the upper end of Salmon lake to the lower end of Seeley lake, three and one-half miles long, and set in angular fashion among heavy timber of larch, Douglas firs, and lodge-pole pine, with alpine fir and other species at high points. Thirty-five cottage sites upon the lake testify to its popularity, the permittees receiving 15-year permits from the Missoula National Forest offices at the annual price of $20 a lot, with a preference given to them to renew the permit at the end of that period if they so desire. Many of the homes are luxuriously built; others are more in the way of week-end cabins; all are comfortable and inviting. Holders of permits at the lake are now listed at the forestry offices as follows:

F. W. English, Malcolm McNeil, Alpha Delta Alpha, Frank McCarthy, William Knopp, Mrs. Elva Cave, Mrs. Amanda Cole, F. D. Pease, H. J. Riley, William J. Moore, Mrs. Bertha Tietjen, De Loss Smith, J. G. Randall, Helen B. McLeod, Walter H. McLeod, C. A. Barnes, E. C. Mulroney, A. W. Wilcox, E. W. Spottswood, F. C. Scheuch, Ed Reissinger, Mrs. Nora Toole Clifton, George F. Weisel, Mrs. J. R. Toole, J. E. Miller, W. I. Fraser, W. O. Dickinson, T. A. Fitzgerald, J. N. Maclean, L. J. Croonenberghs, Fred Morin, J. L. Osborne, J. P. Ritchey, H. S. Gatley, Mrs. Grace Walker and Louis D. Humphreyville.

Placid Lake.

More obscure from the beaten trail is Placid lake, still more heavily timbered than Seeley and as yet more untouched by homebuilders. Since the lake lies outside the domain of the forest, residents upon its borders are owners, two of the larger properties belonging to Mrs. L. M. Robertson and Dr. F. G. Dratz, both of Missoula. East of Seeley lake, and lying in a southerly direction, is another recreation spot, the Binko ranch – alike for “dudes” and old time sportsmen to the manner born.

North of Seeley lake lie other lakes less well known, but no less beautiful which extend north to the headwaters of the Swan river. Five miles through the beautiful woods is Inez lake, a mile and three-quarters long; Alva lake, a mile and a half long; Rainey lake, half a mile long – a group of sylvan gems that culminate in the cut-off, five miles south of the Gordon ranch, 32 miles north of the spot where this road leaves the Ovando highway. It is at the top of them all that the Clearwater commences its course drawn from three heads; Summit lake, Sunday mountain and Clearwater lake. Through the five lakes it flows until it comes into its own at last near the old Clearwater bridge, which marks its junction with the Big Blackfoot from the northeast. No sketch of the Blackfoot would be complete, however, without an arrow of some sort pointing to the Gordon ranch, and east of it, Holland lake, although these two points lie slightly outside of the Blackfoot drainage area.

Holland Lake.

The Gordon ranch, located by a man named Holland in about 1885-6, has passed successively through the ownership of Dr. Gordon of Great Falls, Dr. T. C. Witherspoon and Dr. W. L. Rennick of Butte, and is now owned by Dr. Karl Kessler of Chicago. Six hundred and forty acres comprise its area, lying far beyond the park-like front through the trees of which one sees from the road and the sturdy log dwellings of the ranch. A mile and a half east is Holland lake, considered by many the most beautiful of all the lakes in this territory; three miles in length, running from west to east where the falls drop down from the sheer crevice of the Gordon pass. At the east end of the lake is a ranger station; at the center of the north shore is the resort of D. A. White, who within a remarkably short space of time has established a hotel and built cabins for the comfortable accommodation of summer guests and fall hunting parties. It is 80 miles from Missoula.

Old Ovando.

From the Harper ranch to Ovando, avoiding the cut-off to the lakes and continuing east through Fish Creek canyon, it is a good 17 miles; again the country alters, taking on the appearance, if not the barrenness, of the Dakota bad lands. For its fertility is well proved by such a ranch as that of Mr. Boyd, whose 5,000 acres lie north of the road and east of Fish Creek canyon. Fifteen hundred head of cattle and 5,000 sheep on a ranch where there is said to be “wonderful hay and lots of water” prove the faith of the Blackfoot men in livestock.

Fifty-eight miles from Missoula on the southwest and 40 miles from Lincoln on the east, is Ovando, the dynamic little metropolis of the Blackfoot. Ovando has known days of greater but more fleeting prosperity than her present substantiality. Once upon a time there was a mining industry in the district, with resulting flashy streaks of gold appearing in the village. Now Ovando has the more solid business of catering to the wants of the prosperous ranches round about. Between 50 and 75 persons live within the village, but 169 came there to vote last month at the general election. Nor would you guess that Ovando has lately made a plucky fight against the results of a fire which all but wiped the town off the map several years ago. A comfortable hotel, a soft drink and barber shop, a garage and blacksmith shop, and especially the splendidly equipped store operated by E. R. Kilburn and his son, John Kilburn, fit the needs of the people satisfactorily. Again the school has a prominent place in Ovando, as in Potomac, with two teachers in charge.

