Homesteads of the West

The Young Western Hero

July 22, 2013 By Trinity Vandenacre 3 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I love to hear stories of a brave western hero, whether they ended good or bad. Just the other day, I was talking to my grandpa and he was telling me about his family and some of the stories that he remembered from his youth. To me, it is very important to remember these stories and pass them on to the next generation, so they are not lost in the past forever.

The vast majority of people who live in the west, have families who migrated to the US from Europe or some other country. I am no different, my dad’s side of the family hasn’t been in the US more than 2 or 3 generations.

My mother’s side of the family is a different story, however. I found out from my grampa that I have a direct ancestor that actually signed the declaration of Independence! I didn’t know that, but I would classify him as one of the greatest heroes, although maybe not a Western Hero. His name was Abraham Clark and he became one of the first members of the United States House of Representatives.

Another of my ancestors was George Wilmauth Clark, a direct descendant of Abraham Clark. George W. Clark fought in the civil war at the age of 15 and then became a cavalry bugler in Montana under one of the officers who would have met up with General Custer for the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but as you may know, Custer didn’t wait. General Custer was a man who wanted to be a western hero and in the end, it brought him to his demise.

I learned much about my family that I didn’t know. My grandpa told me a story about a true western hero and my grandpa’s parents before he was born. It took place in eastern Montana on the homestead that George Wilmauth Clark homesteaded in 1916 at the end of his cavalry career. The story of this hero is one of bravery and peril and I believe it is worth the telling, so here it is.

The story of this western hero is one of bravery and peril and I believe it is worth the telling, so here it is.

My great grandmother’s name was Silver Young and she was a woman that many men took a second look at. She must have been very pretty because she was chased by several different men when she came of marrying age. She ended up marrying a man by the name of George Mellinger and they went to live on the Clark homestead, which would have belonged to her grandfather.

George Mellinger was a farmer and it suited him to work the 320 acres of land out in the middle of the rather desolate prairies. The homestead was about 30 miles to the north of Miles City, Montana and very remote. There were only a few ranchers in the area at that time and Silver’s brother Leslie also had a homestead in the area.

Leslie Young didn’t live at his place much however because he was a mail carrier in Miles City and didn’t enjoy farming as much as the next guy. On occasion, Leslie had to ride out to his property and check on things, so one day in the fall of 1918 he saddled up his horse and rode the twenty-two miles to the town of Lambert, Montana. The next day, he was riding leisurely along toward home and he passed his sister and brother-in-laws place.

He noticed that no one was out in the field working. This was unusual because a farmers work was their life. He could also see that the house looked deserted, so Leslie rode over to see what was up.

He heard some moaning when he dismounted in front of the house. This quickened his movements perceptibly and he called out for Silver and George, but got no reply. Worried now he ran to the door and threw it open. What he saw made his heart jump into his throat!

George and Silver were both lying on their bed, very feverish and clearly having great trouble breathing. Their baby, Chad, was less than a year old and accept for his chest sucking in and out as he tried to get a breath, he made no movement or noise as he lay between his parents. They all had influenza!

Their baby, Chad, was less than a year old and accept for his chest sucking in and out as he tried to get a breath, he made no movement or noise as he lay between his parents.

Panic is not a recognized trait for a western hero, but it struck Leslie hard as he realized that this whole family was probably going to die. They were so young and strong, but the flu epidemic of 1918 was a disaster like the world had never seen before, killing over 50 MILLION people world wide and affecting 25% of the American population. The flu was indiscriminate and it took the young and the strong as quickly as it took the children and the elderly. It was a horrible way to die as your lungs filled up with fluid and you suffocated.

In Indian camps around the west, some people were taking cockle burrs, tying a string around it and shoving it down the Indian children’s throats, then pulling it back up to clear it of fluid and keep them alive. Many died within a day or two of the first symptoms.

This was known to Leslie as he stood in the doorway of that little homestead shack and looked upon a family that was in the throes of this very disease. “What was he going to do?”

He knew that without professional help, they would all be dead within a day or two. He had to act fast! Looking the little family over closer, he decided there was only one thing he could do, and that was to get them to the hospital in Miles City.

Leslie stepped back on his horse, leaving the little family, writhing and sick on the bed. With a prayer on his lips, he took off for the nearest ranch that had a wagon! He ran his horse down the road at a punishing gate, dipping suddenly down into a gully or ravine and then up the other side until he reached the nearest neighbor’s ranch house some miles away.

