August 22, 2004 12:00 am • MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
REXFORD - Every evening, for weeks that stretched into months, Eileen Morey visited the grassy hilltop overlooking her childhood home.
She was marking time, her clock the rising waters that swirled around four tall trees in her front yard, slowly swallowing them whole. Inch by inch, branch by branch, the spruce trees, the homestead, the entire river valley slipped beneath the rising river, which was fast forming a lake.
"There was a terrible, terrible sense of loss," Jim Morey said of the days when Libby Dam first plugged the Kootenai River Valley. "There were some real nice farms down there, great towns. Boy, just think what that would be worth today. That river was the prettiest crystal blue-green in the whole world; and that dam was about the ugliest thing you ever saw. I called it the concrete monster."
Jim Morey is husband to Eileen, whose four trees were about the last left standing by loggers who stripped the valley before the river's rise. "I miss it every day," he said of his now-swamped hometown of Ural, where he was born in 1932. It was our home, and we let the government take it away from us."
The government, by way of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, does not mention Ural on its official Libby Dam Web site. It does not mention Gateway or Rexford or Warland, and it certainly does not measure the water's depth by way of four old trees. Instead, the Corps uses a yardstick that dwarfs human scales.
Construction started in 1966, according to the Corps, and the dam was dedicated as a power producer in 1975. Its crest is 3,055 feet long, 54 feet wide. At its base, the dam is 310 feet wide. It's 422 feet high, and contains 7.6 million tons (15.2 billion pounds) of concrete. That concrete houses turbines pumping power enough for some half-million homes, 600,000 kilowatts at full throttle.
Libby Dam, according to the Corps, created a lake 90 miles long and 370 feet deep. It stores more than 5.8 million acre feet of water, about 1,892,595,436,000 gallons.
But those kinds of numbers are hard to wrap your brain around, and there are other ways to take the measure of the dam. You could, for instance, measure it against a man's life, the life, say, of a guy like Gerald Marvel.
"It was our family land," Marvel said. "My dad settled in old Rexford in 1902." Actually, that's not quite true. It was old old Rexford. Old old Rexford was the first Rexford, which was later moved a couple miles to front the newly-built railroad tracks. Later still, old Rexford was moved again, this time to a high-water mark as the river rose behind the dam.
"It was a wonderful valley," Marvel remembers. "There was no money. Everyone was in the same boat, so we really didn't know we were poor. We hunted and fished, had little farms, did some logging."
He remembers picnics at the Grange Hall, parties at the school, weddings and funerals and Christmas mornings. But what he remembers most vividly is the river, which was the lead character in any story about the people who lived along the Kootenai.
"Oh, that was just a beautiful river," Marvel said. "Right about Rexford, that's where it started to open up out of the canyon. The fall was the best, catching big old trout. It was better fishing than this damn reservoir ever will be." In fact, he said, after 40 years of fishing the wild Kootenai, "I've never dropped a line in that damn mudhole they built, never been on it in a boat."
Marvel and his brother, Fred, were some of the very few who fought the dam, who went to court to force the government to pay a fair price for their farm. It was a tough time, he said, for two farmers "with more experience raising hay than raising hell."
Three years of lawyers and they doubled their money, he said, but it didn't come close to paying the price of losing the family home and the wild river.
People were still living in town, he said, even as the government bulldozers leveled neighbor's houses. Marvel planned to burn his house, "before anyone else could get to it, but I was too late." Somebody bought it, he said, and moved it to Eureka where it still stands.
The fight soured brother Fred to the point that he left to ranch in Canada, never to return. As for Marvel, he moved onto a farm south of Eureka, where, he says, "I've been for 37 years and still haven't got used to it."
Talk to the folk who lived up and down the old river valley, in towns long since flooded - from Gateway on the Canadian border down through Hayden and Sheldon Canyon and old Rexford and Rondo and Stonehill and Tweed and Ural and Valcour and Warland and Yarnell and Jennings - and you won't find many others who, like Marvel, fought the government through the courts. But neither will you find many who have much good to say about the dam or the government process that built it.
