Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 3

JUST REMINISCENCES
By Eugene (Gene) R. Grush
(Retired 1952)

In the early spring of 1910 I decided to take Horace Greeley's advice and go West, so I left Pittsburgh and worked my way across the country, arriving in Spokane in August. Men were being hired to fight fires, so I decided to take that on. A crew of us was sent to Troy, Montana. We arrived there early in the morning, had breakfast at the old Doonan Hotel which at that time included a bar, and some of the boys got pretty well tuned-up.

A wagon pulled up to the hotel partly loaded with grub, and we added our bedrolls to the load. When we got down to the ferry on the Kootenai, the wagon and some of the men were part way across the river. A well liquored Irishman named Kelly, anxious to get to the fire apparently, stripped off and jumped in the river with the intention of swimming across. We fished him out and dressed him. At O'Brien Springs the cook prepared a lunch for us of bacon, eggs, fried spuds, bread, and coffee. I can still smell the aroma of that bacon and coffee.

We made camp that night at the spring on the east side of Yaak Falls. Next day part of the crew was sent up to the Bob Holmes homestead camp about three miles above the town of Sylvanite which had just been completely burned out. The Forest Service had built a bridge across the Yaak at the falls that spring. The fire was closing in on us so the team and wagon were moved across the river "just in case."

One of my duties was to keep the fire crew supplied with water. Water bags were either nonexistent or we didn't rate any as I was given a 12 quart pail and a tin cup for this duty. When we were trying to head the fire off up Arbo Creek I had to go down a very steep side hill to the creek. Before I got very far up from the creek the contents of the pail included not only water but twigs and leaves from the thick brush through which I traveled. I dumped it, refilled the bucket, tied my red bandanna over the top and returned to camp with clean water.

When the rains came and doused the fire we moved down to Charlie Dennis' homestead below Kilbrennan Lake (Charlie was Ranger of the Troy District at that time). We were assigned to build trail up O'Brien Creek and got quite a little way before the fire money was cut off. We were paid in cash at Troy - no checks at that time.

Three of us had been traveling from Edgemont, South Dakota, when we hired out in Spokane. The other two had been taken up to the camp on the Bob Holmes homestead. I waited a couple of days for them but when they didn't show up I took my bedroll and a little grub and started out to find them. On arriving at Sylvanite I found the town had been completely leveled by the fire, except for one hotel. Later oldtimers told me that when the town was going full tilt, about 1896, there were about a thousand people there and dance halls, saloons, a post office, stores, and the best hotel in Flathead County. It was a part of Flathead County at that time. The two-story hotel that survived the fire was located along Fourth-of-July Creek. I had been told that the only reason it was still standing was because a lot of liquor was stored therein and the boys fought like hell to save it. Of course the ground was a bit swampy back of the hotel.

When I arrived at the upper camp I found that one of my chums had left some time previously and the other was going to trap that winter with a chap he had met on the fire. The next morning I started hiking back to Troy. On the way down I met an old fellow, Harry Higgins, who had squatted on the land at the old Half-Way House (the present Buckhorn Lodge). He talked me into staying with him that winter. I trapped part of the winter then went to work for Johnny Ehlers who held a water right on the Yaak Falls. He had dreams of generating enough power to run the mine at Sylvanite and for other uses. Higgins and I had an argument and parted company. I kicked the pack rats out of an old prospector's cabin about a half mile below the falls and moved in. I started clearing a place for a power house a short distance below the falls. One day I returned to Higgins' place to get my axe and some of the meat I had left there. I loaded half a deer in a pack sack that I had made from a gunny sack and started back, deciding that the "going" would be a little better on the river. This proved to be a poor decision when the ice broke and I found myself sitting in water up to my shoulders. I removed my snowshoes and the pack sack from by back and got out of the hole, but had to go back in the water to fish out my axe.

