Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 4

THE CCC'S AS R-1 FOREST FIRE FIGHTERS
(PLUS A LOOK AT TRAIL CREW AND LOOKOUT LIFE)
By Bert W. Morris

Outside of fishing, hunting and a little trapping my career as a tree squeak really didn't get off to a start until the summer of 1935. A local fuel dealer offered four of us punks (I was the oldest and only 14) $1.50 per cord for making cordwood. This amounted to falling tamarack snags, bucking them into 4 foot lengths, splitting these with wedges and a 12 lb. maul and then packing the pieces to where they could be loaded on a truck. Some of the hardest work was extracting our pay, which averaged about 75¢ per day per kid.

The boss would pick up some broke lumberjack every now and then to speed production. One character was telling us about watching a young Indian climb out the chimney in the Pierce, Idaho, jail when he was a temporary guest. He said it was tough but the kid made it. I checked that jail years later and that must have been a small Indian.

The next summer, '36, I enlisted in the great Hooligan Army, the Civilian Conservation Corps. An outfit better known as the C.C.C. The book said no one could enlist unless he had passed his 17th birthday. If you were from Montana they were inclined to bend the rules such as if you said you were 17 then that was your age and you were supposed to sign up for 6 months but they gave an honorable discharge if you found a way to return to school. The reason was most of the Montana kids were quite familiar with WORK and without exception seemed to know how to use common hand tools like a pick and shovel.

Wound up with some of the real personalities of that time. There was Oley Johnson who was Camp Superintendent at Thompson Falls, Pat Duffy who was foreman and ramroded the Plains Spike Camp; Bill Shelden, foreman and Frenchy whose last name sounded like Laffin Ear who was the Headquarters Guard at Plains. That crew of Montana Kids was really something. We had two kids over 16 and were supposed to build a 6-strand telephone line into Bend Station, build a new Ranger Station at Plains, repair telephone lines from Plains to Thompson Falls, and fight fire when the need arose. The camp was never at its authorized 25 men. The month of August I managed 3 days work on the project. The rest of the time was fire. Because of the practice of making up a camp of men who all came from one locality we had little Italy's, Little Hungary's, Little Chicago's, etc. all over the region. The people around Plains called our camp Little America. We really had a good relationship with the people of Plains. The show house gave us the kid's rate and made a refund if there was a fire call in the middle of the show. One of the local bars let a few of the older ones charge a beer a day providing we paid promptly on payday. (We did.)

The flat where the station was built sits on hardpan clay. I still think it would have taken less labor if they had laid all the lines on the ground and backfilled over them. That was sure a lot of ditch digging. When it got hot and dry they resorted to dynamite to loosen the stuff so we could dig the ditches. They wanted a cesspool for the cookhouse, so Owen Grinde and I were given the job. In a day and a half we had a hole 10 ft. x 10 ft. x 10 ft. deep. We didn't get many coffee breaks.

The C.C.C. system was to move in a few men, and maybe a sawmill, cut the lumber, digs the ditches, lay the pipes, build the buildings, and then go to work on projects. It was sure fine training in a lot of trades.

In 1936 the uniforms were still WWI surplus. We were issued 3 undershirts, 3 boxer shorts (all 44 inch waist), 1 pull-over wool shirt, 1 wool blouse styled for and called a Mae West coat, a blue denim hat, a blue denim jacket (large), 1 pair of wool blanket trousers, 2 pair of Munson Last shoes, socks, and 2 pair of denim work pants (size 44 waist, 40 inseam). We were also given 2 towels and a sewing kit. Those 44-40 work pants presented a problem. The first thing was to the chopping block with a sharp ax and shorten the legs to where you could get your feet out of them. They had a short belt in back. By running that to the front belt loops and then back they would fit most of those no-assed kids.

It was comical watching a bunch of those skinny kids wearing those oversized denim jackets, (the wool shirts itched something awful), and those pants. Because of the system of shortening the waist, the pants usually appeared to have an extra 12 qt. bucket in the rear. And the crotch, depending on the wearer's height, usually hit at the knees.

Getting to go to a Spike Camp was duty that everyone wanted; mainly it took us away from the military at main camp and such things as inspections, bed checks, standing reveille, forming for retreat and most important was that the main camps fed for a daily man allowance of 30¢. In the Spike Camp this allowance was beefed up by an amount of 50¢ per day per man. The reason for this was that shipping and hauling was tough so they let the cooks and Forest Service buy locally to inject some money into the local economy. As tough as times were it wasn't long before they were getting plenty of competition from the suppliers. We really ate high off the hog in those camps.