When they heard the tale he had to tell, they helped him hitch up their wagon and sent him on his way back to the little house that was soon to be filled with death! Leslie knew that when he reached the Clark homestead, he still had to traverse over 30 miles of prairie to get back to Miles City and the doctor. Because of this, he could not push the horses too hard or they would not have the steam to cover the entire distance without stopping.

In todays world of paved highways and air conditioned vehicles, 30 miles is nothing. We do that in less than 30 minutes out west where there isn’t any traffic. Back in that time in Lambert, Montana however, travelling 30 miles with a wagon was a big undertaking which usually took about 12 hours or more if the roads were not too rough. Horses can only travel at a trot, pulling a wagon for about 10 to 15 miles and then they would have to be changed out with fresh horses, not to mention that you would about jostle your sick passengers to death if you went at that pace. So Leslie knew that he would have to go slow and it was going to take him a long time.

When Leslie got back to the house, the family was still alive, but in terrible condition, and had to be mostly carried to the wagon and laid in the back on a pile of blankets. After making his sick passengers as comfortable as he could, Leslie started the slow trek back to Miles City. For hours on end, the Mellinger couple and their small baby bounced and jostled down the bumpy road toward possible help.

With this influenza strain, Leslie wasn’t sure whether the doctor could help these poor people or not. The whole world was in the throes of this epidemic and so many had died that about 1 in every 4 families in the US had had a family member die. With those kinds of statistics, there was certainly no guarantee that the doctor would be able to keep this young family alive. There was also the very real chance that they would die on the long trip to town.

Leslie kept praying all through the long night that God would have mercy on him and the Mellinger family. Each mile seemed to stretch into 10. The horses started to get tired toward midnight and began to go slower and slower as they went on. Leslie kept them going as best he could without either tiring them out or bouncing his passengers too much. As is often the case in such situations, he certainly didn’t feel like a western hero, or a hero of any kind. All he could think about was what the bumping along of the wagon was doing to his dying cargo.

The moans of agony and labored breathing of Silver, George and the baby became unbearable to hear. The sound spoke of impending death, slow and agonizing, but then at about 4 o’clock in the morning, the lights of Miles City came into view in the darkness ahead. There was no one else on the road at this time of night, and even though the sight of the lights brought hope back into Leslie’s heart, the lights looked as though they were a world away.

He tried to push the horses into a trot for a while, but that only brought more of the horrible noises from his passengers. The half gurgling crying of the baby was more than Leslie could stand and he brought the tired horses back down to a walk.

Several times in the next 2 hours, Leslie found his chin falling down to his chest in sleep. Even in this stressful, life or death situation the trip had taken its toll and he was having to shake himself awake every 15 minutes now. The lights of town had appeared and reappeared several times, but now they were steady and he could tell, in the growing light of dawn, that they were approaching the outskirts of town.

“Thank you God!”, Leslie said out loud as the wagon slowly passed the sign announcing that they were entering the city limits. He was almost there.

He pulled up in front of the hospital and two orderlies, seeing the wagon coming, ran out to help move the sick into the small hospital building. The nightmarish trek was over! The doctor did what he could for the the suffering family and after seeing them safely under the doctor’s care, Leslie himself walked over to the little hotel where he stayed when delivering the mail in the area and crashed on the bed with his clothes still on.

If the true western hero, Leslie Young had not stopped by it would have been the end. One more day in that cabin and they would have been beyond hope.

Leslie had been awake for over 24 hours, hitched and drove the team for about 40 miles, not including the miles that he rode that morning on his horse. He didn’t know it yet, but he had just saved the lives of Silver, George and Chad Mellinger! All the members of the family lived through the terrible ordeal and the couple went on to have 9 more children, 6 girls and 3 more boys. If it hadn’t been for the brave actions of Leslie Young, that whole family line would have been wiped out. If the true western hero, Leslie Young had not stopped by it would have been the end. One more day in that cabin and they would have been beyond hope.

Leslie is a western hero in my mind, not only because he saved the lives of Silver, George and Chad, but because in doing so he saved MY life. Although he died before my time, I want to say, “Thank you, Leslie, you won’t now be forgotten.”

Chad Mellinger is 96 years old and still going strong at the time of this writing and lives on a farm in Fairfield, MT!

