by Dave Shors
Ted always was reluctant to accept any help. He would let me work on his bike, but if I said, “Ted, if you need any help with anything up at your cabin just let me know,” he would respond with a nod, and never once asked me to help with any specific project. He never said, “Chris, can you come up and help me set up some beams across the creek?” I would have done that, and he knew it, but it was as though he didn’t want to impose, or he didn’t want me to see what he was doing.
There was only one way Ted would allow me to help him, and that was in the area of information. All he had to do was bring up any topic of discussion in my fields of interest and then leave the rest to me. I would openly and readily tell him everything I knew about the subject, from nature to welding. On the other side of the coin, if he stopped by and I was unloading something from the pickup or doing some other chore, he would pitch in.
I’ll always remember an episode that took place about 1980. The mail had just arrived and I was on my way to my Lincoln shop. I usually picked up my mail in the evenings, but this day I had gone home to grab some parts I needed. It was just before 11 A.M. While I was there I saw the mailman pull away from my box, so I thought I might as well get the mail. As I headed toward Lincoln I saw Ted walking to town, so I stopped and gave him a ride. That day I had received an unusual amount of mail, most of it advertisements and solicitations. I brought up the subject that all the junk mail was a huge waste of resources, and a nuisance to boot. Ted said he never received any junk mail.
In fact, he seldom received any mail at all. There were many times I gave him a ride to his cabin from town; I’d usually let him off at his mailbox. Most of the time he wouldn’t even open it. If I drove him farther up the side road to his cabin I’d offer to stop at his mailbox so he could check it. He always declined, saying he wouldn’t have any mail.
The more I thought about it the more I began to realize just how invisible he was in Lincoln. He didn’t receive any junk mail and he wasn’t on any mailing list. Everyone who has a credit card or orders things from a mail-order catalogue ends up on a mailing list. Mailing lists are sold or shared with other firms. Few escape the cycle.
I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think Ted ever filed an income tax return while he lived in Lincoln, since he never worked and he basically lived off the land.
He first had a post office box in Lincoln and later a mailbox on Stemple Road below his home cabin. Knowing he picked up his mail only every few weeks, I always wondered why he even had his post office box, where he had to pay box rent as long as he did.
Ted’s neighbor, Butch, didn’t really like Ted after he walked off the log-peeling job and the two had several arguments about spraying weeds—Ted was adamantly opposed to spraying—but Butch still tried to help Ted. Being neighbors, they had their share of strange encounters. Butch told me about one involving logging work.
Butch had cut and moved some trees on the upper end of the gulch above Ted’s cabin. Later in the summer Butch piled the brush and limbs quite a distance past Ted’s and then later that fall walked up to burn the slash pile. Ted approached and asked Butch not to light the fire, saying he would clean up the brush. Butch replied that picking everything up by hand wouldn’t be nearly as clean as burning it. Ted insisted, saying he would pick up every branch—to which Butch agreed.
Ted carried every scrap of branch and limb all the way down to his cabin, a huge task. Even though Butch told me Ted couldn’t get all the small pieces and the pine needles, I marveled that he would want to take on a task of such magnitude, making countless trips carrying all that slash. Peeling logs wouldn’t be nearly as hard.
The old saying “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure” certainly applied to Ted, who was the biggest pack rat I’ve ever seen. He saved everything he found in the woods. Whether it was a metal scrap from an old mine, a discarded piece of rope, a glass or plastic container found along the road, Ted would pick it up and take it to his cabin.
Ted’s favorite water jugs were nothing more than discarded large plastic soda jugs, bottles with a fluted dark plastic base, a clear plastic container, and a screw-on top. He didn’t drink pop but he didn’t discriminate against any brand, using any jug he found, whether it was Coke, Pepsi, or Dr. Pepper. The last one I saw him toting around was a Dr. Pepper. These pop jugs are tough and make great water containers.
He even saved different types of wood. I saw many things up my gulch that were moved, as if they had been mentally catalogued and set aside, or just taken. What did he want with all that stuff? Was he just eccentric or did he have a use for pieces of wire, aluminum scraps, electrical components, and other things?
