Staking Claim to Life on the Prairie

Battling the Elements for One’s Very Existence on Montana’s Plains

Text and Photography by Mahlon Kriebel

In the spring of 2011, we visited my 92 year old cousin in Great Falls and learned that my grandfather had homesteaded a few miles west of Fort Benton. Homesteading in 1911 wasn’t for the weak of heart. Winds scoured wheat fields before seeds germinated and torched scantily watered gardens. Water from drilled wells was so alkaline homesteaders hauled sweet water from the Missouri River. In winter, wind driven snow obliterated the horizon. Granddad relates that guide ropes linked buildings together and a visit to the outhouse was fraught with danger. Skeletons of strayed milk cows weren’t found ‘till spring. Prairie shacks were wall papered with newspaper but icicles grew from nail heads. When the buffalo chips disappeared pioneers huddled near a stove of smoldering cow pies. A window of respite between the winter thaw and summer heat with concomitant flies and stinking water provided a ray of hope to endure. That hope was shaken when a hand-watered garden was attacked by swarms of grasshoppers. My grandfather’s stories were incompatible with the mood of Laura Ingalls’ “Little House on the Prairie.”

Leaving Great Falls, we drove to Fort Benton on the Missouri River where the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery beached their boats in 1804. With westward expansion, Fort Benton bustled with commerce because it was the navigation terminus. In 1858, the United States Congress directed the U. S. Army to construct a military wagon road from Fort Benton to Fort Nez Perce on the Columbia River. Early pioneers bypassed the Montana Prairie to use the 640 mile long military road over the Rocky Mountains and Bitterroot Range to homestead the Great Columbia Plateau in Washington Territory.

The Montana Prairie was open cattle range until the 1890s when the government surveyed the prairie into 36 square mile townships with each square mile divided into quarter section homesteads. Grandfather was born in Oklahoma Territory in a ‘soddy’ of prairie turf, dirt floors, and a planked roof. He was hardened to rough living. My great-grandfather “ran” in the 1889 Oklahoma land rush, and family stories of those times are every bit as exciting as portrayed in movies and novels.

Great-granddad left Oklahoma before the dust storms to homestead land in the Palouse region of Washington State. By 1910, new farmland was scarce and Granddad’s generation looked to the Montana Prairie because homesteading was a natural life event to the Kriebel family. Great-granddad outfitted his three boys and two daughters with farm wagons, lumber for shacks, plows, harrows, and teams of Cleveland Bay draft horses. They loaded two boxcars on the Chicago, Milwaukee and Puget Sound railroad in Garfield, Washington. Granddad also took along his well drilling rig with his patented rotating drill bit.

After two days, my grandparents’ boxcars were uncoupled at Floweree, Montana. They drove their buckboard to Carter which had a land patent office, where ‘Locators’ working for the Northern Pacific Railroad Company promised “free” farms where “you can work for yourself, work all the time and give your children a head start”. Their promise of ‘work’ was the only truth in their guidance. Granddad’s homestead patent was number 22,000. Few sodbusters had cash to pay the usual $4.00 an acre to “break-out” the buffalo grass sod with a 16-mule team or a steam-powered tractor.

After my wife Moni and I visited Fort Benton‘s Grand Union Hotel which has anchored the Missouri River since 1882 we ascended the Missouri River Breaks to drive to Floweree. The prairie there is flat to the east, west and north. The Belt Mountains penetrate the southern horizon. Floweree is a scatter of farm buildings and wheat elevators surrounding a gray cluster of homestead era structures. Looking in the old tavern’s window, I mused that Charlie Russell on his way to Judith Basin may have rubbed shoulders with sodbusters. I wondered if my dad was treated to rock candy in the mercantile store and if granddad worked in the smithy shop making the derrick for his well drill.

North of Floweree stands a derelict house in an enormous field. When walking to the ruin I startled a herd of antelope. Sensing no threat, they stopped, looked back, then drifted over the horizon. Grandfather claimed pronghorns know if a person carries a rifle.

A windrow of field stones guards the old house of vertically sawn red fir, now scoured of paint. Sections of foundation have collapsed leaving the floor to molder. Roof and ceilings have fallen into a jumble of plaster lathe, joist and rafters. The six-panel vertical fir doors, wainscoting, chair rails, and picture moldings indicate a one-time fine home.

As I daydreamed: “Had my grandmother sipped tea in the parlor?” A voice bellowed from a man on an ATV: “Hey, what the hell you doin’ in there?”

