Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 3

EARLY DAY SAWMILLING IN THE SNOWY MOUNTAINS
By David Lake
(Retired 1940)

It was in May 1902, having spent the previous winter in the East, I had a few months before returning to the Snowy Mountain region to start over again, and as yet I had landed no permanent job. One day I ran across a friend named Tom Cameron who said he also had no job, and had decided to ride over to the Elliott ranch at the east end of the Little Snowies. Being footloose, I decided to go along.

We made the old Stone house that night, and the owners, two old Portuguese named Joe and Antone Bettencort, who ran a bunch of sheep, had just started lambing and needed help. So we spent the next two weeks, which was mostly rainy, in helping them out.

Here I learned of a sawmill just starting up in the Little Snowies, at the Block Cabin Spring in Sec. 21, T 12 N, R 21 E. (The so-called Block Cabin was built many years ago at the best spring in the Little Snowies, and was used by early day hunters. A cabin for the party and a stable for their horses were built with the early day loopholes for protection against Indians. There was evidently some truth in this, since I picked up at the spring two empty copper shells, size .577 caliber. This size was not common with American hunters, but was used quite extensively by English sportsmen, both in America and Africa. I still have these shells. At the time we were there the buildings were badly tumbled down, but enough remained for a fair identification of their former use.)

According to the report, they were short-handed at the sawmill. There being a prospect for a summer's job, I decided to ride over and take a look. Never having been in that region before, I had no idea where to look. But I soon found the trail where they had cut their way through the young growth to reach the log site. The mill was an old one, and owned by a young man by the name of Ed Fowler. He had a homestead on Beaver Creek, and had bought the mill to do custom sawing to make a living while getting started on the homestead. The mill had a 42-inch saw, and was powered by an old 20-horse portable engine. It was old enough to have been freighted in the early days for use in the old mining camps.

I landed a job off-bearing, at $40.00 per month, which meant taking away the slabs and lumber as they fell from the saw and placing them in piles for later disposal. We cut on an average of 6 to 8 thousand feet per day, so off-bearing was no small job.

Here I should state that this setting of logs was cut from land that later became National Forest, Sec. 28-29, T 12 N, R 21 E. A large portion of the Little Snowies was burned off about 20 or 25 years previous and a very dense stand of young growth yellow pine was then coming in. It was then 3 to 6 feet in height. At the present time it is around 30 feet in height and very dense.

We finished this job of around 150,000 feet with only one incident worth relating. We ran out of food supply and had to shut the mill down while the boss, Ed Fowler, drove to Lewistown - about 40 miles distant - for supplies. We boys who had saddle horses put in the time hunting, so when Fowler returned with his supplies we had plenty of fresh meat to go with them. A few days later the game warden came along, and being a long distance between eating places, he was asked to stay for dinner. Our cook didn't know what to do about the venison, but Fowler told him serve it up as usual and call it beef, which he did, and the game warden ate his share; and if he knew the difference, he never let on. But we were all quite uneasy for awhile.

Ed Fowler had a father-in-law who had a freight team, so when we were finished with a job he was brought in to move the outfit to our next job, about 25 miles away and over some very difficult roads. We had one terrible hill to take the outfit down, about one-half mile in length, very steep and sliding. We spent several days with pick and shovel lowering the upper wheel track. Instead of using the eight-horse freight team to take it down, Fowler had a nearby homesteader, Angus Cameron, who had a fine team of large horses, haul the engine down the hill. He placed a board over the smokestack hole and rode it down. We had to depend on the handbrake, as a rough lock would have ruined the wheel. All would be well if the lower wheels could be kept in the rut, but if one of them should get over the bank it would be goodbye engine, as it would go rolling down to the bottom of the coulee 100 yards below. But nothing happened and we made it safely down. We brought this same outfit down the same hill the next year and thought nothing of it.

After plowing our way through a couple of recently planted fields of grain; against the owner's threats of everything he could think of, we arrived at the next setting. We made two settings that summer on the East Fork of Spring Creek, sawing around 150,000 feet, and then moved on around the north side of the Snowies, through the Judith Gap country, and on to Timber Creek - the South Snowies. Here two local ranchers, Fred Irish and Jim Woodhouse, had gotten out about 100,000 feet of logs, partly fire-killed and partly green timber. We landed the mill here about November 20th and completed the sawing just before Christmas.

The Jaw Bone Railroad, then building from Harlowton to Lewistown, had by this time become an assured fact, and a man one day appeared and stated that he wanted to contract for a quantity of bridge timber. So Woodhouse and Irish contracted with him to furnish the bridge timbers for the road.

