Longtime residents retain a wealth of information. They can tell us how people have lived within the ecosystem over time. Their stories are not only entertaining, they provide clues as to how we can both use and protect our forests, wildlife, water and a rural way of life. Swan Valley journalist, Suzanne Vernon, local students and volunteers, are conducting oral histories of longtime residents and summarizing them for Swan Ecosystem Center and the Upper Swan Valley Historical Society, with the goal of publishing a book.
Oral History summaries, volume I and II are available for $15 each at our gift shop in the notebooks "Swan Valley, a Century of Change." Featured below is an excerpt:
Ona Lake saw the Swan Valley for the first time during the fall of 1936. She came with her future husband, Dutch (James John) Lake. "He brought me up here to show me where he was going to retire," she said, with a matter-of-fact look on her face.
"He loved this country. This was his dream. He would have loved to have lived way back [on] the top of some mountain," she laughed.
Ona preferred to be around people, but Dutch liked the remote Swan Valley for exactly the opposite reason. Here he could be completely away from people.
"Lots of men kind of like that idea, you know," she said, shaking her head. "I'm so thankful he wasn't able to get a place way back," she giggled.
"It was beautiful, but it was so isolated," Ona said. The road from Seeley Lake to the Swan Valley was horrible, she added. "Potholes were six, eight or ten inches deep. And dust? Oh, my goodness, the dust. It was pure powder, on all the shrubs and trees, you couldn't see green . . . Everything was covered in dust."
While she sipped tea and enjoyed homemade pie served on her favorite dinnerware, Ona wondered aloud why men like Dutch ever fell in love with the Swan Valley in the first place. "Probably some romantic instinct of being totally independent. Probably like a cat ends up after birds, [it's an] instinct within them," she said. "He just loved the country. He thought the big trees were so beautiful. [He enjoyed] the freedom that was up here. And he loved the privacy," she said.
Ona and Dutch Lake were married in 1937. It was the beginning of a loving relationship with each other, and with the people and landscape of the Swan Valley.
"He was a good guy," she said, remembering the man that she fell in love with so long ago. "We had fifty-six years together." Dutch died of natural causes in 1993.
Ona had grown up in Eastern Montana, attending elementary school in Broadus. During the late 1920s, she moved with her family to Tacoma, Washington for a few years, then back to Miles City, Montana, where she graduated from high school in 1933. The following year, she moved with her family to Deer Lodge. That's where she met Dutch, while she was working at the local bakery. In fact, Dutch proposed to her while she was at work.
"He came into the bakery one day and said, 'I want you to quit your job. We're going to get married,'" she laughed. "So that was the proposal. He didn't say, 'Will you marry me?'" she grinned. Ona accepted his proposal. She and Dutch lived and worked near Deer Lodge for the next thirty years.
The young couple were not immediately blessed with children. However, by the early 1940s, Ona's nephew, Mike, had come to live with them.
"My sister [Twyla Tulley] got an infection in her teeth and tonsils, and it got in her blood stream and killed her. Mike was two-and-a-half," Ona explained solemnly. Her sister had been ill for a long time. "The doctor told me that, had he been able to use penicillin, he could have saved her life. But, at that time, they were using it only for servicemen. It wasn't for public use," she continued.
"My mother was taking care of her when she died, and [my sister] had asked my mother to ask Dutch and me to please raise her boy, and her husband went along with it," Ona explained.
"It was hard," Ona said, speaking of losing her sister. "But, [Mike] made our life for us, gave us stability," she explained.
The young family spent most of their free time--weekends and vacations--enjoying camping, fishing, hiking, and hunting in the Swan Valley.
Ona explained that, in the late 1930s, several men who lived around Deer Lodge owned a hunting cabin along the Swan River, just west of the Community Hall. Dutch was among them.
"The [other] men only came up for a hunting trip, and that was once a year. So the cabin was usually available to us. We used it for years," she said.
