Trails of the Past: Historical Overview of the Flathead National Forest, Montana, 1800-1960

A Flathead National Forest employee of 1915, if transported to the Flathead National Forest of today, might have difficulty recognizing the agency and much of the land it manages, so great have been the changes over the decades. For example, most of the drainages with roads would have been reached in his time only by several days' travel on horseback or on foot. No longer in a custodial role, the Forest is now actively managing timber sales, developed campgrounds, and other resources. Many of the forest homesteads established in the early 1900s have reverted back to the agency; some of those that are still private are now summer homes.

The era of the fire lookout has come and gone, replaced by airplanes. Instead of small crews of local men hired to fight fires, large crews of men and women are often flown in from all over the country to fight fires. Radios, commercial telephone systems, and computers dominate agency communications. Some similarities with 1915 remain, however, particularly within the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. There, pack strings still supply backcountry administrative sites, and much of the work is still done by hand. But the presence of the agency - in the form of guard stations, trails, and the number of employees - is more apparent than it would have been in the early 1900s, when funding and other resources were quite low.

Finally, the hypothetical 1915 worker would be astonished at the changes in the Flathead Valley communities. Cars and trucks have practically replaced the railroad, and the population of the valley has grown greatly over the past several decades. Many people, including Forest Service employees, commute great distances to their jobs. Local businesses provide goods and services that were unheard of in 1915.

The history of the Flathead Valley and of the Flathead National Forest is summarized in the paragraphs that follow. This broad-brush summary gives some idea of the patterns of change and continuity - for better and for worse - that have taken place in the Flathead Valley since the arrival of the first Euroamerican in approximately 1800.

The Flathead Valley remained difficult and hazardous to access for decades after the first Euroamericans came through the area. This was due to topographical factors such as the surrounding rugged mountains and Flathead Lake, the hostility of the Blackfeet to the east, and the long, hard winters. Independent fur trappers and fur company employees ventured into the upper Flathead Valley in the early 1800s. At that time, bands of Kootenai were the main occupants of the the area. The center of the fur trade in the region was farther south, in the Mission Valley. A small group of Euroamericans joined a number of Kootenai at a traditional camping ground near the head of Flathead Lake in the 1840s to form the first tentative (and short-lived) Euroamerican settlement in the upper Flathead Valley. At approximately the same time, the Hudson's Bay Company established a seasonal trading post in the Tobacco Plains Valley. Settlement in the upper Flathead, however, remained temporary and very low in numbers until the 1870s, despite several government and private surveys and explorations that traveled through and reported on the area in the 1850s through the 1870s. The establishment of the Flathead Indian Reservation in the lower Flathead Valley in 1855 further insulated the region.

In the 1860s hopeful prospectors and miners passed through the Flathead Valley on their way north to the mines in the Wild Horse Creek area of British Columbia. After that boom had slowed, some of these men returned to the Flathead Valley to prospect, a few even to settle. Gradually, the outside world was learning about the abundant natural resources of the Flathead Valley.

The real influx of permanent settlers to the Flathead did not occur until 1883, when the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Missoula over 100 miles to the south. Blackfeet hostility had lessened by this time, and transportation improvements such as steamboat travel on Flathead Lake reduced the earlier obstacles to settlement and exploration of the area. During the 1880s, settlers cleared land in the valley floor for agriculture and began exploring the surrounding mountains for mineral and other resources. Major fires in the summer of 1889 burned thousands of acres in the surrounding forests; there was not yet an organized firefighting system in the area. The town of Demersville, founded in 1887, was the largest town in the valley for a time.

With the arrival of the first Great Northern Railway train in the Flathead Valley in 1891, most of the barriers to travel into the Flathead were removed overnight. Markets for agricultural and timber products suddenly became national rather than strictly local. More and more people moved into the area. Some of the towns founded along the railroad line are still major communities in the valley, such as Kalispell and Columbia Falls; many others no longer exist.