To be chosen for the Spike Camp you had to be able to work hard, with little supervision and generally do a high standard job. There were drawbacks—if you weren't on fire standby you could go into town in the evening. The hitch to this was in event of a fire call you had 3 minutes to be either at the Ranger Station (about 2 doors from the Silver Dollar) or at the Spike camp where the present station now stands. If you missed, you knew well what would happen. The next morning you were on your way back to main camp. A few dry runs were held and those who missed were always given the same treatment. We also had a 'flying squad of four men'. These four men were among the best fire fighters in the camp and they were assigned duty with what was then a revolutionary piece of equipment. The district had a new 1936 V-8 Ford pick up, painted a bright red, a loud siren, an 85 gallon tank with a marine pump and live hose reel. They also had complete tools including 5 five-gallon backpacks to take care of a ten-man crew.

Someone came up with a directive that the pick-up could not leave the station without its CCC crew on board. After the first of July the flying squad was on 24-hour stand-by. (When you heard the siren at the station you had better be in the road in front of the camp when that pick-up came by.) The men were rotated every two weeks or so to keep them from going nuts under those restrictions. One evening, Barney Mendenhall, the Ranger, decided to show how the rig worked to a couple of his friends. The "Fire?" was reported at Weeksville and Barney came by camp in a cloud of dust and the crew hit their perches. About a half hour later one of the foremen took one of the crew trucks out, which was puzzling. When the crew got back they gave us the scoop; Barney was doing better than 60 MPH down the road and an old hereford cow walked out in front of him. Those mechanical brakes, the speed of the vehicle and the closeness of the cow only meant one thing; anyway, the local body shop had the rig back on the road in two days and you could not detect a scratch to it. I often wonder if all the accident reports had been made out or if Barney just paid the bill and said "To hell with it."

The year 1936 was one terribly bad fire year. I was on my first fire about the 25th of May. Lightning had struck an old snag in a patch of ceanothus about 8 miles west of Thompson Falls and right on top of a mountain on the north side of the Clarks Fork River. That was something when daylight came to look down and see a herd of Mountain Goats 500 to 1000 feet below you. Besides the lightning Alley along the Clark Fork and the Little Thompson we also had certain things that led to troubles. The Anaconda Company was logging private lands north of Plains and they were using Shays (a type of locomotive) and railroad logging. Those danged old teakettles threw a lot of sparks and they were not practicing right-of-way management. The other trouble was the Northern Pacific Railroad. For some reason there were not the best of relationships between the local railway hierarchy and the district staff. The engines were still burning coal and it seemed they would shake their grates wherever they felt like it. That would be equivalent to scattering a pick-up load of hot coals over a 4 mile of track. Then they had a zealous section gang. That bunch of Italians was charged with keeping the right-of-way burned clean and fire proof. Some of this was tough burning so they would wait until it was real hot and the wind was blowing then touch off the tough spots. We caught one a half-mile away. It left good tracks. We would try getting facts from that section gang on who did what and I never saw a bunch that understood so little English.

Over the 4th of July my buddy, the telephone construction technician and I chased 6 fires out of Bend Station. We figured we walked over 30 miles. It is interesting going through beaver swamps at midnight with only one headlamp for the crew. Our uniforms weren't the only part of the outfit that was WWI surplus. The emergency rations had hardtack that was stamped U.S. Army 1918. The rest of the ration consisted of a can of beef (knew a guy who swore he found a spur rowel in a can of the stuff), a tin of bacon, a large molasses candy bar, a can of beans, a can of grapefruit, a can of cheese, and a box of raisins. We had two-piece shovels that we would take apart and use the blade for a frying pan. We would fry our bacon in the shovel and then soak the hardtack in the grease. Not too bad if you were hungry. Some of the older smoke chaser packs had cast iron cooking utensils and a wool blanket in them.

We hit quite a few fires in the project class. Two really stand out, the Cow Coulee Fire south of Cascade and reputed to have had as many as 5000 men assigned to it and the Edna Creek Fire on the Old Ant Flat District of the Kootenai. It hit around 13,000 acres on Cow Coulee. Our crew went into a sector camp about eight miles from the end of a road. We were assigned a sector well over 2-1/2-miles long. The hike in was pack your own sleeping bag and a fresh shovel in one hand a sharp pulaski in the other. Our 25-man crew replaced 125 New Yorkers; we figured that was about PAR. The next day we were on control and after that moved into mop-up. About the 5th day we were sometimes going a mile into that fire for a smoke. The "we" is loosely used, as one man was sent to each smoke. After 8 days we had all the smoke out in one hell of a lot of real estate. Pat Duffy had worked us 14 hours a day except Sunday when we only put in 10. 75 Kentuckians replaced us. We knew we were good but not that good, i.e., 25 of us replacing 125 New Yorkers, controlling over a 2-1/2-mile sector, mopping it up and then being replaced by 75 Kentuckians. Someone must of thought we were supermen.

Our camp had been dry, all water coming in by pack string. We were given a quart of water a day to wash in. When we hit the base camp on Smith River someone took a look and threw each of us a big towel and a bar of soap. Smith River was nice and warm and it sure ran muddy for some time. We went home from that fire without a repairable pair of shoes in the outfit. Stretching out to shovel had caused those low crotched pants to rip and split. You should have seen the skirts that were fabricated as a cover up when they stopped to feed us in restaurants on the way home. We used towels, burlap sacks, and blankets. The guys may have looked like something from Hades but at least we didn't get arrested for indecent exposure.

