100 years of stories

Homesteader moved here in October 1916

Autumn's golden mantle was descending when Evelyn Taylor first caught sight of her family's new homestead in the Swan Valley.

She arrived in the back of a horse-drawn wagon.

"We landed on the second of October 1916," Taylor recalled. "I was 12 on the 25th."

On Monday, she marked her 100th birthday in Kalispell. With help from her youngest son Doug, she still lives in her own home.

Though her eyesight has dimmed, Taylor retains a sharp wit. She and her 92-year-old kid brother, Roxy Hollopeter, remain the last survivors of 11 family members who set out for Montana at the dawn of World War I.

Taylor said her father, mother and eight brothers and sisters hit the trail when word reached Oregon that the Swan Valley was open for homesteading.

Her mind's eye still sees those two wagons pulled by Billy and Maude and Balli and Flossie. One wagon carried the family while the other hauled a mattress, cooking utensils and a bathtub.

"We had to laugh at Dad on that trip from Oregon," she said.

Taylor remembered he stopped at streams with a bucket, watered the horses then took a drink from the bucket himself. In his book, horsepower trumped hygiene as well as a thirsty family.

Her father and the boys built a log cabin on her 21-year-old brother's homestead first. The tiny space housed a few bunks, a table and a cookstove.

"Us smaller kids slept three in a bed," Taylor recalled.

When her brother returned from the service, a four-room house was built on the other homestead. It had two rooms downstairs and a boys' and girls' bedroom upstairs.

"It only had a ladder and no stairs so mom wouldn't go up there," Taylor said.

Taylor said her family ate lots of wild meat and raised what they could. Her mother waged a losing battle with deer as she tried to grow cabbage.

She recalled her mother carefully planting seedlings and erecting a teepee of wood sticks around each one.

"The deer would follow along behind mom and stick its tongue between the sticks and take the cabbage," she said with a laugh.

Taylor met her husband Jack Taylor when she was 18 and he was 31. It wasn't love at first sight for Evelyn.

"I didn't even like him when I met him," she said.

Jack was renting a room at his brother's home where Evelyn had a job.

She remembered attending a Thanksgiving dinner at their mother's home. Her husband-to-be arrived for the event with a huge appetite after hunting trip.

"I thought I sure would hate to feed that guy for the rest of his life, but that's what I did," she said.

The two moved around a bit before settling into a ranch in Pleasant Valley west of Kalispell. Times were hard for the couple with four little children, then seven, as the nation entered the Great Depression.

At the beginning of that time, while Prohibition was still in effect, the couple went into business producing corn liquor under the nose of those pesky federal agents known as revenuers. The reputation of the Taylors' moonshine helped it to command as much as $5 a gallon.

"You could get real good and drunk on it but you didn't feel bad," Taylor said.

The liquor was cooked up from a fermented mixture of corn, sugar and water in a homemade still. Taylor nervously changed the jars as each filled with liquid.

"Every bachelor for miles around could smell it," she said with a laugh.

Taylor had some close calls that made her hair stand on end.

In one incident, their distributor had driven a supply of moonshine into Kalispell. He had set up shop in a motel downtown when a revenuer came knocking.

He quickly set the jars behind the door before letting the agent inside.

"That son-of-a-gun never even looked behind the door," she said.

The two quit their summer of moonshining just as the agents were getting warm to their operation and neighbors were snooping around their property on horseback.

Luckily, President Roosevelt came up with a jobs program that put her husband back to work.

"He was a Democrat from the inside out," Taylor said.

She said she doesn't vote based on party affiliation but she cast her absentee ballot this year for Democrat John Kerry. Taylor said she felt President Bush had no business invading Iraq.

Assuming this was her last opportunity to vote in a presidential election, Taylor had no intention of missing out.

"I haven't missed a vote since they allowed women to vote," she said.

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com