While clearing for the power house, every time I sank the axe into a tree my head seemed to jump into the air, caused no doubt by a back tooth that had been giving me trouble. I no longer had access to the cotton and carbolic acid that Higgins, while I was with him, had let me use to pack the cavity and relieve the pain. So I decided to eliminate the tooth, with a ten-inch file and four-pound single-bitted axe to serve me in this operation. I placed the end of the file against the tooth and took a swipe at it with the axe, missing the file and batting myself on the side of the jaw. After repeating this operation several times with the same result, I took off for Leonia, Idaho, twelve miles away, to get some acid. When I found that the acid no longer gave me relief, I caught the train to Troy to call on old Dad Woods who, I had heard, pulled a tooth now and then.

It was late when I arrived. Dad wanted me to wait until morning as they had only coal-oil lamps. When I told him I had to leave on the 4:00 a.m. train he asked Josh Inman, his bartender, to get the lantern. Dad fished out some kind of pliers and picked out the tooth he thought should be pulled. I told him, "No, it's the one behind that one." The one he wanted to pull had a large filling in it which no doubt looked like a hole to him. We finally compromised. He said, "OK, we will pull that one and I will keep on pulling till we get the right one." Lucky for me the first tooth pulled was the right one.

In the spring Les Vinal (later supervisor of the Kootenai) brought a group of students up, most of them equipped with six-shooters and cameras. They lined up on the bridge and took pictures of the falls. That summer and the next, eastern white pine and red oak were planted at Sylvanite Ranger Station. The white pine are now beautiful, thrifty trees. The cayuses browsed on the red oak. Jack Baldwin saved five of them by moving them to the back of the dwelling where his wife kept them watered with her dishwater, and they are now beautiful trees. The largest one is taller than the dwelling.

The Yaak Falls power didn't materialize so I pulled out for Manitoba where I worked in the harvest fields until October, then returned to Pittsburgh, entered business college and worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. This was in 1913, and the railroad company assigned me to work in connection with the Ohio Valley flood where I was paid straight time (24 hours a day). I then returned west, where I had wanted to be all the time, and went first to Night Hawk, Washington, to trap. I wound up back on the Yaak where the winter of 1914 was spent trapping. The next spring I built a two-story log cabin for a homesteader and filed on a homestead myself before leaving for the Palouse country to make some money to support my homestead.

In the fall I arrived in Spokane with $90, bought a little black mare and buggy I saw parked outside a saloon with a sign reading "For Sale $40.00." I bought my winter's supply of grub and headed back for the Yaak, a five-day trip. One night during a hard rain I was bedded down under the buggy when an automobile went by. I said to myself, "One day I will have one of those things."

Jack Baldwin, later Ranger at Sylvanite and still later in charge of the Engineering Shop in Spokane, had just homesteaded. I helped build a log house for him. Later that winter I helped Hi Crum build a log house on his homestead, which we started in 23-below-zero weather.

I worked on fires for the Forest Service, cleared land, and in August 1916 went to Canada and enlisted in the Army, returning from overseas in the fall of 1919. I made cedar posts that winter and went to work for the Forest Service the next spring maintaining telephone line. While I was away the Forest Service or B.P.R. had built a road from Sylvanite up the Yaak to where the radar station is now - about 18 miles. This was quite an improvement from the old trail I had hiked and snowshoed over a number of times.

John Brobst, L. Dooley, and I moved the telephone line over from the trail to the new road. We used some new wire from half-mile rolls. Jack Baldwin and Johnny would put them on a reel on the back of the wagon and drive up the road stringing the wire out, after which they would hook the end of the wire to the axle and go up the road again, as Jack said, "to take out the slack." I was doing the climbing. One day I had taken the wire across my arms and started up an old burnt fit, a remnant of the 1917 fire. It was on a curve and leaning toward the road. I got up about ten feet and, luckily, wasn't using my belt when they took the slack out. It threw me clear across the road. I was plenty mad and started up the road with blood in my eye. I had gone quite a little way when I realized I still had the climbers on. By that time I had cooled off, had a good laugh and went back to work. Later I was up a tree, had the insulator fastened to my belt, and Jack was under the tree telling me how they used to do it when he worked for the telephone company back in Kansas City. The insulator pulled loose and conked Jack on the head. Jack's hair was rather thin so I imagine it didn't feel so good. I am sure he thought I did it on purpose to get even with him for yanking me out of the tree.

Just before the 4th of July we put a young, newly married couple on Mt. Henry. During the summer a lightning storm came up one night and knocked them out of their tent, or so they said. She had a rather bad burn and had to eat standing up for awhile. Anyway, they said they'd had enough, and we had to replace them.

Fourth of July night when we got back from the lookout the road crew had completed the right of way to the lower ford and were throwing a party. The settlers were invited, and danced in the old schoolhouse. It was quite a party, lasting most of the night.

From the basin on to Rexford over the Dodge Creek summit the county had built a wagon road, which amounted to only a double trail. Some brave soul, not a native, decided to make the trip through with a car. The boys dragged the car through the river at the lower ford with a team and he took off. Later we heard that after prying out rocks and cutting off stumps in the road, what remained of the car, arrived in Rexford behind a team of horses. That was the first car to make a trip up the Yaak and through to Rexford.

After maintaining the telephone line to Mt. Henry and Baldy from our two tent lookouts, I spent the rest of the summer as smokechaser at Long Meadows. We had a number of fires, the largest on the West Fork. Hiked in with my fire pack about 15 miles, bedded down that night at Pete Creek Meadows and the mosquitoes had a field day. I built three smudges in an effort to get some sleep, but they crept in under the smoke and gave me the works.

For a number of years I had seasonal work with the Forest Service. In 1922 I was on final surveys. They were trying to wind up the homestead business. During the off season I worked on various things - clearing land on my homestead, prospecting, logging, helping in the Yaak log drive, doing assessment work. In the winter of '23 I took care of a herd of cattle and horses for a rancher who had moved out for the winter. It was a cold winter with the temperature dropping as low as 52 below.

In the spring of 1924 we were taking the drive out and when about a mile above the falls the water dropped, causing a large jam in the canyon below the falls. Weyerhauser's men were having plenty of trouble too skidding logs off the bars in the Kootenai with teams. Later I blasted the key rocks out from under the jams above the falls and also blasted the jam in the canyon. In blasting a ledge out that stuck up at the head of the falls, the logs were battered up pretty badly. I had to shinny out on a pole to get at it and it was a ticklish job to keep from going aver the falls. The next year Weyerhauser took the drive out in good water. That was the last drive on the Yaak. This timber was all logged by homesteaders from their own lands and went to the Bonners Ferry mill.

We now had a mail route up the river, 44 miles from Troy, with the Yaak Post Office at the end of the route. By changing teams at Sylvanite the mailman made the round trip in two days. I kept one team at Sylvanite. The winter of '24 the freight business got too heavy for his once-a-week trip, so I hauled freight for him from Troy to Sylvanite, a two-day trip. He took it on from there, another two-day trip.

During the winter we had a very warm spell, then the thermometer dropped way below zero in a few hours. Sap must have been in the trees as it killed a lot of fruit trees and turned the needles yellow on many evergreens, most of which survived however.

I believe it was in '25 that we had a lot of fires, the largest on 17 Mile Creek. The coming of snow finished it. Late that fall we built a lookout house on Roderick Mountain and had lots of snow and wind during construction.

Activity during 1926-27-28 was pretty much routine; maintenance, construction, telephone lines, trails, roads and buildings, and some fires.

In the fall of 1928 I loaded the family and a camping outfit in the car (a 1926 Chevrolet touring car) and started on a trip that took us to the Coast, down to California and Mexico, across to Florida through the Southern States, up the East Coast to Canada, and back across the northern tier of states, a total of 12,000 miles. We arrived home in April. It was a nice trip and quite educational for our two children, although at times they were rather trying. Once in Arizona I stopped the car to get something to work them over with, but the best I could find was cactus and I had no gloves. I had my tire chains along "just in case," but the only place they were needed was in coming through from Noxon to Troy via Bull Lake. We encountered quite a lot of road construction on the trip and still had gobs of red clay of the South and gumbo of the Dakotas under the car when we arrived home. When we got back in Montana the water tasted so good we stopped and drank our fill at every creek and spring. We also commented that this was the only state where they surfaced the roads with boulders.

