Roads and Trails Tailings 1

Interaction between the speakers and the audience at the Roads and Trails program presented Aug. 7 by the Upper Swan Valley Historical Society generated additional tales worth sharing. These short stories will be shared for the next two weeks to wrap up the series.

Drinking stories

The old roads had their challenges, but they never kept the folks in the valley from having fun.

Gene Miller's memory that the road from Condon to Swan Lake was virtually impassable during winter prompted someone from the audience to call out, "Well, you could use horses and sleighs." There was audience laughter, which increased when someone else yelled, "You could always make it to Liquid Louie's [tavern]."

Another audience member recalled Dennis Jette pulling skiers behind a black hard-top convertible with a roof that folded into the trunk.

"Yeah," Jette said, "We pulled a lot of skiers. Then in '64," he added, "I remember I bought a new GMC pickup. You could take these metal posts and stick them in the back corners so the rope [that skiers held onto] was up higher. 'Course the snow was about seven or eight feet deep then."

According to Jette, there was no set trail, he just drove wherever he wanted to.

"We'd ski all the way to Bigfork behind cars," Jette said. "We'd take turns. There'd be a couple cars. And we'd go to [local bars] and have a couple beers."

Someone asked how old he was at the time. Jette said he was 21, which caused laughter.

Jette asserted it didn't matter anyway. "If you was old enough to stand up and put your money on the bar, they'd sell to you."

Hills and mudholes

Nathan Kauffman said he could remember trips to Salmon Prairie. According to him, "It'd be dependent on the weather, which time of year, whether you'd go by Hulett's or whether you'd go round by Neil Meyer's because of the mudholes."

Kauffman said his dad Reuben had an interesting description of the east road, the route Gene Miller described in his talk as wandering around and through the homesteads. The elder Kauffman would say, "It was up a hill through a mudpuddle around a corner down a hill around a tree and through another mudpuddle."

Getting logs to the mill was also a major challenge in those early days. Kauffman said his uncle Paul had one of the first big logging trucks. He recalled a time when Paul helped Dunlap, a fellow logger. Dunlap couldn't make it up Squaw Creek Hill driving a single axle truck with a load of logs. According to Kauffman, his uncle hooked Dunlap's truck behind his own and pulled it up the hill.

Electricity and telephones

It was many years before electricity got connected up in the Upper Swan Valley. Dennis Jette thought it was probably 1957 when his family got access.

Leita Andersen commented, "And when we got the power, we didn't have it very often."

Jette agreed, "When I moved down here to Charles Road, on the other side of the Work Center," he said, "all them lodgepole trees, every time the wind would blow, the power was out."

Nathan Kauffman recalled a story about Dan Conley. "He had a toaster and the first time the power went out Conley couldn't figure out why his bread was not getting toasted."

Neil Meyer said, "I remember when we got wired and finally got electricity in the house. There was one plug in the kitchen and we had a little light plugged into that. First night the power went off and everything became dark. You'd a thought the world had come to an end. But here we'd been using kerosene and stuff for years!"

Nathan Kauffman said for his family, telephone service came a year after electricity and used the same poles.

Meyer remembered those early phones had to be started by cranking a handle on the side. Several families shared a "party line." When the phone rang, families had to listen for their ring code.

"A long and a short, two shorts and a long, whatever, to get who you were talking to." Meyer explained. "It was like a public phone."

Nosey members of the party line could pick up the phone and listen to their neighbor's conversation. It was best to assume your call was not private.

Meyer said, "A friend of mine, he'd answer the phone when it rang for him or he called someone and about every sentence he'd say, 'Ain't that right Jack?' or 'Ain't that right, somebody else.'[because he figured they were listening]."