Columbia Falls men recalled building Hungry Horse Dam, 70 years ago

Seventy years ago, work on the Hungry Horse Dam began in earnest, with an official groundbreaking on July 10, 1948.

Robert Kamrud and Ed DeReu, both longtime Columbia Falls residents, worked on the dam.

“I was just old enough to go to work. 16,” Kamrud, now 85, recalled.

He grew up in Hinsdale in eastern Montana and started work at the dam in 1949, moving west with his father, Arthur, who also worked on the dam.

He ran a vibrator, which packed down the cement as it was poured.

“We worked seven days a week,” he recalled. Pay was a $1 an hour and they worked nine and 10 hour days.

“Mud job,” he said. “You didn’t get no time off.”

Kamrud worked for two years on the dam before he got drafted and went overseas in the Air Force, serving in post-war Europe.

DeReu worked in the steelyard in Hungry Horse and didn’t see the actual dam much. He was 29 and unlike a lot of guys, who lived in houses in Hungry Horse and Martin City, he lived in Columbia Falls. He moved to Montana from Minnesota.

“They had a bus run to the dam,” DeReu, who is now 95, recalled.

Both men today live at Timber Creek Assisted Living Center in Columbia Falls.

They said the work was dangerous. The bar scene in the towns outside the dam was dangerous, too.

“You had to be watching everything you did up there,” Kamrud said.

He recalled a worker who was buried to death under cement.

“He was where he wasn’t supposed to be,” Kamrud recalled.

Outside the dam, the beer and liquor flowed freely for the thousands of workers.

“There were 12 bars and a liquor store in Martin City alone,” DeReu recalled.

He remembered sitting at the Dam Town Tavern in Hungry Horse when the owner shot another man right at the bar. Kamrud recalled a shootout at a Martin City bar when two men got into a fight about an elk hunt. He also recalled a murder, where the perp maintained it was a hunting accident.

DeReu said he made more working in the steelyard than on the dam itself.

“My paycheck at the end of the week for seven days was $150.47,” he said.

“That was big money then,” Kamrud recalled. “Everyone was happy.”

“You could buy a beer for a nickel; gas about 15 cents,” DeReu said.

DeReu recalled a rather famous wreck in Martin City after the dam was completed in 1956. A logging truck went into the Silver Dollar Bar in Martin City in October, 1956. The owner of the bar, Helen Eddie, said the crash sounded like an earthquake. She was asleep in the back of the establishment. She estimated damage at $5,000 and the wreck knocked her out of bed.

“A newspaper delivery person went right in front of the truck. He swerved to miss him and went right into the bar. I saw it,” DeReu recalled.

After his time in the service, Kamrud went on to be an ironworker and moved back to Columbia Falls. DeReu also worked in timber industry, worked building the aluminum plant and for three years, owned what was Rex’s Bar at the time — the now defunct Ol’ River Bridge Inn in Columbia Heights.

Kamrud and his wife, Patricia Anne had three boys, Robert A., Keith and Brett. DeReu and his wife Darlene had seven children, Wayne, Rebecca, Tim, Tom, Beth, Mary and Chris.

The dam had a great impact on the men’s lives and on the Flathead Valley.

“The dam opened things up for construction,” Kamrud said. “Without the dam, there was nothing to look forward to.”