In the early 1890s, prospectors ventured into the more remote valleys and believed they had discovered promising signs of coal, oil, and mineral resources, particularly in the drainages of the North and South Forks of the Flathead River. The financial panic that began in 1893 slowed the development of the valley, but the economy picked up again when the Klondike gold rush began in 1897 and created vast new markets for products of northwestern Montana. Prospectors continued to search the mountains and creeks for wealth, and some trails and roads were built to promising sites. None of these deposits, however, led to much development work or to the production and shipping of valuable resources.

The U. S. government, meanwhile, had begun setting aside "forest reserves" to protect watersheds on the public domain from devastation by lumbermen and fire. In 1897, President Cleveland created the two forest reserves that later became known as the Flathead National Forest: the Flathead Forest Reserve extending along the international boundary from Tobacco Plains on the west to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation on the east, and the Lewis & Clarke [sic] Forest Reserve, extending along the South Fork of the Flathead from the Middle Fork almost to Ovando. Despite much initial local protest about "locking up" valuable lands, the General Land Office hired rangers to protect the forest reserves from fire and timber trespass beginning in 1898.

The Forest Service was created in 1905, and its employees took over the management of the forest reserves that year. The headquarters for the Flathead National Forest (south half) were moved from Ovando to Kalispell, where the Supervisor's Office still is today. In the Flathead, these men (and they were all men) who patrolled the several million acres of the two national forests were faced with great difficulties of transportation and communication in the steeply sloped, heavily wooded reaches of the forests. Early rangers and other employees devoted most of their time and energy to building trails and stringing telephone lines through the woods, always worried about wildlfires burning out of control and destroying the public timber resources being held for future needs. The first phone line on the Forest was built in 1908 between Kalispell and Coram (private companies did not yet serve that route).

In 1910, fires raged throughout northwestern Montana and northern Idaho. The Forest Service was unprepared to suppress such firestorms, and over 3 million acres were destroyed by fire. Immediately after these fires, Forest Service budgets increased and lookout points were established on high peaks and ridges to aid in early fire detection. The Forest Service became the lead firefighting agency in the country. That same year, 1910, Glacier National Park was created out of the eastern portion of the Blackfeet National Forest.

Eventually, the Flathead and Blackfeet National Forests built several thousand miles of trails throughout the two Forests and established systems for supplying workers in remote areas by pack animals. The Forest Service Remount Depot, established near Missoula in 1930, provided stock and equipment to the Region One Forests for many years. Administrative buildings such as ranger stations and guard stations were built along the main trails, which branched off from the few wagon or automobile roads in the area. In 1935 the two Forests were combined into one administrative unit under the name of the Flathead National Forest.

Other agencies and private organizations were also involved in fire protection. The Northern Montana Forestry Association formed in 1911 as an association of private owners of forested land. The group hired fire patrolmen and firefighting crews to protect their lands. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the Stillwater, Swan River, and Coal Creek state forests were carved out of Flathead National Forest lands and the state assumed the responsibility for managing and protecting these lands.

But the Forest Service was not just a fire-oriented agency in the early years. The Flathead National Forest has also managed a number of other forest resources. Beginning in 1906, the national forests opened to settlement land within their boundaries that had been determined to have agricultural value. Homesteaders settled many areas of the Flathead under this program, and although a large number of the homestead tracts eventually reverted back to the U. S. Forest Service, others remain in private ownership to this day. Homesteaders and others obtained permits to graze livestock on national forest land, but grazing was never a large program on the Flathead National Forest.

The Flathead Valley has been one of the centers of the lumber industry in the state since the 1890s, but the timber on national forest land was not harvested to any great extent until World War II. Private lands in the valley bottoms were on more level ground and were thus much more profitable to log, so the lumber companies concentrated on these areas until the mid-1900s. Timber products in the Flathead Valley during this period included sawlogs, railroad crossties, cedar poles, shingles, and lath. The one very large timber sale on the Flathead National Forest prior to World War II was the sale of almost 90 million board feet of timber in the Swan Valley, which the Somers Lumber Company logged between 1914 and 1919. The Somers Lumber Company was a subsidiary of the Great Northern Railway, and it produced railroad ties and lumber at its plant in Somers from 1901 until the 1940s.

