Excerpts from “Cabin Fever” © Mildred Chaffin 1989. Reprinted with permission.
The Corlett Ranch was a stock ranch before it was bought in the late 1920s by Jan Boissevain and Colonel George F. Weisel. Boissevain dreamed of building it into a combination horse and dude ranch. The Double Arrow Ranch, named after a brand on Boissevain’s favorite horse, was established in 1929 and became the first commercial dude ranch to be located at Seeley Lake.
Boissevain was a competent horseman and had even served as a reserve officer in the Dutch Cavalry. There he had ridden an American horse with a double-edged spear brand and the animal, he found upon investigation, had come from the Spear Brothers Ranch at Drummond, Mont. The young officer later left the Cavalry to go into his family’s banking business and found himself transferred from Amsterdam to Texas, then to Spokane, Wash., where he met Allen Toole, son of John H. Toole, president of the Anaconda Company’s Timber Division at Bonner.
Boissevain was not favorably impressed with Montana until he accepted an invitation to visit at Toole’s summer cabin at Seeley Lake. There, he met Toole’s brother-in-law George F. Weisel and they began to talk of starting a dude ranch. They learned that Frank Scully was managing the Corlett Ranch. Several people had indicated that Frank Skully and a man by the name of Nesbitt had planned to establish a dude ranch. However, Boissevain and Weisel bought the property and re-named it The Double Arrow because of the brand on Boissevain’s favorite horse.
Building the Ranch
It took about a year to transform the Corlett Ranch into the Double Arrow “dude ranch.” Three log “Scully” cabins were moved from the Trail Creek area and located at the Double Arrow building site. After a winter of hard work several of the present ranch buildings were finished. Some of the people who worked on the construction were Earl Wood, Cliff Vaughn, Vic Parent, Irvine Speny, A. McDonald, Bill Stewart and W. Christenson. Carpenter Fred English and his crew from Missoula put in tamarack (or larch) flooring and did the finishing work. Dave Thompson was the “skinner” (horse driver) and Emil Gobalet was the stonemason. Col. George Weisel closely supervised all the construction in 1929 and 1930.
Sometime during the construction period, Boissevain made a trip East to drum up some opening trade. On July 1, 1930, the president of Cornell University and his wife arrived with other notables as guests.
The Double Arrow Ranch began raising fine horses, too. Boissevain brought the first thoroughbred stallion to the ranch in the fall of 1930. That horse was obtained from a re-mount service in Colorado. The stallion had been injured during training for races, but he had a gentle disposition and sired many fine colts.
Boissevain and Weisel brought other horses from the Flathead Indian Reservation and from the Bitterroot Valley. The ranch did not produce enough hay to keep the entire herd of horses over the winter. Most of them were driven over the Jocko Trail to winter in pastures in the Mission Valley - a custom practiced by most of the dude outfits at the time.
Some Tough Years
By now, Boissevain, divorced from his first wife, had become engaged to his partner’s daughter, Anna Afton Weisel. The wedding that took place after that first guest season was attended by people from all over the United States and part of Europe. After a honeymoon in Hawaii, the young couple returned to build a cabin for themselves which is still called the Hilltop House.
Tragedy struck. In the spring, Anna died in childbirth. Boissevain had completed the house, the dude season was about to begin, and he was forced to carry on.
By 1932, the Great Depression had caught up with the recreation business and the Double Arrow was struggling to stay afloat. Weisel sold his interests to Boissevain in 1932 in order to start over with the Circle W dude ranch on the Blackfoot River.
Boissevain married Edith Greenough of Missoula in 1933. Together they tried to keep the business in operation, since they were still getting a few guests. At this time, they also started breeding horses which were sold to the Army.
Indian Camp
In the fall, the Indians came over the Jocko Pass to camp and hunt on Double Arrow land. Boissevain felt that they had a right to use the land as they always had and he welcomed them. Eneas Granjo and his family, John and Agnes Pelka, Mischelle Kiser, Happy Ninepipes and Mose and Ellen Big Sam were among them. He even rode to warn them when the game warden was on the way!