Ted’s life was a complex array of puzzles and contradictions. He was so isolated at times he would lose track of all those things modern man has programmed into his life. If I picked him up after not seeing him for a while, he would promptly ask statistical questions like: “What time is it?” “What is the date?” “How cold is it?” He didn’t wear a watch but I thought he probably had a battery powered or wind-up clock at his cabin.
I always kept a stick-on calendar, given each Christmas by a local fuel business, attached to the dash of my pickup. I also had built a digital clock and installed it into the dash panel. Whenever Ted rode with me he would check both and ask me to confirm the time and date. It didn’t make much sense at the time why a man who lived off the land should be concerned with anything but the seasons of the year so he could be prepared for them.
Even though Ted lived his life almost entirely in the outdoors, he wasn’t what you’d consider a sportsman. If he went fishing, which I rarely saw him do, it wasn’t with a fly rod and a dry fly for sport and recreation. It was with a spool of line and a hook to catch fish for food.
FROM FBI INVENTORY
MF36—Plastic bag with two fish hooks, string, and two boxes of matches.
When he hunted he wasn’t interested in stalking the biggest buck deer or bull elk. A trophy meant nothing to him unless the horns could be made into a useful item like a tool, or be sold. When he hunted or fished it was solely for the meat he needed, and not for the outdoor experience. I realized that early on, and it was always a mystery to me.
Most people move to a place like Lincoln for the scenery, outdoor sports, and recreational opportunities. It was clear from our conversations those weren’t the reasons Ted was here.
Why did he live here? Even people like myself who are attracted to a lifestyle like Ted’s eventually grow tired of the struggle to survive in the wild, and then they either get a job or move on. Ted did neither. His lifestyle changed very little during the twenty-five years he lived in Lincoln. In fact, in many ways living off the land became much tougher as the world began to move in around him.
Lincoln, Ted’s Haven
The mountains surrounding Lincoln, Montana, form a natural geological observatory where the work of the ancient forces of nature lies close to the surface. Much of the Upper Blackfoot Valley was carved by glaciers slowly grinding off the mountains to the north during the Ice Age, glaciers that left behind expanses of sand, gravel, and boulder plains of glacial till. To the northwest the majestic Swan Range with its snow-covered peaks was uplifted skyward as huge jagged blocks along the Swan fault. To the east are the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide, composed of Precambrian Belt sedimentary rock layers that crushed together, uplifting giant slabs to form the overthrust of the Rocky Mountains.
One of the area’s anomalies is the Boulder Batholith, a large and out-of-place mass of granite, the earth’s ancient magma, that gurgled molten through the basement rock of our planet’s crust about 70 million years ago and then solidified. Most of the Boulder Batholith reaches south and east between Helena and Butte, but pockets intrude through the sedimentary slabs in the Lincoln area, especially around Stemple Pass. The batholith and other igneous intrusions that pushed through the sedimentary rock some 40 million years later carried riches for modern man in their veins.
During the early 1860s, prospectors were attracted to strikes throughout a vast area of the gold frontier that was to become Montana Territory in 1864—Bannack, Virginia City, Grasshopper Creek, Gold Creek, Blackfoot City, and Diamond City. Placer riches were discovered on July 14, 1864, along Last Chance Gulch, launching Helena, Montana’s capital city. Prospectors quickly spread out and explored drainages north, south, east and west, searching for granite and telltale signs of ancient stream beds—rounded stones washed by centuries of water, and white rims showing old water levels around the hills—including those in the Upper Blackfoot Valley just fifty miles to the northwest.
Jib Longhandle McClellan, an old-time prospector whom many called one of the best of his era, came into the Blackfoot Valley in the late summer of 1864. He and his two companions decided to spend the winter, but stories of rich strikes in Last Chance Gulch were more than his friends could stand.
McClellan, who wasn’t impressed by the news of riches, remained and explored the riffle bars on Poorman Creek as he awaited the first winter snows. With a pick and shovel, he sank a hole to bedrock. It was a fruitless effort. Then farther upstream in the mouth of the gulch that bears his name he found a giant ponderosa pine blown over by the wind, with its root ball high in the air. The hollow left by the uprooted pine had been filled with gravel carried by centuries of rushing water. McClellan worked the cavity and found gold all the way to bedrock. But rather than develop the pay streak, he decided to spend the last days before winter prospecting for the mother lode and setting up a cold-weather camp.