Homesteads Joined in Marriage

July 13, 2013 By Trinity Vandenacre Leave a Comment

I live in western Montana and have always been intrigued by old abandoned homes and building that I see all over the state. One of the things that always comes to my mind when I see one of these old homesteads is the thought that someone worked very hard to try to make that place a home. Whoever the owners were, I am sure they had no intention of abandoning the place, but somewhere along the line something had caused their plans and lives to change. Now there it sits, abandoned to the whims of the roaming cattle and the timeless wearing down of the weather.

I love to hear the old stories about the west and the homestead years, and I would like to know the stories behind some of those places and what became of the people that lived there. When were they homesteaded? Who was it that attempted to build a life there? These are some of the questions that I want to ask. Most of the time the stories are lost somewhere through the deaths of the brave homesteaders themselves, but some of the information is still there for the finding. You just have to look hard and ask alot of questions.

I am just learning how to find out more information about some of these homesteads. What I find out is often not the full story, but bits and pieces of the story that have survived through their family tree, an old newspaper article, or census information.

There are two such homesteads near where I live that have been abandoned since the 1950’s and for years I just passed them without much thought to who had lived there before. Recently, however, I was speaking to a ranchers wife who moved out to Montana from Iowa in the 1940’s to marry a rancher named Paul Hahn. She recalled some of what had happened to these two homesteads and that got me to do some digging of my own. This is what I was able to discover.

They both started the same way any homestead begins. With an enterprising young man and the homestead act! One of the intriguing things about these particular homesteads was that they were both inhabited by the families that had originally homesteaded them for almost 50 years, so they weren’t one of those flash in the pan homesteads that I have researched before, like the Ball Homestead in Avon, Montana. These two were eventually joined together into one piece of property, but I am getting ahead of myself here.

Before I launch into the story of these properties, let me tell you briefly how someone “proved up” on a homestead in the first place.

The homestead act of 1862 brought immigrants from all over the world to get a free piece of land in the American West. From Oklahoma to the Canadian border in Montana and North Dakota, there were wide expanses of land for the taking.

To take advantage of this opportunity, any person 21 years old or older could go down to the local land office and file his intent to homestead a piece of ground. They paid a $10 filing fee and a commission to the land agent of $2 and he or she was on the road to owning there own property.

Any person 21 years old or older could go down to the local land office and file his intent to homestead a piece of ground.

It may sound simple, but that was not all they had to do. The main stipulation was that the potential owner had to “prove up” on the property. This meant that they had to do three things.

First they had to build a home. It didn’t matter what size it was, it just had to be a dwelling the homesteaders could live in. In fact many of the homes that were built on these properties were thrown up in a hurry and were very small. Sometimes no bigger than a large camping tent now days. That didn’t seem to matter to the homesteaders though, as some of the homesteads that started with extremely small shacks ended up become very successful ranches.

The next requirement was that they had to live on the property. To prove up on your property you had to actually live there. In some of the houses or shall we say “cabins” that were the original dwellings on these places, that must have been miserable indeed, especially during the brutally cold winters in the north.

To prove up on a homestead, you couldn’t JUST live there either, you had to farm it too. Farming is fine if you were lucky enough to have a flat patch of land in a river bottom, but the Rocky Mountains were not miss named. The extremely rocky ground on some of these properties, makes me wonder at the hard work that it took to farm there. Keep in mind that all of that farming had to be done with horses as your only pulling power.

In my mind it comes down to the fact that if you were a proved up homesteader, you were an extremely hard working and determined individual. To them ownership of that little piece of land was worth the work.

When they had lived and farmed the land for a period of 5 years, they had to get two of your close neighbors to sign off that they had indeed fulfilled the requirements. Then they went back to the land office and paid another $6 dollars and were awarded a patent for their very own little piece of property in the west!

This is exactly how the two homesteads in question were started. By determined couples deciding to do what it took to get their own land.

The Whitehead Place

Life In The West - Whitehead Homestead in Winston, Montana — Whitehead Homestead

Andrew Whitehead was born in the same year that the homestead act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. This was right after the secession of the Southern States.

Andrew immigrated, along with his brothers, from Canada in 1890. He and his brothers lived and worked in the area around Winston, Montana for many years. In those days, the mining industry was booming all over in the mountains and work was abundant. One of Andrew’s brothers, Charles, was a wood freighter in the area and actually “proved up” on his own homestead of 277 acres in 1918 about 4 or 5 miles down the creek from his brother.

He was brutally bludgeoned on the head with a chunk of metal in a sock and then robbed!