In 1929 we had quite a few fires. A big one in 1931 started on Deer Creek in Idaho on a Sunday morning. By that night it was burning on Baldy Ridge. That fire occupied me the rest of the summer. Of course we had help from other forests and from the Regional Office - Frank Jefferson, Lloyd Hornby, Hartley Calkins, and F.K. Stewart. On the Montana side we had 31 camps on the fire and 1500 men, with crews coming and going, and 300 head of pack stock. Quite a few of these were "knotheads" that had just been rounded up from the range. The packers had to break them but "knew their stuff."

At that time we had only a one-way road into the Yaak, with a few turnouts. We had a man at Tepee Springs and another at the Sylvanite Ranger Station. In this nine-mile stretch the vans and buses couldn't pass. Some of the drivers on the buses and vans were quite angry as they had scraped their rigs on the cliffs at the falls. On one occasion, instead of the grub we ordered for the fire, Spokane sent us a large vanload of mixed vegetables, salad variety. They must have been overstocked on these. An odd thing about that fire was that every Sunday from somewhere inside the line, fire would be thrown quite a distance outside, causing us to lose considerable trench. Art Greeley traversed the fire line. We had 90 miles in held line in Montana; I don't remember how much they had in Idaho. By the time the fire was out our road was beaten to pieces. I broke five springs on my Model A that summer.

Later came the CCC's and a 200-man camp for us. These boys rebuilt our road and surfaced it with crushed rock, for which we were all grateful. They did a lot of good work - built a steel bridge across the Yaak below Sylvanite, several steel bridges across the creeks, some side roads and trails, and worked on fires and in other places where we could use them. First we had a camp of L.E.M.'s (local men) who were fine, then a camp of Jewish boys from New York. Later on farm boys from Ohio and the mountains of Tennessee arrived. There were many amusing incidents, but that's another story.

Next came the E.R.A., and we fell heir to a crew of transients from another county or forest. They were not too satisfactory, but we did get some road right of way cleared. When the money ran out we sent them back to where they came from, but it seemed they weren't wanted there either, since more money was allotted us and the crew returned. Along the way they had got hold of some "joy juice" and when we opened the endgate of the truck some of them rolled out on the ground. We finally got them tucked in for the night. The next morning they craved tomato juice, and the cook had to run them out of the kitchen with a cleaver.

Then came the N.R.A., and we were allotted some money to build a combination building and a five-stall machine shed. Sylvanite Ranger Station was beginning to look up. Quite a bit different from when I first saw it in 1910. After the 1910 fire the Forest Service had built a general-purpose building out of rough lumber, for which they had traded stumpage to the sawmill at Sylvanite. The mill had been hauled in from Troy to Sylvanite via Kilbrennan Lake and Yaak Falls with a four-horse team the winter of 1910. The boiler was the big load. The road crew had left a couple of shacks in 1917 which were converted into a cookhouse, warehouse and office. Previous to this time the Sylvanite district had taken in part of the old Troy district, extending from Kootenai Falls to the Idaho line and north to Baldy Ridge. We had ten lookouts and many miles of trail and telephone line.

An odd thing is that sometimes you can have a lot of lightning going to the ground and get very few fires, but in 1940 it seemed that every strike started a fire. We had 44, some of them pretty good size. That year we had outside help which we greatly appreciated. I.V. Anderson from the Regional Office came to the Ranger Station and among other things commented that he had been on a lot of fires but that this was the first time he had been given a whole drainage to take care of. Upper Ford district had assigned him the Spread Creek drainage. Our district wasn't bad off compared to the Raven district which got 100 fires out of that first two-day storm. This was the first year we used planes. A fire outfit was dropped on Yaak Mountain for us, but the water was missing from that load.

