In 1987, the Seeley Lake Writers Club started a project that two years later — in time for Montana's Centennial — was published as the book "Cabin Fever." This remains the best compilation of articles and interviews of the first 100 years of the Seeley Lake area. One of the key figures in the writers group was Mildred Chaffin. We have read many of the fascinating stories she wrote, but her own life makes for quite a story as well!
Mildred was born in Evaro in 1908, back when Evaro seemed to be even more remote from Missoula than it is today (a steep winding road traveled up Evaro Hill, not the paved four lanes we have now.) She attended an early one-room schoolhouse, the DeSmet School west of Missoula.
Mildred lived with her first husband, Alfred Morkert, in Arlee, and had five children prior to his death in a railroad accident in 1935. Two years later she married Allen Chaffin, and they spent another 15 years in Arlee. Mildred and Allen (known to those of us who worked with him as “Al” Chaffin) came to the Seeley Lake area in 1953. For the next 18 years the two of them worked as guides and outfitters in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. How fortunate are we that she found time, once in Seeley, to become a key member of the community and capture so much of what went on in her writing!
In an article about the January 1959 meeting of the Seeley Lake Home Demonstration Club, it was noted that Mildred Chaffin had served as the club's reporter for the prior year. In 1960, you could read in the Missoulian that the S.O.S Writers Club was meeting, and Mildred was part of the group. Clearly her writing was of such quality that the Missoulian began what would be a long relationship with Mildred.
Her byline appears in a May 1965 Missoulian article about the reconstruction of the bridges up the North Fork of the Blackfoot, washed away in the historic Western Montana floods of 1964. In the fall of 1965, Mildred's byline appears again in a lengthy article about Dorothy Taylor, the long-time lookout on Double Arrow (so well known in the Lolo National Forest that everyone simply knew her as Dorothy). Two years later, the Missoulian had a section labeled “Seeley Lake News" to which Mildred was a frequent contributor. Her significance as a reporter from the Seeley Lake area is clear from her byline in a 1972 article listing her as a correspondent.
That Mildred Chaffin was an exceptional writer beyond journalism is indicated by the recognition she received in 1968 from Writer's Digest Magazine. She was selected as one of 300 awardees out of 5700 entries! Coming to Seeley Lake the same year as electricity, raising seven children, packing in the Bob and leaving behind an important written trail of her life and the community she lived in — that's an accomplishment!
While Mildred lived until October of 2001, a small classified in the Missoulian of 1975 suggests it was time for a change back then. Allen and Mildred Chaffin were auctioning off pack saddles, a John Deere baler, tents, tools and many other items common to those who make their lives in these parts. We are lucky that it gave Mildred more time to focus on writing, and to produce the articles she wrote in Cabin Fever that sparkle with wit and charm.
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