All of our traveling was in the back of 1-1/2-ton stake trucks. These were open with absolutely no protection from the elements. I sometimes wondered in later years about the necessity of sending out two pick-ups when 4 men were going somewhere. After 'ceilings' that was cured because we only had two men and they were going different directions.

We hit Edna Creek the last part of August. The nights got quite cool. The first night the camp boss heard that the crew was from the Flathead Valley so he wouldn't issue sleeping bags, as he was sure we would hide them in the bushes and come back for them after we were discharged. There was a small mountain of baled bags in the supply area. Did you ever try to get some sleep when three men are trying to sack out under one small WWI Army blouse and it freezes an inch of ice in a water bucket?

Here on Edna Creek was where we almost had a riot and it wasn't from sleeping without bags either. All of the local WPA crews had been drafted to fight the fire. They had a funny situation: the most they could make on WPA was $40.00 per month and if they missed their scheduled week of work it took another full month to reestablish their eligibility. Most of these men then had to make at least $80.00 to come out even. The going rate for line workers was 35 cents per hour so it took a few hours to make up the difference. Us Hooligans were doing the same work but only getting $5.00 per month take home ($25.00 was sent home). The fire overhead wound up putting CCC night crews on where CCC crews had been doing the day job and all the hard feelings ended.

Edna Creek was where I saw a horse team used to plow a fire line. In the lead would be about three teams of CCC sawyers who cut windfalls and the large obstructions. The team of horses followed. The horses were two big logging horses and hitched in tandem to a two-way fire plow (right or left). Following was about a 10-man crew that sanitized the line; limbed up trees, broke up concentrations of fuel against the line and did some spotting. Even in the very heavy fuels of Edna Creek we had no trouble getting as much as a mile an hour of line with this set up. I would say that the line built was about the speed of a modern dozer but we didn't have the troubles of pushovers and buried fire. In that period backfiring was verboten and burnout was kept to the minimum, so usually you had your butt in the flames. I saw spruce crown out close enough to singe that big team and they wouldn't bat an eye, just keep leaning into their collars. The line was a full 18 inches wide and usually as deep as needed to turn mineral soil.

When I said the Forest Service was not permitting backfiring during this period, I was not joking. Many of the bad escapes during 1929 and the very early '30's had been caused by the improper use of backfires. The 1929 Half Moon Fire that burned a good share of Glacier Park was a classic example of what could happen. As an 8-year-old I was out watching the fire with my folks. The fire had started around 2:00 p.m. about 5 miles west-northwest of Columbia Falls. Pushed by about a ten mile per hour west wind it was heading toward the Northfork Road and a mile or so north of Columbia Falls. The fire plan was apparently to backfire from this road when conditions were right. When we got up there they had men lined along the road with torches. The word came down the line to start backfires. I can still vividly remember an old lumberjack about 30 feet away from us putting his torch to the east side of the road and my dad saying "We better head for home." Within one half hour it was on top of Teakettle Mountain to the east. I believe it was during WWII that backfiring again became respectable.

Of that old CCC bunch there are many memories: Bud Mitchell and I met several times and I understand that he retired from the Forest Service as a dispatcher. Winnie Cowan is a yardmaster here in Whitefish. Owen Grinde is some kind of executive for the Burlington Northern. Our crew had an Indian who we called 'Chief' Malatare. For him I had a particular soft spot. One evening a drunk Indian (not a CCC) got me in a corner in the old hospital that we were using for our first camp in Plains. This guy had a long wicked knife and was bound and determined that he was going to see what my insides looked like. 'Chief' talked him out of it but things were sure tense for a while. Malatare was badly wounded in the Marines in WWII. The corps let him go home to Augusta to die. 'Southy' Southerland who, with me, wheeled all the cement used for the garage at Plains is still in the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. While job-hunting in Seattle during February of '41 I saw another of my friends, well manacled, being taken into the police station. Another of my friends used to stop and visit quite often when I was Ranger at Lincoln. He lived in the Alice Creek area. My wife and I were in Sparks, Nevada, when he made national news. His son had shot and killed him when he was using a bullwhip on the youth.

The CCC experience was a part of my career that cannot be forgotten. I often wonder if such a program would be successful under today's climate? We had a true mixture, college graduates and prison rejects and well mixed. There was an education program that was different. You could learn anything in their classes from running a jackhammer to planting trees. The only requirements were that you had to really want to learn the subject, that an instructor could be found, and that the process was on your and the instructor's own time. Forest Service and Army personnel both put in many long evenings teaching classes in trades and formal education.

Should I live to be 100 the things I shall always remember is Pat Duffy putting his head into our tent at 4:00 a.m. and hollering "I want four volunteers for a fire, Morris, Clark and two others!" Also "Oley" stopping the crew in early September saying he had a letter from Major Kelley saying we were the best organized fire crew in the Region.