Jim Morey calls it the concrete monster. Jim Kuchinski, whose father's and grandfather's homesteads are under water, calls it the damn dam. Marvel, of course, calls it the damn mudhole, and David Peterson says simply that "the Corps of Engineers doesn't have a real good reputation around this country."
Kuchenski, who's on the historical society board in Eureka, remembers his dad running the government engineers off his land. But they came back, he said, "with a threat - 'Accept the offer or we'll condemn it.' It wasn't very pleasant."
Sure, they all agree, building the dam brought a pack of jobs to places like Libby. But 30 years later the jobs are gone and so is the wild river they called home.
"Hell no it wasn't a good trade," Marvel said. "Just look at Libby now. Those jobs came and went. Poof. But that land, that river, it was beautiful. You can't replace that."
Peterson, who with his wife Mary Lou taught at Warland in the early 1960s, couldn't agree more. "Losing your home was tough," he said, "but even more than losing your home was losing the river. It was a perfect river."
Before there were towns, before there were rails and roads and roundhouses, there was the river. "It had everything you'd want," Peterson said. "Fishing, recreation, solitude. Some years it'd flood out and jam with big ice floes. There were big islands, some with farms on them."
Mary Lou wrote a letter to the Corps saying the valley was too beautiful and too important to flood behind a dam, but they never responded.
The Corps built the dam to provide power and control floods, but Marvel never saw the point. Most of the places up and down the river didn't have power, he said, and the big flood of '48 dumped so much rich silt on his fields that he had his best hay crop ever that year.
Today, the big bridge spanning the reservoir cuts across that same hayfield, now a couple hundred feet under water.
The river was a highway both in winter and summer, either by current or by ice, and everyone has a story about the groan of the breakup, about the power of the spring rush, about learning to fish or to swim or to skate, about someone lost and never found.
The river also cut the alluvial flood plain that later became a railroad bed, with the Great Northern stringing the Fernie line down from Canada in 1901. It hit the east-west line at old Rexford, making the town an important hub. Those were the days of the steam engine, and whistle-stops popped up along the Kootenai wherever a water tank was located.
Then came section crews, homesteads, depots. Loggers followed the trains, and soon there were hotels and dance halls and restaurants. For every church there was a saloon or two. Eventually, civilization arrived with post offices and schools. "Our little school was a beauty," said Mary Lou Peterson. "Two rooms, eight grades." She taught one through four, while husband David taught five through eight in the early 1960s.
But even at that late date Kootenai country was isolated, she said, so they worked a deal with a train conductor and the Spokesman Review newspaper of Spokane to bring the world to Warland. The Spokesman would get the daily paper to the station, and the conductor would toss it off as he blew through Warland. The Petersons would send a student down to pick it up.
Problem was, the conductor kept throwing it out the left-hand window, where it landed in front of the bar. "The people at the bar would just grab it up," Mary Lou Peterson said, and the students were too intimidated to ask for it back. In time, they trained the conductor to toss to the right, and the student would scoop it up quick before the train passed and the bar patrons could cross the tracks.
From the classroom, the paper made the rounds through the community, a bit more wrinkled and cut up with each hand it passed through. Some snipped recipes. Others wrapped fish. Not a few clipped a page or two to start the morning fire. "It was a really important commodity," David Peterson said. "It was a real highlight."
As were his field trips. He remembers fondly the dark winter morning he took his seventh- and eighth-graders out with his hound and his rifle to track, tree and shoot a mountain lion. You had to be careful with kids in the woods, he said, because in the '60s Glacier National Park was still dumping its problem grizzlies in the Kootenai, splashing their fur with yellow paint to mark them as trouble-makers. "You always knew a park bear by its yellow coat," Peterson said, remembering the day a wounded yellow griz charged through the schoolyard, two armed men on horseback in hot pursuit.