By spring others had joined McClellan. They removed the overburden and followed streaks of placer gold deep under the stream and against the hillsides. The McClellan strike became one of the richest in Montana. McClellan Gulch was cleaned out quickly, giving up almost $4 million a mile by the end of 1866. It was reworked with a brief flurry of success in 1873. Some areas were worked a third and fourth time. During one of those more recent excavations through old tailings, two miners discovered a 57-ounce lump of gold in 1924.
Many of the miners who moved into the valley were attracted by the rich McClellan Gulch strike. These prospectors, carrying little more than picks, shovels, gold pans, and small grubstakes, discovered more gold northwest of McClellan along the Blackfoot River in 1865.
As they staked their claims, food came from the nearby forests—venison and other wild game—complementing staples carried in their packs.
We know these early miners were patriotic because they chose to call the place Abe Lincoln Gulch, a popular namesake throughout the country during the first years following the president’s assassination. The camp that boomed with the discovery was called Springfield City, honoring the president’s hometown. That name soon gave way to Lincoln City, which actually was located about five miles northwest of present-day Lincoln.
These early prospectors were accustomed to the most difficult labor, hours of digging, shoveling, and moving heavy boulders in the cold stream waters. We know that only a few of them really struck it rich. We also know they seasoned their hard work and usual bad luck with a healthy dose of good humor, calling the Blackfoot Valley streams where they set up their rocker boxes names like Poorman, Sauerkraut, Beaver, Humbug, Sucker, and Keep Cool.
“Keep cool” was appropriate advice for the early miners if they wanted to keep their scalps because they had struck gold and built their mining camp right in the middle of a popular seasonal travel route for several Native American tribes, including the Salish and Kootenai, the Crows, and the great warriors of the plains, the Blackfeet.
Skirmishes between the settlers and Native Americans were common. Early Upper Blackfoot Valley miners often were caught off-guard, until they set up a lookout tree south of Keep Cool Creek near the river, and manned it day and night. When the guard sounded the alarm from a perch high aloft in the towering yellow pine, miners and their families escaped into the surrounding forests.
Long before gold miners arrived, the valley was a favorite among nomadic Native American tribes who hunted and gathered roots, wild vegetables, and berries, except during the season of heavy snow. Those early travelers followed the Cokalanishlot (River Road to the Buffalo) through the valley and then crossed the Continental Divide to the game-rich plains of present-day eastern Montana. Along the way they found important staples for their survival. Camas roots were abundant in the Alice Creek area. The roots, which were cooked for several days in a shallow hole filled with coals, had a sweet taste and could be kept for long periods of time in loaves.
Those early travelers also cut bark shields off ponderosa pine trees in the spring when the sap was flowing, exposing the cambium layer, which was then removed with scrapers for food and medicinal purposes. Several of these so-called shield trees can still be seen in the Lincoln area. Plus there was plenty of game: deer, elk, and even buffalo that had wandered over the mountains and into the valley. Nearby, stone quarries on Willow and Nevada creeks were known for their chert, a stone resembling flint that could be chipped into weapon points.
Meriwether Lewis was the first to map the area when he and his small group of explorers crossed this valley on July 6 and 7, 1806. Lewis and William Clark had split their forces on their return trip after wintering at their Fort Clatsop in today’s Oregon, enabling the Corps of Discovery to explore more of this wilderness territory that was part of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Clark took his larger group down the Beaverhead River to the Three Forks of the Missouri, where they split. Sergeant John Ordway would lead nine men down the Missouri to eventually meet Lewis’s men at the Great Falls of the Missouri. Clark would take the remaining ten members of the party overland to the Yellowstone River, then explore downstream to its mouth on the Missouri, where the whole Corps was to eventually reunite.