Besides marketing dairy goods to Missoula, Drummond and Helmville, Ovando enjoys a reputation for being a headquarters for sportsmen on the way to the South Fork of the Flathead. Indeed from 1898 to 1907 it was headquarters for the Flathead National Forest supervisor, who is now in Kalispell. The Blackfoot Fire Protective association has its summer headquarters in Ovando, maintaining a crew there during the danger season, and a fish hatchery located there by W. A. Clark II, has caused several million fish to be planted in Cottonwood and Warren creeks, and the North Fork river. Ovando is certain to become of increasing importance as the country grows up around it.

“There’s a big body of timber waiting up here,” says Mr. Kilburn, “when they get through down below.”

East of Ovando, running north and south for 39 miles from Finn[1] to the mouth of Nevada creek, is the startling Nevada valley – a table land sometimes 12 miles wide, and like the Big Hole to which it is in many respects similar, it is punctuated with plentiful haystacks. It is a high, wide, handsome valley, ready made for the livestock industry and in which ranches that would be strikingly large in the lower valley here stretch and stretch and don’t make such a great impression.

Except – “The Kelley Ranch Co.” – that’s the sign painted in white upon the largest red barn of that famous ranch established by the late J. W. Blair[2] in the last century.

Kelley Outfit Big.

Thirty-two thousand acres lying on the broad surface of the wide and mellow Nevada valley belong to H. P. Kelley, newly elected commissioner of Powell county. Nowhere this side of the divide is there anything to approach the veritable village which is “headquarters” on this typical old time outfit. The house of the owner is across a genuine street from the general store of the ranch. On another street is the cook house, but it looks more like a town residence. Twenty men in winter, and perhaps three time that many in the haying and riding seasons of summer and fall, compose the population of this town-by-itself on the lower end of the great Nevada valley, a part of the still greater Blackfoot valley. Three other smaller ranches, also part of the Kelley string, lie up and down the valley from the home camp. And somewhere between them graze 6,000 sheep and 150 horses, finding life very healthy at an altitude of 4,500 feet in the shadow of the main line of the Rockies.

Helmville, Old Post.

Still in the Blackfoot watershed – which alone can determine the Blackfoot valley, since it seems to have no other unifying characteristic – is the village of Helmville, 18 miles south of Ovando and two miles south of the Kelley Ranch company. Like Potomac and Ovando, Helmville is a trading post retaining still more peculiarly the frontier atmosphere of sunken doorways and low-one-story buildings. Associated with the town since 1871 until his recent death was the name of J. W. Blair, hitherto referred to as the founder of the present Kelley ranch. In that year Mr. Blair came to Helmville in the company of several other men of like mining ambitions who subsequently made a good thing out of the placer mining game. The first moldy brown cabin is still there, now well hedged in by the dwellings of the present population of 150 persons. Twenty-eight students attend a school carried on by two teachers. The Catholic and Methodist churches host regular religious services. It is, altogether, a wide awake town within striking distance of Drummond on the railroad 20 miles to the south.

Prominent among the ranches near Helmville is that of C. M. (Burt) Mannix, holder of 10,000 acres of deeded and 10,000 more acres of leased land, three miles east of the town. Seven thousand ewes, 200 horses and 20 dairy cows form the typical livestock outfit of this veteran of 25 years’ experience in the Blackfoot. Year in and year out Mr. Mannix has managed to raise some 2,000 tons of hay for ranch consumption, and fifteen men form the average working staff the year round, with a vanguard of 25 more that come in haying times in the summer. Even greater in this capital of sheep, though owning less land, is J. C. Manley whose 12,000 acres start about 10 miles from Helmville on the Drummond road and stretch nearly to the latter town. It is the distinguishing characteristic of the Manley flock that most of them are of the foreign and excellent white face Rambouillet type, and have the unusual weight of 76 [sic] pounds – “the heaviest in the valley,” says their owner.

Fortune Not a Dream.

So this is the Blackfoot; an extraordinary combination of pioneering in the process, of still more to come, and yet of finished recreational facilities. Old timers point with pride to what has already been accomplished in the raising of grain and the development of livestock – especially of sheep. Missoula owners of cabins on the lake chain are likewise proud of the rustic beauty that they have claimed for their own.

But there is still more coming.

If in the Blackfoot you meet one citizen with the spark of progress in his heart, you will meet a dozen more who will say to you dreamily, “Wait until that railroad is through Ovando to Great Falls.” But it is not all a dream.

“If the Milwaukee completes the road to Clearwater, we of the upper Blackfoot will guarantee an elevator at that point,” says E. R. Kilburn. And he means it. It is a characteristic of Mr. Kilburn and other earnest citizens of that beautiful and productive valley that they mean what they say.

 

The above article appeared in The Sunday Missoulian on December 19, 1926.

 

The newspaper that day consisted of 92 pages over nine sections – “one of the largest ever put out by a Montana newspaper.” The article above was lightly edited for numerous printing errors. Other articles in this edition covered almost all of Western Montana – the Bitterroot, Flathead, and Missoula, and also make interesting reading. The author of the above article, John K. Hutchens, was the son of the former Missoulian editor, Martin Hutchens. In 1926, John Hutchens was barely 20 years old and at the start of a long career in the journalism field. He was later the author of the book “One Man’s Montana,” published in 1964. His father, Martin Hutchens, had recently been fired from his position as editor of the Missoulian when this edition came out. The current editor, Warren Davis, came to the job from his position at the Anaconda Standard, owned by the Anaconda Company. For more on the history of these newspapers see “Copper Chorus” by author Dennis L. Swibold.