The next summer, 1937, I figured I was all set to try for a seasonal job with the Forest Service. I approached Charley Shaw, who was then Ranger at Tally Lake, for a job. I gave him my experience and references and he sent me to guard school. I passed with flying colors. Casey Streed was one of the instructors. One of the trainees asked Casey how you could keep warm at nights on a fire and Casey replied "Simple, there will be a blanket in your smoke chaser pack. You stand up and wrap that around you, then you start shivering and if you shiver hard enough you can shiver yourself warm, then you lay down and go to sleep." I am not sure but I think someone leaked my true age to either Carter Helseth or Charley, anyway I didn't go to work that year as a regular. I wound up as a per diem guard in Whitefish. They had about 15 of us ex-CCC boys lined up and they would give us a call if either the State or the Forest needed any extra hands in an emergency. The work was quite intermittent but there were no restricts. If you were ready when they called, fine; if not, still OK. One nice thing about the set-up was that we usually were paid as faller or straw boss and that was 45 cents per hour against the usual 35 cents for a line worker.

During the summer of 1937 I caught one good project fire. It happened on June 4th and we were there 3 days until it hit control. The fire started on state land above Whitefish Lake. It happened in old tiehack slash where the brush had been all hand piled but not burned and it was about 10 years old. One of those old hand piles would start and they would burn hot enough to throw brands over what seemed like the whole north end of Flathead County.

We, myself, and five friends, were picked up about dark at the old Stillwater station when Morris Cusik came in from the fire and said, "I need all the help I can get." They assigned the six of us to a strawboss. This guy was a huge character wearing dashboard overalls. About 10:00 p.m. I had some questions for him and apparently he had got tired, as we never saw him again on that fire. At midnight they took us off the line and were feeding us from a pile of brown bread, tin willy and Moss Rose beans. They asked for some volunteers to go back to the station and go on a new sector at daylight where the fire had jumped Swift Creek. I volunteered the crew (I was now strawboss) as the station meant a good meal and a couple of hours sack time. We had a good supper, a 2-hour sleep, and a good breakfast and were on our way across Swift Creek at daybreak.

Everything went really smooth to about 10:00 a.m. At that time a brisk dry wind sprang up from the southwest. We had only been building line, not having enough men to drop off for patrol. That fire started spotting and spotting hot. The first spot I gave to two of my crew. The next spot 2 more went. The last fellow and I took the next one. Except for the one crewman who was with me I saw no more of that crew until after the wind shifted about 8:00 p.m. One of those crewmen was my brother. The fire burned out a camp that had been set up for use and they had a new one in the process outside the line when we walked out through the fire. The Forest Service had taken over the fire and they had installed an old cow camp cook as a slum burner.

They had 200 men waiting to be fed and to go on the line where our 25-man crew had been trying to stop it. These 200 men were hungry and they were making a lot of noise about it. Finally it got to that old cook and he stood up and hollered "Not a one of you sons of bitches gets a bite until every man who came out of that fire has been fed." They shut up. He had piled all his Kimmel stoves in a heap and was cooking in big bake tins on bars over fire pits. There was a hindquarter of beef and he just cut it off the bone, sliced it and fried it. We had steak, canned corn, mashed potatoes, gravy, with strawberries for dessert. The cook told me later that the 25-man crew ate the whole hindquarter of beef and he had to feed hot dogs and ham to the 200 going on the line. We had 3 big days on that fire and I drew strawboss wages for the whole time and the check came to $14.00. One of my crew was a good worker but he never stopped bitching. The state was doing the paying and their schedule was 45 cents per hour for strawing and fallers, 35 cents for a productive line worker and 25 cents if you didn't put out. This one fellow rated the bitcher on my crew at 25¢, and then he did howl.

Fires weren't coming too fast so I signed on with one of the Great Northern's steel gangs. After about 3 weeks I got tired of 10 hour days, 20 minute noons, damn poor grub and only clearing $2.00 per day. The Norsky boss and I also had a disagreement and I told him where he could shove his railroad and where he could nail a cross tie after he got it shoved there. Then I grabbed the first empty tie truck heading back for the woods.

I wound up working for Wilford DeSeve in his camp. My job, for the most part, was staring at the south end of a northbound skidding team. Part of the time I would be swamping and the crew couldn't figure out my not tiring after swinging that 42 lb. ax all day. After 10 hours with that 8 lb. spike maul the ax seemed like a toy. The camp was strictly of the classic type. The bunkhouse was a long, low log building with one little sky lite window in the roof. Bunks were rough board frames filled with hay taken from the horses.

Sanitation was a board trough with a few tin washbasins; and the bull cook would bring in two buckets of warm water morning and evening. The toilet was a pole between two trees over a rather shallow pit. There was a Christmas tree frame over the stove where you could dry your socks at night and a deacon seat that ran down the middle. There was also a kerosene lamp in each end of the bunkhouse. The cookhouse was about the same except it did have a window, a big wood range in the cooking area, and plank tables covered with white oil cloth. The system was typical: you were assigned a seat and you sat nowhere else, you walked in when the gut hammer was rung, you sat down, you ate, you DID NOT talk, you finished, you got up, and you left.