Charles had a terrible incident befall him in July of 1889. He was brutally bludgeoned on the head with a chunk of metal in a sock and then robbed. The account was printed in the Helena Montana Newspaper of the time which was called “The Helena Independent”. After reading that article, I know why my parents were always so worried about those carnival ride operators when I was a kid.

Andrew Whitehead married Miss Annie Brodick of Canton, Montana (Canton Montana is now under Canyon Ferry Lake) on October 3rd of 1894. Anna as she is called in later United States Census forms was 12 years younger than Andrew.

Exactly when Andrew and his young wife began living on the land he was later to homestead, I was unable to find out, but on the fifth of November in 1908, he had “proved up” on a plot of land next to beautiful Beaver Creek, in a place then called Iron Age, Montana. Because of the 5 years of farming that were required to prove up on a homestead, they must have lived there since at least 1903, which is 110 years ago at the time of this writing.

They had four children, all boys and they named them James, Charles, William and Hugh Whitehead. These four children grew up on the homestead and were friends with the neighboring family, the Geiger’s.

The Geiger Place

Life In The West - Homesteads of Montana — Geiger Homestead – Main House

William Geiger was born in Pennsylvania in July of 1868. He married Katherine (Katie) Blaisdell, who was born in the Montana Territory in about 1875. They were married in Helena Montana in 1899 and were living in Helena Ward 1, Montana at the time.

It wasn’t until October 1st of 1913 that William Geiger was awarded a land patent on the land adjoining the Whitehead property. Since it was required that a homesteader build a house, improve the land and farm it for 5 years before being awarded the patent, the Geigers had to have been on the land since at least 1908.

William and Katie had only one child, a daughter named Verna. Verna was born on March 2, 1905. I don’t know how many other girls lived in the area, but with all the miners around and the four Whitehead boys living less than a mile away, I wonder if Verna’s father walked around with a loaded shotgun slung across his back. I think I might have.

Two Homesteads Become One

I can just imagine the attention that Verna got from the Whitehead boys and I wonder if there was a bit of jealousy when she chose to give all of her affection to the youngest of the boys and the one closest in age to herself, Hugh Whitehead. Even if she did cause a stir, she married Hugh in 1924. At that time they lived at the Whitehead homestead which they must have purchased from Hughes parents.

Side Note: At the time of the 1940 census, Andrew Whitehead (Hughes father) was renting a house in Helena Montana for $10 a month. Anna Whitehead (Hughes mother) was living with Hugh and Verna on the homestead at Iron Age, Montana. I don’t know why they were separated. Andrew was 80 years old at that time and possibly was living in some kind of retirement home. That is completely speculation, but is one possible explanation.

Sometime between about 1945 and 1950 Hugh and Verna inherited the Geiger homestead and the two neighboring places then became one. Leaving the Geiger home vacant, they lived in the Whitehead house on Beaver Creek. The couple raised beef cattle on the their little ranch and also ran a small dairy. They sold the milk from their dairy to families in Winston, Montana which was just 3 miles down the creek and a major entertainment and supply hub for the miners in the area.

It was not long, however, that they ran into financial trouble and were in a bit of a pickle, owing money to a couple of prominent ranchers in the area. One of the ranches was Arthur Diehl, who had settled in the Winston area well before the turn of that century.

The End of the Whitehead – Geiger Legacy

Life In The West - Geiger Homestead in Winston, Montana — Geiger Homestead

In 1955, Paul and Dorothy Hahn were driven from their picturesque ranch on the banks of the Missouri river to make way for the new Canyon Ferry Reservoir. Because of this, Paul needed land for his cattle and purchased the Whitehead and Geiger place, paying off their debts to the local ranchers.

This was the end of the Whitehead – Geiger ownership of the land. Today the Hahn Ranch in Townsend, MT still owns the property and grazes cattle on it in the summer and fall. It is a picturesque area and with wonderful grass. Beaver Creek runs through the property past the old Whitehead buildings and there is a spring coming out of the ground next to the Geiger house.

Many of the buildings still stand, though they were abandoned more than 60 years ago. They stand in the grass and whisper of a different time. I am sure there are so many stories about the people that enjoyed those two places that now are lost in time forever, but at least we now know a little about the two homesteads that were joined together by marriage.

It was over 100 years ago that the Whiteheads and Geigers “proved up” on their homesteads. The weathered remains of the buildings where these old west pioneers lived and raised their families are all that is left to tell the story of their life in the west.