Many Flathead Valley residents worked in the woods, often staying in logging camps during the winters. The major IWW-led lumber strikes of 1917 started in Eureka and shut down the mills in the Flathead Valley for several months, leading eventually to improved working conditions and wages for loggers and mill workers. Logging camps declined, however, as trucks replaced horses and river drives. The last river drive of logs in the Flathead Valley occurred in 1931.

World War II created a large demand for the country's timber resources, and the post-war building boom led to an unprecedented demand for timber that could not be met by logging private lands only. The Forest Service shifted from custodial, protective management of the national forests to the development and intensive use of the resources. The agency accelerated timber harvests greatly in order to meet the new demand, and roads were built into many drainages previously accessible only on foot or horseback. At the same time, the Forest Service began to use aerial fire patrol and smokejumpers to detect and fight fires in remote areas, which included much of the Flathead National Forest.

On the Flathead National Forest, the after-effects of a severe November 1949 windstorm emphasized this shift in management techniques. Previously, the blowdown of mature trees left by windstorms had generally been left unsalvaged because of difficult access and relatively low prices for timber. In the early 1950s, however, the Flathead National Forest built roads to salvage the downfall and used mechanized methods of logging to get the timber out. Spruce bark beetle epidemics developed and spread from the dead timber to live trees, and "control logging" was instituted to reduced the spread of the infestations.

The Flathead National Forest, with its excellent hunting and fishing and its magnificent scenery, has long been recognized as an important recreational area. In the early 1900s, recreational use on the forest reserves centered in the Lake McDonald area (which became part of Glacier National Park in 1910). The South Fork of the Flathead became increasingly popular, primarily among people traveling with pack animals. The Flathead National Forest also began to study and then manage the wildlife in the area, particularly big-game species such as deer and elk and "desirable" species of fish. The Spotted Bear Game Preserve was created in 1923 to protect big-game populations on the South Fork (it was eliminated in 1936). The large Bob Marshall Wilderness was designated in 1940 to protect land with exceptional scenic and wilderness values. This wilderness area, which has been enlarged in recent years, is today one of the largest and best-loved components of the nation's wilderness system.

Beginning in the 1920s, the Flathead National Forest began to build roads into the Forest to provide better access, primarily to aid in fire detection and suppression, but the roads also improved access for other Forest users, such as recreationists. The recreation program was also aided by workers enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1942), who were based at several camps on the Forest during the Depression years. They built campgrounds, roads, and trails, and worked on numerous other projects on the Forest. In 1936, the Flathead National Forest could boast of 4,500 miles of trail. Trail mileage on the Forest was declining by the 1950s, however, until in 1985 there were only about 2,100 miles in the trail system. Meanwhile, road mileage had risen from 360 miles in 1936 to almost 4,000 miles in 1985.

The economy of the Flathead Valley changed in the 1950s, with the construction of Hungry Horse Dam and the Anaconda Aluminum plant and the rise in tourism. In the 1950s conflicts developed between the users of various national forest resources, particularly recreation and timber. The demands for both increased sharply after World War II, and the debate over the proposed Bunker Creek timber sale in 1954 heralded many others to come as the Flathead National Forest intensified its management and use of the Forest resources. The Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960 attempted to provide a means of balancing the needs of various groups that used the national forests, but it actually offered little specific guidance to Forest managers.

The story of the decades following 1960 is also a story of change, with major events and trends including the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, the greatly increased road density (and thus resource use) on the non-wilderness sections of the Forest, and increased public participation in land-management decisions. The policies of Flathead National Forest employees today have been affected by decisions made by their predecessors beginning in 1898, and before that by the Native Americans and early non-Indian settlers of the area. As described in this historic overview, the changing management of the Forest reflects changing priorities and resource needs of the American public. Decisions made in the past will continue to inform decisions made in the future.