When women were scarce

Editor’s note: George Ostrom is under the weather this week. We bring you this column from 2010...

An early Park photo shows four young men outside a log cabin with a large sign, “Wives Wanted.” One is identified as “Apgar,” for whom the village is named. That photo reminded me of C.D. O’Neil’s “Timber ‘n Injuns.” Young C.D. came here in 1895, and in later years wrote a book for his family. The stories are for sharing:

“Women Were Scarce”

“In the early days women were very scarce in the Flathead. None of the regular lumberjacks and very few of the Kalispell business men had wives.

“Mayor Griffin was a single man and I think it was he who thought of a plan to advertise the Flathead by offering a buffalo calf to any young woman who would come to Kalispell to teach school. Newspapers throughout the east copied the ad and it ran as a news item. The story kept growing as many papers told of the wealthy business men living in the wonderful Flathead Valley of Montana who wanted wives.

“The mayor had a large mail response for some time. Some ladies wrote for more information. Some told the day they would arrive and asked him to meet them at the train or at the boat in Demersville. One widow wrote she would arrive via the Great Northern on a certain Sunday afternoon, and to be sure to meet her as she was bringing her five children and mother-in-law. She said since the mayor was a real estate dealer, she would expect him to have a nice home ready for them. They would not want the buffalo calf!

“I think there were five hundred men at the depot to meet the train. In the crowd were over a dozen big buck Indians wearing breechcloths and buckskin moccasins. The Indians had their hair braided and tied back with beads and skins of white weasels. The train stopped for twenty minutes and many passengers got off and walked to the east end of the platform to inspect the natives. In those days the women wore long dresses so as not to expose either their necks of their ankles. I noticed as they got near the Indians, many of these eastern ladies blushed at seeing the amount of anatomy the Indians had exposed.”

C.D. did not report if that widow found a husband, but as scarce as women were then, I assume some lonely logger didn’t mind taking a wife with five kids and built-in mother-in-law. Other chapters do tell more:

“As Kalispell grew and the country became settled there were more women and children. At first the ratio was fifteen men to every woman. By 1900 there were still three men to every woman. School teachers continued in great demand, particularly as many of them married in less than one year after arrival. In the early days girls did not work in stores or offices as they do now (1950s), so teaching or getting married were the natural things.”

C.D. tells of two young ladies coming to his office and introducing themselves as new teachers at the high school. They asked if he might take them to a logging camp, if they paid for horses and a sleigh. He immediately said, “YES!” He tells us, “When I drove to the school at seven Sunday morning, there were sixteen young women ready to go see ‘timber beasts’ as the men in the woods were called.”

He took them to the Neffner Mill five miles past Kila, “... where one hundred men and twelve horse teams were logging.” Needless to say all the men from bosses to sawyers went loopy. C.D. was the hero of the day for driving a four-horse sleigh up that mountain road with “a load of pretty girls.” His story ends like this; “That trip to the woods stimulated the bath business at John Frohlicher’s Barber Shop. John maintained the only public baths in town, and even private baths were rare. He had two tubs and plenty of hot water. The lumberjacks would come in for a bath and hair cut before calling on the teachers. In the months that followed, several ‘timber beasts’ were taking school teachers to the Sky Pilot to get harnessed as teams.”

Thanks C.D.!