"We were up here at least once every month, and it was an all-day trip up Saturday and an all-day trip home on Sunday, almost, in those days," she said.
Ona considered herself "the chief cook and bottle washer," she said, when her family would come up here for hunting trips. She remembered the slow-cooked dinners that she prepared on the old wood stove in the cabin. "Roast, stew, in the old Dutch ovens. Then hot cakes for breakfast and deer steak to go with the hot cakes," she said.
Of all their activities, Dutch enjoyed hunting the most. The young couple had horses, and would trailer their stock to the Swan Valley so he and his friends could hunt in the vicinity of Elk Creek.
Dutch was not a trophy hunter, Ona explained. "He was a meat hunter. And we used it all. Now, I don't even care if I ever have any, but in those days it made a big difference," she said, adding that by the 1950s, they could take their wild game, mostly deer and a few elk, to Conklin's store (where the Mission Mountains Mercantile is located today). "He had lockers at that time, and he would cut your meat up and put it in the lockers for you," she said.
Life in the Swan Valley, in the 1930s and 1940s, however, was still rustic. For instance, the cabin where they stayed lacked running water or electricity.
Jess Forster, a neighboring homesteader, built the cabin for the men from Deer Lodge. "Of course, [Forster] also supervised the building of the Community Hall," she explained. The hall was built in the late 1930s, with Works Project Administration (WPA) money.
Other old-time residents whom she knew during those days included Lydia Strom and her family, who built the store that is now known as Swan Valley Centre.
Ona got along well with Lydia. "I just loved her. She was one, if she liked you, she liked you. If she disliked you, she didn't hesitate to let you know it! [She was] a very down-to-earth person," Ona explained.
Several "down-to-earth" people established stores and businesses along the route from Seeley Lake to the Swan Valley in those early days, and Ona knew most of them.
From Deer Lodge, she and Dutch drove to Drummond, then on dirt roads to Helmville and Ovando, via the old Drummond road. From Ovando, they followed another dirt road to Woodworth, then past Fish Lake (now Big Sky Lake) and then to Seeley Lake.
Freshour's Log Cabin Bar and store in Seeley Lake offered groceries and supplies. Kenny and Betty Freshour were known to all the local residents, and most of the frequent travelers. "They loved everybody. They just liked people," she said.
"That was a stopping place for us when we'd come up on Friday night. Beautiful, big old log building. I was just sick when that burned down [many years later]. To me, that was Seeley Lake," she said, remembering one of the first businesses ever established in that townsite.
"We left Freshours to come up to the cabin, and in those days, we had to bring all of our own bedding, all of my cooking utensils and everything, because there was nothing in that cabin, it was bare," she said.
Ona remembered one of those late-night trips between Seeley Lake and the Swan Valley.
"We left Seeley Lake late at night, and somebody had plowed, but in those days when you plowed it just went one way and only one car, not the double track. Up on Coyote Hill [at Rainy Lake] . . . there had been a big snowball that rolled back down on the road and froze there. We came up on top of it with our car and tipped our car over [on its side] right in the middle of the road," she said. She and Dutch tried to release the car from its high-centered position, without success. "So I made a bed out on the glass, the windows of the car, and we went to bed. There wasn't a soul came by until Johnny Hollopeter the next morning about 8 o'clock on his way to Seeley," she remembered.
"In those days there were so few people living up here, everyone knew everyone else," she said, adding that John Hollopeter and Dutch eventually got the car moving again.
People were friendly and helped each other whenever the need arose. "There was a culture, such a bond among the people here," Ona explained. "You [might] not see each other for months on end. Yet, if you needed something, boy, they were there for you."
Dutch and Ona, like most others who drove through the area, also visited the Swan River Tavern on their trips to the Swan Valley. Louie and Mame Krause opened that bar in about 1946.
"My husband [would] have a beer and Liquid Louie would haul a beer out of a tub of ice. That was the way he kept the drinks cold, was ice," she explained. "He was just a likable guy," she said.