Every evening someone was usually leaving camp with a rifle. A little questioning brought out the fact that a venison would knock quite a bit off your 35 cent a meal board charge.

The logging area was the Edna Creek burn of the year before and the ashes were still deep. Beings there were no bathing facilities in camp a few of us prudish ones used to catch the last tie truck after supper heading for Trego. We would get off at an old splash dam on Wolf Creek and wash the black off.

About a week before school started the boss told me one morning that he would have to lay me off. A couple of his old jacks had come back to sober up. I said OK, and then he said I do have a job if you want it, bucking ties out of the mill. I asked him what it paid and he said 60 cents per 100. They cut 600 ties a day and when a truck had trouble you were stacking them 8 feet high. I told him I thought I would go fishing. My check was good but I met some of the crew a few weeks later and they said on the next payday that all of the checks bounced.

The summer of 1938 was quiet as far as project fires for the local per diem crew. I managed to hustle a couple of jobs in the tie camps to bring in some beer money. During that period of time it was expected that a scaler would pay his wages every day with a long thumb on the "gyp stick." On any falling job you could expect to have a scaler in the woods weighing up each crew daily. In the one camp it was the practice for each crew to write their gang number, an arrow for direction of fall, number of tie lengths and the date on the tree stump. Our scaler really had a big thumb and was also a little stupid. A couple of the crews decided to recapture some of our work. When we would head out in the morning the first thing we would do on the edge of the last day's work was to scalp the tops off a few stumps that had been tallied the day before. We would hide the disk cut off and write the dope for the present day's cut on the new stump. I guess we got over-eager as he caught on within a week. We did get a few days pay that was almost equal to our cut.

The summer of 1938 was also the one that I decided to get rich as a cedar pole maker. The job was up the North Fork of the Flathead and another typical logging camp. The outfit had one set price, 3/4 cents per running foot of pole made. This meant falling, bucking and peeling. Those poles all had to be real good or they were culled. Two 50-ft. poles, about 4 hours work, netted you and your partner a total of 75 cents. I decided to quit when it looked like I would have to buy a sack of 'BULL DURHAM' on the time pay plan.

During these years it seemed as though I was always chasing jobs and filling out applications. Our present personnel section heads would really go "gunny bag" if they were to view the hiring procedures of those days. The form was mimeographed and had about 25 questions on one side of a sheet and that was it. You did not fill it out except for the original copy. You could use anything you could write with to fill the blanks.

The Forest Service form asked how old you were. How much time you had spent in the woods. Could you handle stock? Could you cook for yourself? What hand tools could you use? etc. Down at the bottom they had one personal question—Are you married or single? You can bet that if you were married you didn't get the job. This was because you were expected to stay in the brush all summer and most married men seemed to get a yearning for Mama about the middle of August. By contrast the Park Service also had a form (printed) still just one side and fill out one copy. Their questions were—Are you married? How many children? Are you on relief? What relief organization? Are you a veteran? and at the bottom of the page there was one very short line following the questions: Do you know anything about the work you are applying for?

The employment contract for Temps was about the same caliber. It was mimeographed on both sides. Mainly it had your name and mailing address, the terms of employment, to wit: If you quit or were discharged for cause your pay stopped and your travel was without benefit of Government food or transportation. You also pledged to take care of all government equipment and stay with a fire until it was put out or you were properly relieved. They also asked whom to notify in case of serious accident. Jelmer Rainey wrote "The undertaker."

In May of 1939 I received a note from Carter Helseth stating that I had been selected for a position as LOOK-OUT, FIREMAN on the Big Prairie Ranger District. The salary would be at the rate of $1200.00 per annum. Would I please reply if I desired to accept. There were other things not explained in the note. One was that I would pay out $18.00 per month for board and $5.00 per month for quarters. This was a flat rate whether you were at headquarters or eating bear grass roots and sleeping on a hillside by a burning snag. Take home amounted to $77.00 per month. Even in those days $200.00 was not a hell of a lot to get one through the winter. Maybe that was the reason for the question, "Are you married or single?" Many of the crew used to bitch, saying the Forest Service at least fed its mules during the winter. There were some fringe benefits. One was that if a seasonal employee wanted to use a Forest Service cabin as headquarters for a winter trapping operation he would usually be given permission. The trapper was expected to provision the place from his own funds before the snow hit. He was also expected to leave the place cleaner and in better shape than when he found it and the woodpile should be a little bigger when he left. The Service would also act as a clearinghouse for other Government agencies that were trying to find men for short-term employment. Carter Helseth placed Steve Wilkie and me with the USGS the fall of 1941. Our boss was Arthur Johnson, one of the finest cartographers I ever knew. We mapped dam sites on the lower Flathead from Polson to the old remount ferry site. The crew was broken up when Steve received his "Greetings."