Most of the mill crew went home for the holidays, but another lad and I, having no home to go to, decided to stay on the job and cut logs. We finished the cutting by February, and the sawing again started with the weather well below zero.

By this time I had been promoted to engineer, which meant that I had to get up at 5 o'clock and fire up, and again the last thing at night put in a good fire and fix things safe against freezing. The logs were quite large and very long, and by this time were well buried in fresh snow. It would often require from four to six horses to bring some of the logs to the mill. It was really tough going. We had cut about 100,000 feet of logs, all into bridge timbers making them unfit for any other use. And then Irish kicked out and refused to start delivery.

Delivery meant hauling the timber from 25 to 50 miles with horses, and Irish didn't have either teams or wagons for the job. But without delivery, no expenses could be met, So Fowler one day rode horseback to Lewistown and filed a labor lien on all the lumber. Settlement was finally effected and another party took the contract of delivering the timbers to the railroad right-of-way - from Harlowton to Lewistown. And at this date I am quite certain that I am the only man living who had a hand in sawing and delivering the timber for the Jaw Bone Railroad.

In the spring of 1903 another mill set up about a mile from us on the West Fork of Blake Creek, Sec. 20, T 11 N, R 17 E. The locality is still called Tie Camp Coulee. The mill was owned by Frank McCullum, and he had taken a tie contract. He had plenty of good tie timber available and a good outfit, but he was not getting anyplace with his sawing. He asked Fowler to come over and take a look at this outfit. So Fowler and I rode over one day, and we soon found his trouble. His saw pulley was too large, which ran his saw too slow. There were no sawmill supplies nearer than Billings or Great Falls. Then a thought struck me. Wm. Stranahan, the man I had formerly worked for, had two pulleys and, one of them was the right size, I was sure he would loan one. I offered to go over and see, providing McCullum would furnish a man in my place. He furnished a team and buckboard and I drove over to Careless Creek. I soon found I could get the loan of the pulley and that it was the right size, 16-inch, while the McCullum pulley was 22 inches. As soon as the change was made, they began to really make ties.

The summer of 1903 found us on the North Fork of Flat Willow Creek, and also again in the east end of the Little Snowies where we sawed out a setting of logs for the Willow Creek Sheep Company, or the Elliott Brothers. The timber was all from homestead owners. Eventually, that fall, we moved to the head of Beaver Creek where we all had homesteads.

During the winter we all got out enough logs to build our cabins and get ourselves started with our improvements. The spring of 1904 ended my work with the mill. Fowler sold the whole outfit to someone on the north side of the Little Belts, and later - a lot later - I found the last location of the mill. It was dismantled and taken up the North Antelope Canyon. They did a lot of work in this narrow canyon to widen it enough to get the engine through, and then up over a jumbled mess of large, house-size rocks, to get it on good going. The mill was set up in Sec. 1, T 11 N, R 13 E. Some lumber was made, but the mill did not stay there long. It was thought by many that the creation of the Forest scared them off.

About 1903 two boys, Bert MaHaney and Jim Pratt, both local residents on the North Snowies, put a mill in the Cottonwood Canyon and started to work on the fine stand of lodgepole pine. They made a good setup, building several good cabins, a shed over the mill, and a 300-yard log chute, and were going along in fine shape. They had a planer and were able to make various kinds of finishing lumber. They did their logging and sawing in the summer and hauled the lumber to Lewistown by wagon or sled. As this was before the railroad, they had a good market. Lewistown was building and lumber was in good demand. Finally a report was received that the Snowy Mountains was made a National Forest and that all trespassing mills would be confiscated and the owners fined. So this mill was pulled out and the owners never returned. They left quite a lot of lumber and a lot of logs behind. The old log chute is still visible.

In this connection I might add that the stand of lodgepole is still uncut, waiting for someone brave enough to build about six miles of road to reach it with trucks. This very probably is the best stand of lodgepole in the country. There are several million feet and the trees will run from one-and-one-half feet D.B.H. to two-and-one-half feet, and five to six logs to the tree. In my opinion, a good stand of accessible timber.

Sometime in the early thirties, my Supervisor, W.B. Willey, and Mr. W.W. White came down to visit me. Mr. White wanted to find an old cutting where he could make some growth studies. I told him I knew of a place and I also knew the age of the cutting, as I cut the trees myself. I took them to our old 1903 logging site.

1935 trail rider party in Sun River Primitive Area under the Chinese Wall. Lewis and Clark National Forest.