By the 1940s, Dutch's brother, Maurice, had purchased land in the Swan Valley. He and his wife lived here for many years, in the vicinity of Guest Ranch Road. Dutch and Ona eventually bought land from Maurice along the river. "He wanted to sell some of [his land], so we bought half of his property," Ona explained.
In the late 1950s, when the Wineglass Mill closed, Dutch and Ona bought one of the cabins that had housed families at the mill. (Several cabins were sold to local residents who moved them to various locations throughout the valley.) Ona and Dutch moved the cabin they purchased to their newly acquired riverfront property.
"You know there are a lot of homes in this valley that are made from these [cabins] and ours is one of them, over there," she said, nodding toward the original cabin site, just down the river from her present home.
Local residents used bulldozers and other heavy equipment to move the cabins from the Wineglass Mill site. "[Ours was] skidded out in the winter, and then it sat along the road there where the yard is now," she said. "Dutch put a block foundation up for it and Chip [Dunlap] moved it with his equipment onto the foundation," she explained.
Ona remembered that the cabins from the Wineglass Mill were small, but comfortable. "It used to be you had to stand up to look out the windows," she laughed. "The men must have built them. The women didn't have any say, because none of them could look out the windows!" she laughed. "If you were sitting down all you could see was sky."
The walls inside their cabin were covered with layers of wallpaper. "We stayed in it with the wall paper hanging down," she laughed. "We didn't have money to go ahead and fix it up, so we just enjoyed it. I've got pictures of having parties with the wall paper [falling down] . . . It didn't stop us a bit from really enjoying it!"
The cabin had four rooms: a kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms. Some of the other cabins that were moved from the mill only had one bedroom, Ona remembered.
Over the years, she and Dutch, and Mike, have done various remodeling on the original building. "We just have loved it and enjoyed it so. Oh, we've had so many of our Deer Lodge friends come over and visit with us. We just really enjoyed that home," Ona grinned.
In the late 1950s, after Mike started high school, Ona went to work for the Milwaukee Railroad in Deer Lodge. She worked there for the next 17 years. "I loved it. I still keep in contact with the girls in the office who are still living," she smiled. "I love people. I like people. You know, we have people who don't want to be around other people, but I'm not one of them," she laughed.
By the mid-1970s, following Dutch's retirement from the Montana Power Company, this energetic couple finally moved to the Swan Valley full-time.
Ona took up hiking, with her friends, Marylou Wilhelm, Gyda Newman and Peggy Kratzer. "Marylou, Gyda and Peggy and I have had the most wonderful hikes. I've been up to Upper Rumble [lake]. Sure I have. In my sixties--after I retired!" she laughed. "Turquoise Lake, the top of Lindy Peak--I think they are all gorgeous. I think Lindy Peak is my favorite because one time when I was up there, [Peggy] counted and named 13 lakes around us."
Another "special" memory after retirement was a week-long trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Frank Jette and Marylou Wilhelm provided the trip. "I rode Doris Haasch's horse, Old Yeller," Ona explained. "That trip was one of the highlights of my life," she said.
Ona and Dutch continued to enjoy hunting and fishing, and later added snowmobiling to their list of favorite pastimes. Ona was appointed secretary for the first snowmobile club in the valley, during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Over the years, Ona has enjoyed the Swan Valley from a number of different perspectives. She has been active in her local church, and for many years has hosted a weekly women's Bible study at her home. She is well aware of the changes that are happening throughout the area. However, she hesitates to get involved in the arguments about the effects of growth and development in the valley.
"People need to accept things. I think some people like to fight life. They need to learn to accept things," she said, simply. "God provides."
Ona Lake was interviewed in 2001 for the Upper Swan Valley Oral History Project. She celebrated her 88th birthday in May, 2003. She enjoys being active in community activities, and working outdoors. In June, she hiked to Holland Falls with a friend. "It was absolutely gorgeous," she said.
© Copyright 2010 Suzanne Vernon, Swan Ecosystem Center. All rights reserved.
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