It was a scene from another time. While the rest of America was protesting war and preparing to put a man on the moon, Warland was playing pinochle, going to school programs and having potlucks. Residents were growing gardens so big they had to be put in with a team and wagon. They were taking sleigh rides, sledding on the logging roads, picking mushrooms and huckleberries. They were making skis from the staves of 55-gallon whiskey barrels. They were eating venison chili and piling logs on bonfires, ice skating across the sloughs.
"In these communities," Mary Lou said, "the 1960s looked a lot like the 1930s."
Not a few families shared shoes among the kids, she said, and who got to go out for recess depended on what day it was and who had the shoes.
In fact, the Warland of the 1960s that the Petersons remember so well looked very much like the Warland of the 1930s that Colleen Woodward was growing up in. The same steel bridge spanned the river, built by men from the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the old CCC barracks still stood across the river.
Later, Woodward said, those barracks were used to house German soldiers captured at sea. The detainees had to stay on their side of the river, she said, but a select few were allowed to come over and play music for dances at the Grange. "Oh it was lovely," Woodward said. "Those Germans could play beautiful music."
Just as the Italians later housed there could cook delicious meals.
"They were a lot like the rest of us," she said of the prisoners. "They came with nothing and not knowing anyone, and they found a place to fit in."
Her father-in-law, Ed Woodward, had likewise come to the area with empty pockets, living in a boxcar and working for the railroad. But by the time she married into the family, he owned the whole townsite at Warland.
"My in-laws had a really nice home," she said. "It was horrible to see it scooped up and burned to make way for the dam. It may have been worth a hill of beans to the government, but it was worth everything to the family. We lost everything. The river, the town, everything. It's so sad."
Her mother went to school in the same two-room schoolhouse at which the Petersons later taught. So did she. So did her children. Her son went on David Peterson's cougar hunt.
But in 1969, the Missoulian reported the school was "doomed by the huge Libby Dam project feverishly a-building a few miles downstream." Two years later, the abandoned school and two teacherages sold for $411.
It's said that when the school goes, the town dies. In the case of Warland and other Kootenai river towns, the town not only died, but was buried as well. When the river claimed the rails, the railroad towns emptied out, and new townsites never thrived as the railway was redirected.
Libby Dam, Colleen Woodward said, flooded more than a river valley and a few thousand homes. It flooded a way of life, a relatively innocent haven, kept apart from the emerging hustle and bustle of modern America.
Mary Lou Peterson remembered the people who lived under Lake Koocanusa as "pretty much poor, but quite happy and satisfied."
It was a simpler life, Jim Morey said, where neighbors took care of neighbors and a pick handle and a tin can were all you needed for a baseball game. "There was no bickering amongst the folks hardly at all," Morey said. "We all worked together to get by. You had to, if you wanted to make it." It was a very different life, he said, than the life he now leads in Libby. And although it's generally true that you can't go home again, the old saying hits particularly hard for the Kootenai River folk.
Every so often, the Corps draws the reservoir down far enough that the bones of old Rexford emerge, and old-timers go back to collect a brick or two.
"When they go back, it's a real strong feeling of sadness," said Mary Lou Peterson. "You can never go back." Nor can you adequately describe to newcomers why the loss still hurts so much.
"You talk to people who've been here 25 years, and they think they know the area," said Gerald Marvel. "Hell, they ain't seen nothing. The most beautiful piece of this country is under water."
Marvel lived 40 years on the Kootenai. Now he's lived 37 more on a farm above the reservoir. And his face still shows the sorrow whenever he talks about his lost homestead. "It's pretty bad," Marvel said. "It really is. All the places, the people you grew up with, you can't even go back and look at it. It's gone. There isn't any place to go back to.
"I wish I was there right now," he said, "with that big ol' Kootenai River running through it."
Also visit ...
Changes Upstream - the Photographs of Stanley G. Triggs
www.touchstonesnelson.ca/exhibitions/triggs/history.html
Thanks to Leeza Long for bringing this Ghost Lake to my attention!