The problem of eating, living and working were the interesting part of this era. To place things in perspective one must remember there were no, or practically no, pre-packaged foods. Aluminum foil, plastics, dehydrated, and freeze-dried were not yet words in the dictionary. The Forest Service then, like now, was always looking for the low bid and whenever you hired one man you could be sure that you turned down from four to ten men that wanted the job real bad. If an employee didn't pan out he would be summarily separated and replaced by someone who would. In all truth it wasn't unusual for a 'crew' to head down the road if they didn't like the way things were being handled.

The standard workweek was 44 hours, five eight-hour days plus Saturday morning. Safety standards were in force but not if they interfered with production. Those 3 seasons in Big Prairie I worked less than ten days on a crew having more than two men. The first summer I spent 6 weeks without seeing another human being. Crews were expected to hit the different camps or cabins on the day the ranger had scheduled. This sometimes led to 16-hour days when there were a lot of logs in the trail or the telephone line had a lot of breaks. One trail job was particularly unique. The trail up Little Salmon to Lion and Smith Creek passes. The main camp for our two-man trail crew was about 22 miles up the Little Salmon where the phone line and trail went up to Point 56 Look Out. The ranger, Bill Gaffney, did not believe in trail crewmen having horses as they were expected to "be in condition" for smokechasing when the season got bad. The crew would roll some grub in their sleeping bags, tie on a can for coffee, a frying pan and a couple of pie tin plates, one man carrying the axe and the other the jungle harp and away we would go for the upper reaches of the Little Salmon. No matter how you did it, it would be four days before you would be back to the comparative luxury of your tent and Kimmel stove at the trail camp. You were also completely out of communication for the entire period. There was a camping spot of sorts where [?] and Smith Creek formed the Little Salmon. I think the distance was about 13 miles and you were expected to make there the first day. There was some really massive spruce in that drainage. We cut several that were over 4 ft. through and across the trail. That really speeds up the mile per day production.

My first summer I worked with John French, now an attorney in Ronan. We started from Spotted Bear about 1:00 p.m. and made Meadow Creek cabin by supper. The next day we made Salmon Forks. From there we headed for Tango Cabin. Tango was a long 13 miles away and the cabin was supposed to be stocked from the winter game count so we didn't have to cut out ahead of a pack string. Just cut out the trail and hang the telephone line. We cut out the trail but lacked 4 miles of having the line all up that first day. We also picked up a grizzly cub for company. When I first saw him he was on a back-slope of the trail and about 20 feet in front of us. My six-shooter sort of jumped into my hand and I said 'Johnny, watch out for mama.' Mama never showed up and the cub followed us to Tango Cabin. At that time (1939) the elk population was at its peak. At Big Slide we wandered into a herd of elk. One calf came up and sniffed the two of us; we were probably gamy by then.

One must remember that everything we ate came in by way of a long day's truck haul to Spotted Bear and then a minimum of two days by pack mule to wherever we were working. Fresh bread, meat, and vegetables were not in the picture for a trail crew. Breakfast was invariably hotcakes with either canned ham or bacon, lunch would be a small can of fruit and sandwiches made from baking powder biscuits; the lunch pail was a sugar sack tied to the back of the belt. Supper was the big meal: baking powder biscuits, (enough for next days lunch), canned ham, or tin willy, or canned stew, spuds and a canned vegetable followed by canned fruit. This meal regimen seldom varied. We could have baked bread on week ends but the yeast that was furnished would not work (remember the low bid). We usually saved the mouse-chewed bacon to toss into the beans in case we ran out of rations.

After getting our "talking wire" patched into Tango Cabin, Johnny and I started to work trail and line up to Holland Peak Look Out. This had been the main trail for years from the Swan into Big Prairie. And it wasn't much of a trail. They had finished the Pendent Creek Trail the previous fall. This was a much shorter trail with an easier grade and went by Upper Holland Lake. After we finished pulling the telephone lines out of the snow banks to see if they were in one piece we started up Big Salmon for the Pendent trail. Some of those spruce stands were really falling apart. In one place we had ten big ones in less than 100 yards. Late in the afternoon Johnny stopped sawing and said "Bert, am I riding this saw?" I told him he had but I was scared to say anything because I was sure I might have been. Anyway we headed for camp a little after five that day. Our last day at Tango we went all the way to Upper Holland Lake and back. This was about the 10th of July and the days were long. We got to camp at dark having left there a little after six in the morning. We had to hike eight miles to start work. When we hit the cabin John walked to the phone and called the Ranger and said "Bill we just got in. How many more days like this before I'm promoted to alternate?" I am sure he got Gaffney out of bed to answer that phone.

