Looking back 50 years

Montana Viewpoint

Fifty years ago, on December 9, 1975, I laid down cash money on a sizeable “stump farm” near Trout Creek. Things have changed over those years, but the land is still here, and so am I.

Unlike my neighbor, Gary, who told me he knew nothing when he came here a few years before me, I knew everything. Well, I thought I did, but I soon learned that I didn’t. My neighbors smiled at my folly, but helped me anyway, and I managed to live through my mistakes and learn besides.

The most important thing, though, was that I liked the town and the people as I found them. It was kind of rough territory. The people worked hard and drank hard.  The roads were bad. In the winter they were frozen, and you could drive on them if the snow wasn’t too deep. In the spring they turned to mud which got soupier and deeper with every passing vehicle. It wasn’t uncommon to find mufflers and other vehicle parts in the mud, and often entire vehicles waiting for rescue. When the roads dried up they were graded. Once. The roads didn’t really have names, either. If you didn’t have a Post Office box your address was “Star Route, Trout Creek”.

And there were neighbors, good neighbors. One in particular was Laurence Molzhon who helped me calve out one year. I had a bunch of heifers that had been bred to a large bull, and they were having a hard time delivering their too large calves. Laurence took all the heifers over to his ranch and calved them out there.

I often think of what he said to me when he made the offer, “I know the pickle you’re in, Jim”

I don’t think that I often had to ask for help, people just offered it. 

I tore down the only building on the place, a chickencoop, and built a small tarpaper covered cabin. There was no electric or water. It was rough living, but I enjoyed it.

In town there was a café, until it burned down, and then there wasn’t. There was a bar and a couple of groceries where people could keep warm in the winter. There was a church or two, and a phone booth in the middle of a perpetual puddle just in front of the café. I worked in the café for a few weeks, mostly for something to do, and on one Sunday, when there hadn’t seen a customer all day, I closed up early and went over to the bar where I kept the bartender company until closing time. Then I went home. It was 35 below zero, which helped account for the lack of customers. It also made the roads passable. But when I got home I realized that it was also about 35 below in the house, and drunk as I was I knew that if I went to sleep I would not wake up, so I built fires in the cook stove and the heat stove and sat between them until I was satisfied that the fires would last what was left of the night and got in bed.

In the morning, I led my cows out to a pond where they took water and chopped a hole in the ice for them to drink out of. The ice was two feet thick, and when I broke through, the water geysered up and hit me in the face. It froze my eyelids shut. In the little time it took me to thaw them out by putting my ungloved hands over my eyes I wondered if I knew the path well enough to make it back to the cabin by feel.

I got smarter, things got better, and I cleared land and made a ranch out of it. It was hard work, and I enjoyed it. If I had to do it all over again, I would do it in the same place with the same people surrounding me.

Montana Viewpoint has appeared in weekly and online newspapers across Montana for over 30 years. Jim Elliott served sixteen years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek.