by Waits, Chris
Most people mox e 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.-^ Kven people like myself who are attracted to a lifestyle like Ted's eventually grow tired of the struggle to sur-vi e 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.
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 cen-
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tiirics of water, and white rims showing old water levels around the hills—ineluding those in the I'pper Blaekfoot alley just fifty miles to the northw est.
Jib Lon
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 paystreak, 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 follow^ed 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 w^ere 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 Blaekfoot River in 1865.
As they staked their claims, food came from the nearby forests— venison and other w^ld 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 buf-
falo that had wandcrcd ()cr the mountains and into the alley. Nearby, stone cjuarries on Willow and Nevada ereeks 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 C^lark 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 Ordw^ay 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 [sk], 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."<
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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 beau-
tiful 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 w^as 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 years 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 ni^ht, because a hli//ard had blow n in from the northeast as Lincoln celebrated, and few wanted to risk a trek home throiio^h the darkness during a storm. 'I'he 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 194()s 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.
Since prehistoric times, the Upper Blackfoot has been one of those mountain valleys where its people and nature, by necessity, live in harmony. The valley is flanked to the north, east and south by imposing mountain ranges with the only access over one of six mountain passes: Dalton, 6,450 feet; Lewis and Clark, 6,421; Cadotte, 6,080; Rogers, 6,376; Flesher, 6,131; and Stemple, 6,376. Today, only foot trails traverse the divide at Cadotte and Lewis and Clark passes; Dalton has a seasonal gravel road; and Stemple has a year-round gravel road. Only Flesher and Rogers have paved or blacktopped roads into the valley. Conifer forests paint the mountainsides a thick, dark green as far as the eye can see, broken only by the lighter splotches of deciduous aspen and cottonwoods along river and stream bottoms. Outcroppings
of granite and scdimentarv' stone burst through the forest tops, nature's towers scraping at the sky with their jagged tops.
Only to the west is there an escape route for spring and mountain waters, w hich pour together into the legendary Blackfoot River. The Blackfoot was the favorite fishing haunt of Norman and Paul Maclean and was the setting for Norman's A River Runs Tkrough It.
'Taul and I fished a good many rivers," Maclean writes in his popular novella. ''But when one of us referred to 'the big river' the other knew it was the Big Blackfoot. It isn't the biggest river we fished, but it is the most powerful and, per pound, so are its fish. It runs straight and hard—on a map or from an airplane it is almost a straight line running due west from its headwaters at Rogers Pass on the Continental Divide to Bonner, Montana, where it empties into the South Fork of the Clark Fork of the Columbia. It runs hard all the way.
"From its headwaters to its mouth it was manufactured by glaciers. The first sixty-five miles of it are smashed against the southern wall of its valley by glaciers that moved in from the north, scarifying the earth; its lower twenty-five miles were made overnight when the great glacial lake covering northwestern Montana and northern Idaho broke its ice dam and spread the remains of Montana and Idaho mountains over hundreds of miles of the plains of eastern Washington. It was the biggest flood in the world for which there is geological evidence; it w^as so vast a geological event that the mind of man could only conceive of it but could not prove it until photographs could be taken from earth satellites."
Running parallel, and always negotiating for space with the Blackfoot, modern man traverses the state on U.S. Highway 200. Power and phone lines also share the sometimes narrow^ mountain corridor. There's no rail line, unusual for major mountain valleys. But early rail entrepreneurs found little potential here, and James Hill's Northern Pacific drove the golden spike of its transcontinental railroad some thirty miles southwest of Lincoln, as the crow flies, at Gold Creek in 1883.
Even though it wasn't a natural for a rail tow n, Lincoln was a good town site, a high mountain valley at 4,540 feet above sea level, with enough room to grow if settlers were willing to carve a homestead and a lifestyle out of mature stands of lodgepole and ponderosa pine.
Today, U.S. Highway 200 stretches taut as a mason's string through
Lincoln, acting as an ad()ptcd-b-necessity main street. Roadside traffic signs warn truckers and travelers anxious to negotiate the eighty-nine miles east to Great Falls or seventy-eight miles west to Missoula that they better slow to 30 mph. The only sign of a traffic signal is a single yellow flashing light, gently swaying in the mountain breezes above the Stemple Pass Road intersection.
If you walk through Lincoln east to west, it's 1,742 paces from Sucker Creek Road, where a Ponderosa Snow Warriors Club sign welcomes snowmobilers, to Leepers Ponderosa Motel with its small cabins scattered in the pines. Slowing from the east, weary travelers looking for a shaded campsite
on a hot summer night find Hooper Park with its Softball fields, horseshoe pits, and picnic and camping spots. Hooper also is one of the places people gather to watch Montana's premier sled dog race, the 300-mile Race to the Sky held each February. Just west of Hooper, and shaded by the same cover of stately pines, is the Lincoln Community Library, a brown lap-sided rectangular building with a green metal roof that often catches rafts of pine needles in its valleys.
Across the street, a yellow sign in front of the Lincoln Public School salutes student activities, especially those of high schoolers. Lincoln people are especially proud of their school, built after a devastating fire destroyed the town's seven-room elementary school in 1978. Out of the ashes of the disaster came a reward for the community. Before the fire, Lincoln's group of twenty or so teens was bused daily some forty miles northeast along often slick two-lane highways to attend Augusta High School or even southeast to Helena. The new Lincoln School included high school classrooms.
From the school, Lincoln's business district stretches west, without any of the congestion of a big city strip, to Garland's Town & Country Store, a false-fronted mecca for hunters and fishers; Lambkin's of Lincoln, a popular bar and grill; the Community Hall, where a sign promises bingo every Friday at 7:30 P.M.; The Lost Woodsman Coffee House Cafe and Gallery, w ith its espresso bar and carved totem pole out front; the chalet-styled United States Post Office; the Three Bears Motel; the Lincoln-log Masonic Lodge; and the Wheel Inn Bar. Also along the way there's a scattering of bars, restaurants, offices, and a hardware store. Lincoln folks can find almost every staple they need
in town, but most do their serious shopping in nearby (by Montana standards) Great F'alls, Missoula or Helena.
Lincoln's population varies. It's about 1,200 most times of the year, yet in the fall, deer, elk and bear hunters can add significantly to that tally. The same is true in the depth of winter when the Ponderosa Snow Warriors attract visiting snowmobilers to town for weekend poker runs at the Sucker Creek Clubhouse. Snowfall that can exceed two hundred annual inches helps snowmobilers and cross-country skiers forget the frequent, double-digit-below-zero temperatures. Nearby at Rogers Pass, the lowest temperature ever recorded in the continental United States—69.7° below zero Fahrenheit—was posted.