When anyone had any complaints about the long hours or work drudgery, someone always came up with a stock answer: "You can rest when you get on the lookout." That resting on a lookout was a crock in that period. You were not expected to. You had to maintain at least a two weeks' supply of wood, a 3 days' supply of water, keep your quarters and yourself clean and often, depending on the point, the lookout would have a patrol to make following every lightning storm. The one on Garnet Peak was six miles long and rough. That amounted to a 12 mile round trip carrying a smokechaser pack, a portable phone, and enough water to get you by for 24 hours. Maintaining that 3-day water supply was also labor as a lot of the water trails involved as much as 4000 feet in elevation as well as the rather short horizontal distance. Frank Bailey used to go from the top of Sentinel to the Southfork River for his water and often he would do it before breakfast. He must have got up early.

I have tried to show the work conditions, the food, and the wages, but this brings up an interesting corollary. There were men who had been returning to these jobs year after year after year. Many of these men must have kept returning because they liked the life. I forget the man's name but I understood that he sat on Holland Peak for a total of 17 summers. Jelmer Rainey must have had close to that time on Crimson. Everret Sommers and his brother were both close to 10 years when I knew them. Norm of Norm's News in Kalispell also put in quite a few seasons.

The attraction for the jobs could not have been money, glory or the chance of promotion. No promotions were available. The one thing that sticks in my mind was the independence and freedom that one had. Almost 75 percent of a summer would be spent alone. When you were working with another man you still had no interference, no supervision, and damned little direction. This, plus the fact that regardless of how tough or easy it might be, you knew that tomorrow was going to be different and something new. This was an ERA for many of us and no one can take it away no matter how much the management may change.

There are a few stories about some of these 'characters.' Jelmer Rainey used a lot of snoose. During August of '39 he ran out. To him there were just two alternatives: No. 1, he could walk out and get more (quit). No. 2, the Forest Service could see that he got another roll. Dick Johnson came in to the Prairie in the Travel-afire to take out Lee Clark with a case of Spotted Fever. He took along a roll of snoose when he headed for Missoula, approaching Crimson from the east. There was one real bad down draft on that side and they just about didn't make it over. They must have dumped the snoose to lighten the load as the snoose hit the cliff. That rock face is about 1500 feet vertical. This didn't bother Jelmer; he crawled around and down and picked it up, damaged though the cans were. He came up with eight of the original ten boxes of the snuff.

In 1940 Ev Sommers on Lena was given a horse so he could do a better job of smokechasing. Ev didn't like horses, preferred walking, so he left the pasture fence down but the horse wouldn't leave. Ev then hit on the idea that if the saddle was unusable he couldn't use the horse so he threw the saddle out on the ground hoping the porkys would eat up the cinch. They didn't even look at it so Ev was considered mounted for the summer.

While Harry Lanagan was cutting out trail by himself, he was standing on a log axing it out between his feet. The ax glanced and he had one awful cut in his right foot. He had to ford and swim the Southfork at Salmon Forks cabin to get to a phone to report. The ranger made arrangements for him to be picked up and transported by horse to Holbrook the next day so he could be flown to medical attention. Harry really argued with the ranger because his brother Jim was coming in from working trails pretty quick and he could sew up the cut with his sewing kit and when he went back to the lookout it would have plenty of time to heal. Good thing he went out as they had to connect two tendons.

During 1938 one of the lookouts was sent on his point early because of fire danger. Quite often you wound up cutting these spur trails out ahead of the packstring carrying your summer's supplies. This fellow didn't have a string behind him, all he did was patch his telephone line and get up there. Well the pack strings were real busy elsewhere; he had quite a few beans, rice, corn meal, flour, sugar and salt, but nothing in the way of meat. After a week this got old so he called up and asked when the string was coming? They still didn't know so he shot a kid goat. He said it was real good eating and he had stretched and cured the hide. It was sure a beautiful thing.

One other item that was standard in the ration was "Fay Bantos" corned beef This was packed in a yellow tin shaped like a pyramid with the top chopped off. I don't know what Argentina put in those cans but it was generally left to be used only as a last resort. After WWII was cleaning the warehouse at Coram. In the basement must have been at least a good-sized pick-up load of this stuff. The ranger told me to haul it to the dump. Being I had a dog, I high graded a can or two to try out on him. The danged dog wouldn't eat it either. We also used to get some stuff in one pound cans that had the word "COFFEE" stamped on it with a rubber stamp in big purple letters. You could not have told the contents without the stamp. Steve Wilkie made the coffee one evening when we were working together, it took him over 45 minutes and he watched like a hawk so the stuff did not boil, just simmered. It was probably as good a cup of coffee as I have ever drunk. That stuff was just too sophisticated for us "Bileing" types of cooks.

The year 1939 was about the first year that anything was tried in the field of smokejumping. Part of this nucleus crew was stationed at Big Prairie. Dick Lynch is one of the individuals who sticks out in my memory. I understand he died of cancer while still quite young. Dick had spent the day haying, without a shirt, and had acquired one heluva sunburn. The next day a WO delegation came in and wanted a smokejumping demonstration. The crew obliged but Dick grabbed a chute and forgot to fully adjust the harness. This is before the day of static lines. He made a free fall for a ways then pulled the ripcord. That harness snapped against him when the chute popped. You could see every mark of the harness above his waist that night. Carl Nussbacker (changed his name in WWII) told me that during those ripcord days he missed the ripcord and pulled all the buttons off his canvas jumper before he reached the ripcord.