The Home That was Built to Last

July 11, 2013 By Trinity Vandenacre 3 Comments

There is a stone house that stands by itself in a cow pasture along highway 12/287 near Winston Montana that has intrigued many. In a time period when life in the west was a remote adventure and homestead structures were thrown together with logs, and don’t last long, the stone house stands just as straight and tall as it did when it was new. The walls are built with much care and time and the woodwork around every window and door attest to great craftsmanship.

It leaves one with a desire to know more about it and why the owner had built a house of such great prestige in a place that was twenty miles away from anything accept for a couple of ranches and a few mines. The stonework and wood carvings of the construction is akin to the construction of some of the splendid mansions in Helena, some twenty miles to the east. Clearly the same type of craftsman built this home.

The story of just how this home was built is buried in the past, but we do know some about the man who had it built. His name was Warren Dodge and he came to the Winston, MT area sometime around 1885 or 86. He purchased the land that the stone house now sits on in 1892 for about $380. It was 155 acres of land that sat along the Railroad.

The actual stone house was built sometime around 1894, although it is listed as being made of logs, which it clearly is not.

Warren was a businessman who listed himself as being a merchant in the census of 1900. He staked many mining claims in the hills above his homestead in anticipation for the mines that moved into those areas. Warren was evidently also involved in politics in Helena, MT to some degree as he is mentioned by a newspaper in Anaconda as being a delegate to be sent to St Louis for some reason that it does not divulge.

Just looking at the once beautiful staircase, curved wall and the carved wood trim, one would get the idea that the owner was very wealthy. Yet that was most likely not the case. Warren must have been somewhat well off, but he still reported that he had a mortgage on the house in 1900. That may not be really surprising as the house was very expensive to build and was constructed for a total of $3500. As far as the cost of labor goes, that would be the equivalent of $448,000 to $647,000 today.

One thing is certain when you look at the home. Whoever lived there had dreams of fortunes being made and putting down permanent roots. Gold strikes have a way of drawing, not only the mining companies and the miners or laborers, but also those who have the entrepreneur spirit.

The mines and it’s miners need goods, the mining companies need land to mine and someone will always be there to provide what they need for remote life in the west. Warren Dodge was obviously one of those men. Not a miner himself, he was a man who made his living from investing in land to sell or lease to the mines and as a merchant, sold goods of other kinds to the mines as well.

No matter how lofty his dreams were, for some reason the finest house for miles around went from being, to be sure, the envy of all the neighbors to a place where the calves go to get out of the rain.

Life in the west can fall so quickly from glory and promise to something that doesn’t resemble its former greatness in any way. Thankfully, places like this stone house live on and stand firm, as if to say, “Hey! Look what happened here one hundred years ago. Take a look and I will tell you about it.” The stone house of Winston, Montana, is no exception. Being built of stone makes it a solid stone that was meant to last the test of time…and although just a shell now, it probably will.

Homesteading the West

July 11, 2013 By Trinity Vandenacre 2 Comments

When you see old homesteads around the west, they look lonely and forlorn. Most people don’t think much about them, but to me they are monuments to what the life in the west was really like. They are usually very small and very short, crudely built and way too simple to be comfortable.

There are many of them standing empty and neglected out on the prairie or on the edge of some mountainous country. A standing reminder of all the untold stories that are still there to tell. Many of these tales will not be yielded and will remain a mystery forever. Because of this, they grasp my imagination and leave me with many questions. Who was it that lived here? What did they do for a living? Farm, raise cattle, or maybe horses? What happened to them and where are their families now?

Not all of these questions can be answered. Those that can often leaving one feeling that what happened to the owners was not fair. Then again life is not fair.

Walking around some homesteads, you can almost feel the stress of trying to make enough money on the few cattle they had to cover your expenses and feed your family. The endless hard work that they did every day, knowing at the same time, that everything you did today could be undone by one bad storm tomorrow. Drought could come and the grass not grow for the cattle to eat. Then there were the concerns about the large cattle companies trying to push you off the land, especially if you have access to a good water source on your property, which the larger rancher may need for his cattle.

The stress and hardships that we experience today would be trivial to those who experienced the real life in the west. The old home with the falling down covered porch at the top of this article is a homesteader cabin in the Elkhorn Mountains of Montana. It is said that it was a doctor or dentist that had settled there. What things in his life possessed him to try his hand out on the rough prairie I don’t know.

