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PLAYING
HERE >
HISTORY
> WHITEFISH, MONTANA |
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“There was nothing to do, but just keep going”
It is difficult to imagine the level of difficult
challenge that early pioneers faced. I could not
describe the experience of just getting here better than
one of our first loggers did.
“W.O. Hutchinson described his own fairly typical
journey from Michigan to Whitefish Lake……I arrived at
Whitefish Lake on November 14, 1890. My brother Joe had
been here two months. I left my old hoe in Michigan on
November 6. I went north to Mackinaw Strait, from there
to Duluth and Minneapolis, from there I took a Northern
Pacific train to Ravalli, which is about 35 miles south
of Flathead Lake, and it took five days to make the
trip.
 “At Ravalli I bought a stage ticket to the foot of
Flathead Lake, There were five stages leaving that
morning but they were so heavily loaded that several us
had to walk. The first day we traveled to the present
day of Ronan, there were no beds so we were forced to
sit up all night. During the night it snowed about
twelve inches, with sleighs replacing the stages. At
noon we reached the foot of Flathead Lake where Polson
is now and took a steamboat to Demersville. (4 miles SE
of Kalispell).
The next morning I got up early and started afoot for
Whitefish Lake, carrying a heavy suitcase and a rifle.
There was no snow until I got to the timber line, about
five miles south of whitefish. It was said to be
twenty-five miles from Deversville to Whitefish Lake and
people had already begun to settle along the road. When
I arrived at the Henry Good ranch I took a wrong turn
and came north. I then followed a trail through the
woods towards Whitefish. After walking about a mile and
a half I came upon three men building a log cabin in a
meadow. One of then was A.N. Smith, later county
commissioner of Columbia Falls. He told me that it was
about a mile an a half to the trail to Whitefish Lake. I
made two attempts, but both times came out to the
Whitefish River, so I went back to where they were
building the cabin and Mr. Smith showed me over to the
lake read. I was surely warm and tired when I got there,
as I had then walked twenty-five miles. It was sundown,
and I was still three and a half miles from the lake:
however there was nothing to do except keep going.
The trail passed a small log cabin with some hay in it.
I thought for a few minutes that I would camp there for
the night, but on second thought I decided to go on and
see what I could find. I had gone only forty rods when I
found my brother and two other men working on his cabin,
about a half mile south of the Lake. I was then dark, so
we came down to the lake to a cabin where John Morton
lived. He was the first to locate in the Whitefish Lade
country, having built his cabin just west of the outlet
of the lake. He was from Michigan, not far from where we
had lived, and I had known him there.
“I was pretty tired from my long hike and slept well
that nite. When I got up the next morning, the sun was
coming up over the mountains by the canyon making the
peaks of the Whitefish Range a beautiful red. There was
a dead swell three feet high rolling down the Lake. I
went out and sat on the shore of the lake, admiring the
scenery for two hours. Never had I seen anything so
beautiful.”
It is men like this upon whose shoulders we stand and to
whom we owe a debt of gratitude. They had the courage to
go into the wilderness to forge a future for themselves
and create the beautiful town of Whitefish for all of
us.
Note: The quoted material is taken
from
Stump Town to Ski Town, by Betty Schafer and Mable Engelter, written in 1972 and reprinted by the Stumptown
Historical Society in 2003. It is available for sale in
the Whitefish Museum located in the Train Depot. |
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