In the fall of 1942 I was mapping and classifying private land for fire protection. One evening I received a call from the Supervisor's Office instructing me to leave the next day for the Guayule Rubber Project in California. I went to Spokane where I was to meet two other boys and drive to California. Something didn't mesh so we took the train to Missoula, picked up a car there and proceeded to Salinas. On arrival, Major Kelley, who was in charge of the project, showed us the nursery and the processing plant. It was very enlightening and instructive. We went from Salinas to Indio where a nursery was being established. Major Kelley had told us that our operations would compare somewhat with those on a big fire. We worked ten hours a day, seven days a week. The temperature rose to 100 in the shade every day - quite a contrast to the cool days we had left at home that October. We had a motley crew of laborers because the armed services had taken so many men. Our needs were filled from skid row in Los Angles.

About Christmas time the wind took over and covered our little guayule plants with sand. We rustled all the push brooms we could get in Indio and put the crews to work uncovering the plants. A 1000-man camp was set up which proved of great help. I believe this was the largest nursery with overhead sprinkling system that had ever been established. We had about 80 miles of various-sized pipe in the system.

About the first of January I was sent to El Paso to help Ed Mackay with a nursery located in New Mexico a short distance out of El Paso. I headed for home at the end of my six-month detail. When I left El Paso the railroad station was packed; many were boys in uniform. The weather was hot and sticky. I awoke early the next morning, raised the shade of my berth and looked out to see a stream of water rushing over the rocks, green grass just peeking out from under the snow, and evergreens, and realized with a feeling of pleasure that I was back in Montana. It was my birthday and I thought, "What a nice present."

In 1944 Karl Klehm and I, while on a district inspection trip that took us to the sheep camp on Buckhorn Ridge, spent the night at the head of Red Top Creek. The third day while traveling up the Cool Creek ridge we encountered two bear about three miles from our destination of Roderick Lookout. These 300-pounders looked as though they disputed our right to pass as they stood up on their hind legs and appeared very belligerent. Karl kicked his horse, yelled and went after them. One of them broke over the ridge, but the other acted as though he were going to take Karl on. Karl was only a few feet from him when the bear decided discretion was the better part of valor and took off down the other side of the ridge. Karl rode back and asked what kind of bear they were and I told him they were silver-tip grizzlies. He said, "Maybe I shouldn't have done that."

In early April of 1945 a 50-man crew of Mexican Nationals arrived to work on blister rust. We still had a lot of snow and they were not dressed for the type of weather we were having. Harold Zwang and a representative of Montgomery Ward came up and took orders for rubbers and warm clothing for them. They were assigned to pruning our white pine plantation, burning brush, road work, etc., until the snow melted and they could work on blister rust. They were good workers.

The next few years we were busy with timber sales, grazing permits, improvements, blister rust, beetles, etc. It was pretty nice having the blister rust crews handy when we were hit with a bunch of fires. Region 1 had recognized the value of planes for fire suppression and under the direction of Regional Forester Kelley had inaugurated and developed the smokejumper program. We made very good use of the smokejumpers, also the drops of camps and equipment.

The work load on the district has increased greatly due to blowdown and invasion of the spruce bark beetle. Thousands of trees were killed by the beetles. Many miles of road have been built to most parts of the district to salvage the millions of board feet of lumber in these dead trees. It is now possible to go by car in short order to most parts of the district where it used to take us a couple of days to make the trip.

Many changes and improvements have taken place. The radar station was built near the Yaak Post Office (incidentally, the post office was closed and the mail route extended up the river). The Air Force rebuilt the Yaak road by contract and have improved and maintained it since that time with the cooperation and help of the Forest Service. We now have a very fine road.

Homesteaders no longer are seen with their pack strings of cayuses on their way to Leonia (this town no longer exists) for their year's supply of grub; just cars, trucks, logging trucks and, yes, jets overhead. Many of the old timers have slipped over the Great Divide to the Happy Hunting Grounds and are no doubt swapping yarns about "the good old days."

Sylvanite Ranger Station a few years after the 1910 fire, Kootenai National Forest. J.K. John Brobst in picture.

Sylvanite Ranger Station, Kootenai National Forest, August 1923. Area behind building was burned over during 1910 fire.

Sylvanite Ranger Station, Kootenai National Forest, 1958.