A history of life on the lake

The National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places provides additional information about the Wheeler property at the north end of Lake McDonald.

The main cabin built in 1942 was placed on the registry in 1998, and the site’s name was changed from Wheeler Cabin to Wheeler Camp in an addendum. The 1.21-acre site abuts the Lake McDonald Ranger Station and has 200 feet of shoreline.

The history of the site begins with a Wyoming dude rancher named Howard Eaton, who built a cabin at the north end of the lake before Glacier Park was established in 1910. Eaton was a friend of John E. Lewis and often stayed at Lewis’ Glacier Hotel, now the Lake McDonald Lodge.

Each summer, Eaton would bring a party up to Lake McDonald to camp at “Jacksonville,” a camp site near Sprague Creek leased from the Park. Eaton’s fall hunting trips prior to 1910 were a big social event for residents along the lake.

Hunting was prohibited in the Park once it was established in 1910, so Eaton sold his cabin site at the north end of Lake McDonald to Lewis, and it fell into disuse.

In 1915, Burton Wheeler, his wife Lulu and his three children came to Glacier Park for a three-week visit. They stayed in a platform tent at Fish Creek as guests of Park Commissioner Clarence Davidson. The next year the family had use of the Col. Nolan camp, just east of the Lake McDonald Ranger Station.

Nolan was a former Montana Attorney General. It was while staying there that Wheeler learned about the nearby Eaton property. When the Wheelers bought the land in 1916, the woods had started closing in on the cabin.

In 1917, now with four children, the Wheelers spent the summer clearing land around the cabin. This established an open lawn that set the property apart from the forest. Two riding horse continued to crop the lawn and keep it short after that.

By 1924, with six children, the Wheelers looked at building a second cabin. According to Marion Wheeler Scott, the “Sleep Cabin” was built with salvage logs from the 1929 Half Moon Fire, which started near the present-day F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber Co. mill and burned all the way down the Canyon to Apgar.

The next year, the Wheelers acquired a DC generator from the Great Northern Railway for lighting. A small building was constructed for the generator that looks like an outhouse and later became a laundry room. Lulu Wheeler, however, didn’t like the noise of the generator and had it shut down early each night.

As the Wheeler children grew up from toddlers to college age, they got to know the nearby Clack, Aronov, Walsh and LaDow families, and social trails became well established between the homes. Wheeler’s son Richard owned one of the first sailboats on the lake, and the family acquired a motorboat in the 1930s.

Sen. Wheeler sometiimes spoke on the phone about topics of national importance when he stayed at the cabin. A lookout on Mount Brown named Stanley once said he could look down at the Wheeler property when he heard the phone rang, and if the senator went over to the ranger station to answer the phone, he listened in on the conversation.

A third cabin was built in 1940 and later expanded in the 1950s. The large stone fireplace in the two-room log “Garage Cabin” was constructed by Ace Powell. After the main cabin burned in 1941, a new cabin was put up by Apgar builders Gus Aubert, Jean Sullivan, Ace Powell and possibly Austin Weikert. The fourth cabin, called the “Boys Cabin,” was constructed circa 1952 with post-World War II construction materials and design.