Lewis’s group, with seventeen horses and some Nez Perce guides, departed from Traveler’s Rest near present-day Lolo, Montana, on July 3. The five Native American guides left the Corps the next day. On July 6, they “passed the north fork of the Cokalahishkit [sic], a deep and rapid stream, forty-five yards in width, and like the main branch itself somewhat turbid, though the other streams of this country are clear.”
From there Captain Lewis noted a “multitude of knobs,” and he called this country the Prairie of the Knobs. “They abound in game, as we saw goats, deer, great numbers of burrowing squirrels, some curlews, bee martins, woodpeckers, plover, robins, doves, ravens, hawks, ducks, a variety of sparrows, and yesterday observed swans on Werner’s Creek.
“In the course of the day the track of the Indians, whom we supposed to be the Pahkees [Blackfeet], continued to grow fresher, and we passed a number of old lodges and encampments,” his journal notes.
That night Lewis and his group camped just west of present-day Lincoln.
“At seven o’clock the next morning, we proceeded through a beautiful plain on the north side of the river, which seems here to abound in beaver,” Lewis wrote.
After following Alice Creek and crossing the Continental Divide at later-named Lewis and Clark Pass (elevation 6,421 feet), Lewis noted the group was “delighted at discovering that this was the dividing ridge between the waters of the Columbia and those of the Missouri.
“We procured some beaver, and this morning saw some signs and tracks of buffalo, from which it seems those animals do sometimes penetrate to a short distance within the mountains,” he wrote.
After Lewis crossed the Blackfoot Valley, there was no other recorded visit by white explorers until Major Isaac Stevens led an expedition on a quest for a transcontinental rail route in the mid-1850s. Stevens actually recommended the Blackfoot Valley in his report, but his suggestion was ignored.
Another decade passed before word spread about the rich discoveries in Montana’s gold fields. The mere prospect of finding a mother lode brought settlers into western Montana valleys quicker than any railroad could.
The population of Lincoln rose and fell with the success of the mines. In those early yea
rs as miners and their symbiotic comrades jumped from one strike to another, the population of the valley might have reached 3,000. More than likely the numbers were less, especially when the area was locked in the grips of a frigid mountain winter. But as for most Montana gold boom towns, the bust wasn’t far behind. By the 1880s, mining was already on the decline and, by the 1920s, most of the miners had left the valley. But during their heyday, Lincoln Gulch mines produced more than $7 million in gold at $12 an ounce.
In the fall of 1916, town folks decided they needed a community gathering place where they could socialize, and hold picnics and dances. That winter, workers took advantage of deep snow to sled 120 logs out of the surrounding forests and started to craft the Community Hall. The logs and a false ceiling were in place after the first winter of work. Built with care and with a long life in mind, each log was mortised and then pegged to the one below with a piece of wheel spoke. It took almost two years to finish the center, and the dedication was held the night of February 22, 1918. The dance literally lasted all night, because a blizzard had blown in from the northeast as Lincoln celebrated, and few wanted to risk a trek home through the darkness during a storm. The octagonal building, with a more recent frame addition, is still a community sentinel on the west end of Main Street.
As the miners pulled out searching for new claims, they left behind a legacy of placer scars, huge heaps of gravel and mine tailings from their placer operations along the stream bottoms, and hard-rock adits, mine shafts, assay buildings, and mills along several mountain ridges. But Lincoln wasn’t about to become a ghost town like many other Montana gold camps, even though it came close.
By 1928, Lincoln’s year-round population dropped to twenty-five. The downtown area consisted of a hotel, a grocery store owned by Paul and Elsie Didriksen, a blacksmith shop, a corner bar, and post office. Lincoln then witnessed several growth spurts, first as an attractive place for summer vacationers who built their seasonal homes at Lincoln Estates, and then again as the result of mining activities. The town grew rapidly during the early 1940s with new ventures near the headwaters of the Blackfoot River at the Mike Horse Mine and several smaller operations. But this time, along with the miners, the valley was being settled by ranchers, loggers, and merchants who created livings from what the land would give them. By the time the Anaconda Company closed the Mike Horse in 1952 and many of the miners pulled out, the community had achieved the balance it needed to survive and prosper.