Being unaccustomed to his strange manner and his accent, the Indians didn’t care for him at first, but later grew to like him a lot. They never learned to pronounce his name but there was a big dinner bell that he rang and they nicknamed him “The Bell Boss.” Mose Big Sam even built a sweathouse for The Bell Boss right outside the front porch at the Hilltop House. In summer they often put on their ceremonial costumes and danced for the guests.
Depression Years
During Depression days, Missoula County contracted with the Double Arrow to house about one hundred unemployed lumberjacks, supplying double bunks from a nearby logging camp and setting them up in the guest cabins. The ranch kitchen, which had been equipped to serve royalty, now served these men who found themselves out of work.
By 1938 Boissevain had tried just about everything to ward off hard times. He even tried starting a ski resort. Bob Manchester, a college student and skier, helped him clear the hillside behind the ranch buildings and the two men lay on the ground with crosscut saws to cut the stumps low enough to ski over.
The ranch provided work for a number of local people throughout the Depression years. Lester Perro was head packer and Herb Townsend was horse breaker and jack-of-all-trades. Herb remembered a black lady who was “a mighty good hand in the kitchen.” But the woman looked out the window one day just in time to see a mountain lion making his way across the yard.
Now, this wasn’t in her contract at all. They had to take her back to Missoula the next day and the Double Arrow was in the market for a new cook.
There were the usual pack and travel troubles. Les Perro had reason to remember some of them. Having tied his “string” together for one certain trip, he mounted his saddle horse and picked up the lead rope to line them out.
“We were in the open field below the lodge,” Herb Townsend said. The horse in the middle of the eight-horse string was carrying the kitchen consisting of a camp stove, pots and pans, tin plates, knives, forks, and such, a rolled up canvas tabletop and a few cans of food. The pans and silverware started to rattle and the horse spooked and broke loose from the one she was tied to. Taking the three that were trailing her, she went to bucking and kicking to rid herself of the load on her back. The three others broke loose and took off with their packs. The kitchen packs came loose and the contents began to fly.
“We never did find all that gear,” Herb said. “But C.B. Rich found silverware from the episode when he came to the ranch some twenty years later.”
The beginning of World War II in 1941 delivered the final blow to Jan Boissevain and the “dude ranch” at the Double Arrow. He offered his services to the United States Armed Forces but was not accepted because of his age and his failing eyesight.
In 1942 he auctioned off the ranch and the business and moved to California. It is said that when he returned to Seeley Lake for a visit in later years, he expressed pleasure at seeing that the hay meadows were green and that the place had again become a working ranch.
History of Ownership
In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Double Arrow Ranch saw several owners and operators. Among them were Ray Cory and Whitey Rahn, Hollywood film makers.
C.B. and Helen Rich purchased the Double Arrow in the fall of 1958 from Jack Lanham, Missoula. Bob Bandy had leased the ranch from Lanham at that time. He had run a small bunch of Hereford cows and milk cows. His wife, Mary-Dell, had also raised some grade and purebred Arabian horses.
C.B. Rich had been an outfitter and packer in eastern Montana for many years. When Yellowstone Park managers killed off thousands of elk near the Slough Creek drainage where C.B.’s main camp had been, C.B. was forced to look elsewhere for a packing/outfitting headquarters.
Bob Cooney, then head of the Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department for the state, suggested that C.B. look at the area on the southwestern edge of the Bob Marshall. The area’s elk populations were stable, thanks to the newly developing Blackfoot-Clearwater Game Range.
“Cabin Fever” is available on the Seeley Lake Historical Society (SLHS) website, http://www.seeleyhistory.org bookstore and locally at Cory’s Valley Market, Double Arrow Lodge, Grizzly Claw and Rovero’s.
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