Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 3

By E.H. ("Smokey") Cunningham
(Custer National Forest)

In August 1934 three CCC camps were established in southeastern Montana and one in South Dakota. The three in Montana were at Ekalaka (one), and Ashland (two), and that in South Dakota was at Camp Crook in the Long Pines. They were created because of the crop failures in eastern Montana and the western Dakotas resulting from the drought. The boys were recruited from these areas, and I believe they were some of the best CCC boys in the organization. There were very few "gold-brickers," they knew how to work and most of them were willing to do their share. I worked in all these camps.

When these camps started we were building the Fifteen Mile road at Ashland. We had an Austin patrol, a "40" Cletrac dozer, and a "35" Allis Chalmers crawler tractor. We rented work horses from the ranchers and built roads and reservoirs with team and Fresno. It would seem awfully slow now to move dirt that way, but we got a lot of stock-water dams and roads built. Most of the boys were pretty good with horses.

The two camps at Ashland were there a little over a year. They built about 200 miles of range fences, 100 miles of road, about 50 reservoirs, and developed around 200 stock-water springs. They also built about 100 miles of telephone line from Lame Deer to Fort Howes and to White Tail station. This line was so well built that the Bell Telephone Company bought it and is still using it, with very few changes. These camps also did a lot of thinning and pruning of timber, got out thousands of fence posts and telephone poles, and peeled and treated them. This was a winter project.

The Camp Crook and Ekalaka camps were there about two years. Their work was about the same as that at Ashland, except there was no power equipment the first year and all the work was done with team and Fresno. They built about 150 miles of road, 40 stock-water dams, 200 miles of range fence, and developed about 150 stock-water springs. Their winter work was mostly thinning and pruning timber, getting out fence posts and telephone poles and peeling and treating them. They also made a deer count in the Long Pines in the spring of 1936. I don't remember what the count was but it was very low, I believe. There were only 16 whitetail counted, and now there are thousands of them. The Montana Fish and Game Department are doing all they can to hold them down but are having a hard time "holding their own."

Each camp had about 200 boys; the Army kept 40 or 50 around camp for their work. A lot more would have been accomplished if the Army had eased up on their restrictions and let the Forest Service hire their own overhead instead of having to use the political appointees assigned to them as crew foremen. One of the camps I was in was sent two construction foremen. One had been a railroad conductor most of his life. The other had been a school teacher and had also worked in a post office. One of them asked me what I did, and I told him I was a dozer operator. A few days later I was coming down the road with the little cat and ripper and he looked it over and said, "That dozer is quite a machine." I told him that wasn't the dozer. Within the next few days I passed him with the patrol grader, which he thought must be the dozer. I told him it wasn't, and he wouldn't believe anything I told him after that and thought I was kidding him all the time.

The superintendent took one of these men out with some CCC boys to build a reservoir. He showed him where to set camp, then took him over a hill about one-quarter mile and told him to cut poles for a corral. He left him there and returned to the main camp, but the man was lost and the boys had to go find him.

This same foreman had been told how to build a dam, but he got mixed up and started putting the core up and down the creek instead of across it. One of his crew was an L.E.M. (local experience man), who had quite a time getting him to change it.

Another political appointee was an engineer. The engineer in the other camp was told to keep an eye on him and check his work, so he would call him up and ask how he was doing. He got the same answer every time: "Right on the button." A lot of his work had to be done over.

In January 1936 I was transferred to Camp Crook, S.D., from Ashland. I had a Model A coupe, hooked a trailer on behind and took off with my wife and daughter from Miles City for Camp Crook, a distance of 150 miles. The weather was very cold and there was a lot of snow, and it took us two days to make the trip. Between Buffalo and Camp Crook the snow was so deep you couldn't see the fence posts. There was just a narrow trail through that the snow plow had made. I dumped my family off at Camp Crook and went out to a spike camp that was set up for the road crew. There were about 40 boys in this camp, living in tents, but they were all happy and contented.

The first night there I thought I would get acquainted with the boys so I went into the tent next to mine. It was called the L.E.M. tent. They were talking about life in the penitentiary. They were a pretty rough-looking bunch. One had been sent up for stealing a cow, another for horse stealing, and I don't remember what the others had done, but they turned out to be some of the best men I had.

A few days after I got there we received a call to head for the main camp with our two dozers. There were only two men in camp who knew anything about operating a dozer. I took along three men for each dozer, and two trucks. It was 47° below zero when we left camp and the wind was blowing. Five to ten minutes was as long as a man could stay with a machine due to snow being thrown back in the operator's face. We got to main camp and found they were out of coal. The Army had failed to lay in enough coal for winter. We plowed out to a strip mine about 20 miles with a bunch of trucks and started mining coal. The temperature was holding from 45-50° below zero, and it stayed there for about two weeks, the wind blowing all the time. We would plow out to the mine, wait until the trucks were loaded, then plow back to camp. We would get word that the roads were open to Camp Crook, so we would take the dozers and trucks and head for town for supplies. I thought I had moved to the end of the world. This was not long after Admiral Byrd had set up camp at the South Pole, so someone hung a sign at Camp Crook, reading, "The Little South Pole," and I think it was just about as bad.

Camp Crook had the distinction in 1936 of being the coldest, the hottest, and the driest in the state of South Dakota. We had only a little over four inches of moisture that year - all snow, no rain all summer.

I meet some of the CCC boys often. One owns a hardware store, another is a dirt-moving contractor and operates a sawmill in Ekalaka, but most of them went back to the farms and ranches. They do not regret the time they put in the CCC. I believe it was good training for the boys. They learned discipline and how to be on their own, and some of them learned a trade. I personally would like to see them back. They did a lot of good for themselves and for the country.

After the CCC we had E.R.A, made up of local farmers and ranchers. We didn't get the work done with them that we did with the CCC. We were always short of money for supplies. We would have 40 or 50 men working through the winter, but as soon as spring came they would all go home to put in their crops. They would be back with us in the fall after harvest. It was quite a job to find work for 40 or 50 men in the hills when the snow was hip deep.