Montana: The Lights Go On In the Yaak River Valley

In the rugged, remote northwest corner of Montana, the Yaak River Valley is a picture postcard of some yesteryear. Moose muse among the willows. Elk graze on the slopes. White-tailed deer browse in the bottom land. Deep among the whispering pine and the hemlock, among the silver aspen and birch, the bears dig into windfalls for grubs. Rainbow trout, cutthroat and whitefish tumble in Beetle and Winkum Creeks.

In that bucolic 45-mile-long valley, 83 families live peacefully in humble cabins and fine log homes. Hunting rifles adorn their walls and fishing rods and boots occupy the corners of the rooms. In cabin after cabin, there is a color picture of the President of the United States. Yes, sir, says one oldtimer gesturing to a photo on the wall, “he was a great man, that Franklin D. Roosevelt.” And over in the Dirty Shame Saloon, Grocery Store and Gas Station, Proprietor “Buster” Bray, formerly of San Francisco, says: “I wouldn’t trade any of this for Third and Market Streets—not ever again.”

Hand Pumps. But progress has finally come to the Yaak River Valley—and last week, amid modest ceremony, the inhabitants observed the first linking-in of the area’s electric power line. The valley will never be the same again—a fact observed with pleasure by most, but with misgivings by some.

True, a few families have had a minimum amount of power. Buster Bray has kept the Dirty Shame alight with electricity generated by a diesel Caterpillar in a shed behind the saloon. But “the Monster,” as he calls it, has been running night and day for three years. It costs $26 a day, and, when it coughs at night, it wakes up folks for miles around. Bray is waiting impatiently for the rural cooperative to string its power-line to his part of the valley.

One of the first to connect his home with the power was Harry Franke, 40. A onetime truck driver, Franke moved into the Yaak with his family three years ago to exchange the nerve-wracking tumult of Chicago life for a small cattle spread. “I didn’t know how to live without electricity,” says his wife Bonnie, “but we had to learn.” The Frankes used kerosene lamps, traded their electric refrigerator for one that ran on propane gas, swapped their radio for an old battery set. Says Bonnie: “The ironing baffled me for a time, but I finally found a couple of flatirons and a gasoline iron.” A hand pump provided water for the toilet, and the rest of the household water was hauled up to the house in buckets from a spring.

Now Bonnie can hardly wait to get an electric iron, an electric water pump, a new washing machine and a dryer. A television set, she says, is at the bottom of the shopping list. She would much rather have her three children explore the Yaak than vegetate before the magic eye. “Later,” she says, “we’ll buy a freezer, and after that a waffle iron. It’s been a long time since this family sat down to waffles.”

“Too Many People.” Anton Obermayer, a 75-year-old Bavarian-born brewmaster, plans to take the service, too, but he will use it only on a limited basis. He is proudly self-sufficient. He built his own home, cabinets and furniture, grows his own vegetables. His wife Mary Monica, 74, makes her own soap. “When I came here in 1917,” says Obermayer, “it was a wilderness. It is not so good now. There are too many people, and they are making too many roads. They kill all the animals. Oh, well, when electricity comes, we will get an electric stove and put it beside the wood stove.”

Torjus “Gunnysack” Johnson, 66, was not so sure he wanted electricity. Gunnysack and his wife, Mamie, subsist on social security money, and they did not know if they could afford the $10-a-month minimum charge for electricity. Besides, says Mamie Johnson, 79, “I’d rather have spent the money for a game license. I do some fishing, but I’d like to get me a deer this fall, and a bear. I’d sure like to get the juice from a fat bear. Makes a fine oil for salad.” Nevertheless, the Johnsons have signed up.

Similarly, Charles Fields, 80, and his wife, Martha, 79, sense that the coming of electricity will intrude on their remembrances of long-gone times. Says Charlie Fields, slapping his thigh: “Back when I was a young fellow, I lived in southern Colorado. I was a gunslinger.” Today the Fields’ combined income is only $99 a month and a memory a day. But, says Martha, “we’re going to go ahead and get the house wired. At our age, anything can happen. We don’t have any electric appliances, and I guess we won’t get any. But we’ll have lights.”

The lights in the Fields’ place—and appliances and television and all the rest in the valley—may illuminate much that has lain dark and shadowy for the people of the Yaak. At the Fields’ place, for example, the lights will brighten walls that are hung with old rifles, a couple of powder horns, pictures of relatives in high lace collars and, of course, a photo of the President of the U.S.—Abe Lincoln.