Yesterdays: Celebrate the bison range with a buffalo barbecue
70 years ago
Oct. 8, 1948
It was estimated it would take about 10 million board feet of lumber to build the Hungry Horse Dam. The wood was used to concrete forms. That’s enough lumber for 1,000 homes. The front page featured seven photos of local Boy Scouts camping, fishing and cooking at Bowman Lake, including a photo of a deer keeping ahead of the boys as it swam in the lake and they followed in a canoe.
60 years ago
Oct. 10, 1958
The National Bison Range celebrated its golden anniversary with a buffalo barbecue, among other things. At the time, there were 300 to 500 bison living on the range near Moiese, which has about the same number of bison today. North Forker Frank Wurtz shot a mountain lion that was in his front yard. The cat weighed 227 pounds and skinned out was 7-feet, 5-inches long.
50 years ago
Oct. 11, 1968
A record 31 million board feet timber sale was to go to bid in the Spotted Bear Ranger District. Included in the sale were plans to extend the Bunker Creek Road for 7 miles, the Gorge Creek Camp Road for one mile and the North Fork of Bunker Creek for 4.1 miles.
Mel Ruder defended the cost of the subscription of the newspaper, which was $7 a year. He noted wages had gone up for printers, postage was up and since the paper ran a lot of pictures, those were expensive, too.
40 years ago
Oct. 12, 1978
Glacier Park officials had started using a computer to monitor bear sightings and locations in the Park. But it wasn’t as easy as sitting down to a laptop. The information of a bear sighting was recorded on a form, then specially coded and sent to a government contracted computer in Virginia that generated a report of all the sightings in the Park during that week.
30 years ago
Oct. 12, 1988
Park ranger Randy Coffman, assisted by three other Glacier Park rangers delivered a baby in a can afdter the expecting mother didn’t make it to the hospital outside of St. Mary. In 1987 the state Lehislature gave the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. a hefty business equipment tax break, saving the company about $900,000. Now aluminum was double in price what it was in ‘87 and lawmakers were questioning the wisdom of the move.
20 years ago
Oct. 8, 1998
Congressman Rick Hill wanted $1 million to further study what impacts a partial or complete closure of th Going-to-the-Sun Road would have on the economy during road construction. The Park initially had planned to close the road either from the west of east side, depending on where the work was, for the entire summer. That plan never happened, and construction went on for years with only partial lane closures for most of the project.
10 years ago
Oct. 9, 2008
A Wall Street bailout bill was good news for county coffers as it provided about $8.3 million in funding to Flathead County for roads and bridges through the Secure Rural Schools Act. Then Sen. Max Baucus attached the bill to the Wall Street bailout, after banks and other institutions failed en masse, during the Great Recession.