In 1946 I was running a small work crew at Coram. This crew all consisted of returning vets and not fully responsible. One of them was part Indian and his name was Clark. He told me, and the ranger vouched, that he had been part of the 1939 and 1940 jumper nucleus. I had a standard practice that if I wanted my crew on Monday I would have to start late Sunday afternoon and hit all the bars in Whitefish and Kalispell and before I had completed the rounds I would have the crew gathered and would then haul them to Coram. This one time I found Clark in the Pine Grove or Stockholm and he was a real mess. On the way to the station I got to asking what had happened. He said "Well, me and this big guy started arm wrestling, then we got more serious, we wound up on the floor. I was doing fine until he hit me on the head with the open end of a spittoon." He not only looked it but smelled like it.

I was interested in photography and purchased a Kodak 35mm in 1940. By today's standards it was rather crude but I did get a lot of wonderful pictures with it. Most notable are the sunsets and mountain goats. I have one series where we chased a yearling goat into the Little Salmon and then captured him. Harry Lanagan and I carried him to Salmon Forks Cabin on a stretcher made from one of Ranger Anderson's mantas. Don't pack a goat on a stretcher unless you can keep the rear end higher than the head. That goat was vicious and knew what his horns were for. They tried to get him to the Crazy Mountains for a goat plant but he died from not eating before plane connections could be made.

On the Little Salmon I got a picture of a huge grizzly. He was on an old slide about 200 yards above our camp and he can still be made out in the negative of the 35mm black and white. I have over a hundred of these negatives that I have never had printed.

Garnet and Mud Lake Look Outs were the subjects of quite a few color slides. It was a real shock when I flew big Prairie in 1963 to see the cover changes on much of the area. There was a 5-acre view clearing around Mud Lake and when I sat there I could almost reach to the tops of the trees. The Necklace Lakes had been surrounded by large mountain meadows. Twenty-four years later the area was well stocked with timber. An uneducated guess was that recreational stock had overgrazed the area allowing the timber to move in.

There were a couple of seasons at Coram that were quite different. The fall of '46 I got a chance to work with John Pike cruising the Hungry Horse flowage area. That was an interesting job and John Pike was a real good guy to work for. When he took over the project the first thing he did was throw out all the data requirements except for volume and species, this speeded us up a lot. The fall of '47 I became a scaler at Pinnacle for Rocky Mountain Lumber Company. Morris Raskin who owned the set-up tried to hire me. He offered $100.00 per week and 10 percent of the action. He said "Any week the 10 percent is less than your wages I'll expect you to quit." I had a wedding date set and my bride and I decided I should return to school. Years later when U.S. Industries bought Rocky Mountain, the 10 percent would have been $400,000.00. The summer of '48 my wife and I spent in the checking station a mile out of Martin City. That summer there was a man shot within 50 feet of my wife in Martin City. The Flatheads moved enmasse into the huckleberry patch south of our cabin. One night they all got drunk and were chanting war songs. Remembering my encounter in Plains I laid the six-shooter on an apple box by the bed and locked the doors. I told her that if one of them came around that night he would be there in the morning.

I spent most of the summer of '47 trying to keep the telephone line through the clearing operations patched together. Quite a few farmers decided to come up for the big money when the haying was over. That telephone line was really an attraction for those fellers in dashboard overalls. Saw one crew walk up to a big larch with an old Mall-6. They started in on one side and went straight through to the other, no under-cut. I was running when it started to topple. We had 5 fires break out from a dragging brake shoe on a Great Northern freight the day that 13 men were burned up in Mann Gulch on the Helena. One of the jumpers was Hellman. His dad, Jim, worked at Coram and received word about the time we got our fire calls. Jim insisted on working until we had control. The Ranger, Bert Beally, almost had to make him go home to his wife.

Other real sad parts of my career were when Fred Metcalf took a disability retirement. I was sure leaning on him and he had given me a lot of good training in my early years. The other major hurt was when Oliver (Slim) Meyers died of a heart attack while setting up a winter cruise camp in Hay Creek on the Glacier View District. I had worked under Slim for several seasons and his wife and mine were close friends. By a quirk he was then working for me. I never met a person with a better sense of humor and who could get more work real easy out of any crew assigned him.

One thing I'll always remember is one day during the winter of '54 and '55 I went to check on a cruising crew working out of Ninko Cabin on the north end of Glacier View. It was snowshoes every day and the thermometer had been dodging around 38 below. The crew was sleeping in tents. This day one of the young foresters looked at me and said, "Bert, you old bastard, now I want you to tell me how tough you had it in the old days." Hell, I was only 33 then.