Gaining a modicum of composure I managed: “Just lookin’ ‘round.”

“You’re trespassing, is that your car?”

Then I noticed his rifle: “Yes!”

“I was hunting coyotes. Thought you broke down.” grunted the farmer.

I responded: “I’d thought this was a homestead.”

A smile broke his weathered face: “Well, this weren’t no shack! Where’re you headin’?”

“To my granddad’s homestead.”

The farmer nodded: “Only hunters stop to hunt antelope. See the rock piles?”

“Yes”

“Well, there is a story, wanna hear?“

“Of course.”

The farmer swung a leg over the saddle: “In 1880, a St. Louis deck hand reached Fort Benton only to find no work so he walked towards Great Falls. It was late when the drifter reached a ranch house. He knocked. An old rancher answered. The two men, separated by two generations, stood awkwardly. The drifter managed: ‘I need work?’”

The farmer, rolled a cigarette, pointed to the rock pile: “The old rancher said he could clear rocks from the yard.” The farmer savored his smoke: “The drifter pitched rocks for two weeks. Then asked ‘what’s next?’ The rancher replied: ‘Well, toss the rocks back’. The young man didn’t hesitate to scatter the rocks. The rancher exclaimed: ‘You’re the first drifter to throw ‘em back. Why?’ The drifter didn’t look up: ‘Well sir, you pay $2.00 a day, cook good food and the tack room is warm.’ “

The farmer’s eyes misted: “The young man stayed on. The old rancher died! The drifter rolled him in a cow hide and buried him. A winter passed. A lawyer from Fort Benton found the drifter fixin’ fence. The rancher left the ranch and cattle to the drifter. My granddad.”

The farmer cleared his throat: “Granddad built this house. When Dad moved to town, he couldn’t tear it down. Neither could I.”

We savored the moment. “That’s a good story. I know who drilled the well.”

Surprised the Farmer replied: “Who?”

Looking at the well pump I began: “Most grand homes were built over the well so the pump was in the kitchen.”

I paced five steps to the water pump: “this concrete cover is fifteen feet from the kitchen. My Granddad witched to find water and always found it 15 feet from the kitchen! I bet my Granddad drilled this well one hundred years ago.”

Shaking his head, the Farmer replied: “Dad said a fellow by the name of ‘Jigs’ drilled it. Jigs danced while playing the fiddle at hoedowns.”

Laughing: “That’s my granddad. I wondered how he got the moniker Jigs”.

“I’m sorry to tell you that I burned Jig’s shack twenty years ago. By the way, his wells were always alkaline”. The farmer chuckled: “But most wells are alkaline”.

I rode behind the farmer to the car. With his directions, Moni and I drove to “Jig’s” homestead. We couldn’t appreciate homesteader life in a car with AC, a GPS, snacks and beer. With wagon, my grandparents needed two hours to reach their homestead and we made the intersection of West Floweree and Starr Roads in minutes. Half mile south on Starr Road was Jigs homestead guarded by rock piles. Homesteaders used 40 acres for pasture, 40 for hay and seeded the remaining to wheat and oats. With a team of horses a sodbuster needed twenty seven days to turn 80 acres. He probably wore out his boots because he walked nine hundred miles behind a single bottom plow called a “foot burner”. Moni and I walked to where Jig’s shack had stood and picked up a couple pottery shards. Contrary to the promise of “Free Land” printed in Great Northern Railroad flyers, the land was not free. After registering in the patent office, the homesteader had five years to “prove-up” by building a house and planting crops. Then he could purchase the 160 acre homestead for $2.50 an acre. Sounds cheap but $400.00 one hundred years ago is equivalent to $10,000.00 today. Granddad didn’t have the cash to “prove-up” so he walked away. A few stayed and as farming techniques improved they managed to scratch a living.

The modern producer drives an air conditioned 550 horsepower tractor capable of pulling a fifteen bottom plow at seven miles per hour to cover 160 acres a day. Tractors are equipped with a GPS, a computer and automatic pilot to precisely control seeding, fertilizer, herbicide or pesticide applications.

Our journey had been successful. We visited my great cousin in Great Falls, walked where my father had played as a two year old and inspected the town of Floweree. I visited with a grandson of my granddad’s neighbor. As we drove to Great Falls with the moon on the horizon, bright as a newly minted nickel, I thought that Granddad Jigs had witnessed the change from horses and buggies to a moon landing.