It was a well built place, as far as homesteader cabins go, and there was even a handmade plank counter with built in sink on one wall. It is separated into 3 rooms, which was extravagant at that time.

In front of this home is the area that was evidently a large set of corals where horses and cattle were kept. This area is larger than many I have seen, which indicates that at the time they owners lived there, it was a rather active ranch.

I can just imagine this family with their dreams of ranching and raising their children out west. I am sure they worked hard to make their life in the west what they dreamed. Digging fence post holes in the rocky ground, developing the water from the spring out behind the cabin so that the cattle could get better access to the water down in the draw below, and working the cattle would have more than occupied all of their time. On top of that, however, the man of the house, and perhaps his sons, would need to lay in a store of hay and firewood for the 9 months of bitter cold storms and snow that would always come on them before they were fully ready for it.

After working hard from the first light of dawn until late in the afternoon, I imagine the man would come back to the little house and walk in through the creaky wooden door, tired and hungry. A blast of hominess, caused by his loving wife bustling about in the home, cooking cornbread and beef stew in the stone fireplace, would hit him in the face. Aah, the feeling of easing his tired bones into a wooden chair while the smells of food swirled around the house.

The fact that the money that he had saved in the coffee can under the bed was almost gone now and the knowledge that they had lost more cattle that he had expected during an especially harsh winter are obliterated from his troubled mind. Right now all that mattered was the love of his wife and the taste of the food being set before him.

Sitting on the porch as the sun dies slowly behind him, covering the huge expanse of the river valley with darkness, the thoughts of how they were going to make it all work start to creep back into his mind. Shaking his head, he decides to let tomorrow bring what it will. There was nothing that he could do about it that night.

The Lonely Cabin In the West

July 11, 2013 By Trinity Vandenacre Leave a Comment

When you look back a hundred years or so, what happened then seems like it had to have happened in a different world. The stories that we hear or read about life in the west, feel remote, and somehow don’t seem to be real. They are like shadows in the past that sometimes intrigue us enough to look at them and try to figure out what they are. We may peer at them for a while trying to discern their features so that we can understand more about what it was like in their time. But mostly they are just shadows that will never reveal their true secrets.

There are, however, some abandoned structures that still stand to remind us that something happened there. One such standing reminder is a homestead cabin that was built near highway 141 in Montana. A marker toshow that someone had been there and staked a claim to the land on which it sits. Green cow pastures surround it now, with cattle grazing right up to the doorstep. It looks out on a most beautiful set of rolling green foothills that lose themselves in the great high mountains of the Rockies.

29 years before the logs of the little cabin were ever chipped at with an axe or cut with a saw, a man named Sterling J. Ball was born. The year was 1889 and he grew up in the Deer Lodge and Helena, MT areas. Little did the cabin know that Sterling would be it’s bulder and yet only stay on the place for a couple of years.

In 1920, when the temperatures were moderate for Montana and rain was plentiful, Sterling established a homestead on a little 160 piece of land in the area that was then known as the Ophir District. There is no doubt that he and his young wife, Marie, had big plans for the place. They cut the logs and stacked them in place, one by one, making the structure sturdy and homey. There were two rooms and good solid wood roof. They took the time to build a little home there in the valley, probably dreaming about their future life in the west.

The climate in the area around the place is rather harsh, and the summers are very short for farming because of the altitude. Snow comes early in the fall and doesn’t leave till late in the spring. You have to be hardy people to live there and take the conditions.

For a few years the family lived on their little set up and hopefully they were able to enjoy the place while they worked and farmed the land.

All of it was short lived however, for by the time of the US Census in 1930, the family was living on the other side of the mountains in a place called Medicine Lake, Montana. The cabin was abandoned. Something happened to make that young family move less than ten years after setting up the little place.

After the homesteading years of plenty between about 1915 to 1925, the weather changed for the next ten years or so, leaving the land parched and dry in the summer and it stayed dry and cold in the winter. Life in the west became much harder under those extreme conditions. Maybe that is what caused this pretty little cabin to be left behind. Maybe they just wanted to find land that had a little longer summer for growing crops. I hope that the reason has not become totally lost in time, but one thing remains clear.

The little abandoned cabin still stands there today as a placeholder to a very short story that most have forgotten about. Until the ground eventually swallows up the timbers that make up its walls, it will remain a stalwart figure, proudly displaying its history for all to see. “Here I am ”, it says, “ and I remember!.”