Old road to Upper Swan presented challenges

The third in the series covering the Roads and Trails program presented Aug. 7 by the Upper Swan Valley Historical Society (USVHS).

CONDON – Upper Swan Valley Historical Society President Steve Lamar introduced speaker Leita Anderson by first explaining that in 1894 Charley Young, along with five other men, forged a route into the Upper Swan Valley extending from Ovando to Lion Creek. In 1917 a rough road was built between Lion Creek and Swan Lake.

Eighty-nine-year-old Leita Anderson provided stories of traveling on the old road from Swan Lake to Salmon Prairie.

Anderson was six years old when she first came to the Upper Swan Valley in 1938 with her parents Dorothy and Babe [William Harold] Clothier and her aunt and uncle Queveene and Archie Clothier and their son ValGene. They and their belongings came in an old Willys Knight [jeep] hauling a four-wheel tire trailer behind.

According to Anderson, the old road wound around trees and down into ditches and back out. One of their biggest challenges occurred when they tried to get up the hill at Lost Creek Road.

"The car almost got up to the peak," Anderson said. "But there was a corner at the bottom and a corner at the top and it was quite a bank if you went over the side. My dad had to drive the car of course. My aunt was the most healthy one. My mom had polio, so she couldn't walk that good. My uncle only had one leg-he had a wooden leg. I don't imagine us kids were very helpful, but we thought we were. So we had to get rocks big enough to put behind the wheels of the car, and we pulled it up a little bit at a time. We finally got over that one. I still don't know how we got up the rest of the hills because I know they were just as bad or worse, but we made it."

The Clothiers finally arrived at Salmon Prairie where their house was being built. It was June and they lived in tent houses through the summer months. When the weather turned, Anderson and her mother were sent to Polson to stay with her mother's parents.

Anderson related another event when her dad drove to Polson to pick up her, her mother, her two-year-old sister Dixie and the three-month-old baby Karen. From Polson they drove to Kalispell to get her uncle Glen Clothier.

"He was coming up to help with the house I guess," she said. "We got as far as Squaw Creek, the other side of Goat Creek a ways, and I don't know, something happened to the car so my dad had to get out and walk clear to Lion Creek to the Russell Fox family. In the meantime, the baby got hungry, naturally. [I guess] they were able to start the car. Mom always had tin cups in the car so she put the milk in a tin cup and my uncle put it on the manifold of the car and heated it up so she had something to eat. Those kind of trips, we had a lot of them."

Anderson had one other story she shared.

"We had to go get our groceries usually twice a year. We had a Model A pickup at the time, which was around 1944 or something. We started from town and got towards home in the night and we had a big hill at Lion Creek-in the wintertime this was-and they tried to make the hill and couldn't and kept backing down it. So my dad turned around and went back to the creek [to camp overnight]. We had a lot of groceries in the back of our pickup and he'd bought a brand new snow shovel. All of a sudden us kids woke up to the smell of bacon. He'd used the snow shovel and built a fire and we had the best breakfast I'd ever eaten."

Anderson concluded, "That's some of the things we went through on that old road, which then was just around the trees and the hills and then the gullies. That's how you had to get around for years until 1957 when the highway went through. It was kind of nice to have a highway come through."

Anderson added, "We also got electricity in 1957. We got it Sept. 11, 1957 at five o'clock in the afternoon." She only had one electrical appliance in the house-a waffle iron given to her by her brother-in-law. The reason she remembers the exact time is because she had promised her children if the electricity came through by five o'clock, they'd have waffles for supper-it was a close call, but they got their waffles.

Next week, we will continue the Road and Trails series with stories from Leita's sister Dixie Meyer.