A Montana memoir: New book details homesteading trials, treasures

In July of 1910, Freeman Halverson and his cousin Fred Halverson, both 21, headed for the Flathead Valley from Wisconsin on the Great Northern Railroad.

Though short on cash, they were long on adventure and youthful energy when they landed in Kalispell. Freeman had planned to teach and Fred was looking for work in a grocery store when both caught homesteader fever.

“The big talk in Kalispell was the opening of the Flathead Indian Reservation,” Freeman said in his memoirs.

Freeman’s daughter, Esther Halverson-Hull, recently published her father’s colorful and very detailed account along with photographs of his homesteader days in “A Man from Montana: Memoirs of My Life in Western Montana.”

Along with history writer Richard Hamilton, Halverson-Hull edited and compiled the book of her father’s fascinating stories.

“When he was retired, he started writing his memoirs for us, his children,” she said.

Halverson-Hull said she had heard many of his stories but kept going back to read more from his memoirs. She then loaned the manuscript to a childhood friend who had grown up near her in Lonepine.

“He said ‘You should get this published,’” she recalled. “I gave it to my neighbor to read and she said the same thing.”

She put off getting started, but now at 84, she got the job done. In her dedication, she calls it “too rich a treasure in the history of homesteading the Flathead Indian Reservation not to be shared.”

The book became a reality when Hamilton, a researcher and author of Civil War books, read the memoirs and offered to retype and edit the manuscript, scan photos and develop a cover design.

“He fell in love with the whole idea and my whole family,” she said. “We tried to leave it exactly like he wrote it.”

As such, some passages contain politically incorrect references, but provide a historically accurate reflection of language and attitudes of the era. His daughter added a short history of Montana plus a postscript as suggested by her co-editor Hamilton.

“He said that readers would want to know what happened to all these people,” Halverson-Hull said.

Along with remembering a treasure of details of the very hard life of homesteading, Freeman recorded amazing images of the era with his box camera. Halverson-Hull said her father was one of the lucky few to own one in those days and he became quite an accomplished photographer.

“Most of the old pictures from 1915 and 1916 are the ones I found in my old cedar chest,” she said. “It was my mother’s cedar chest and I had never been to the bottom of it.”

The book includes some amazing shots, including one of a buffalo suspended over a cowboy who was killed a moment later when the huge animal landed on him during the buffalo ride event at the local Stampede (rodeo).

Halverson-Hull said most people comment on a photo in which he captured multiple lightning strikes on a mountain.

The book includes quite a few authentic pictures of Indians still living in teepees. Freeman also photographed Glacier National Park ,where he had a memorable visit in 1917 with his wife Irene.

Halverson-Hull said her mom and dad nearly drowned.

“They were hiking along a river and mom slipped on a mossy rock,” she said. “Dad went in after her. Someone had a lasso and pulled them out.”

The two had been married just a year earlier. Chapter 10, “Fixing my eyes on Irene,” tells the story of their courtship that started when Freeman picked her out in a photograph of a fellow homesteader’s family that included five sisters back in Iowa.

The neighboring homesteader was Fleming “Rat” Ratcliff. Halverson-Hull loves that story as her dad told it.

“He picked out the pretty girl and said ‘I’d like to correspond with her,’” she said.

They wrote to each other then she visited. The two fell in love, he more than she at first, according to Halverson-Hull.

According to the book, Irene got cold feet just before the wedding, but Freeman persevered and won the day. He convinced her to leave her family and friends and familiar life for the still wild and difficult life of opening up a frontier.

His tenacity forms a major theme of the book, Halverson-Hull said.

“That’s one of the unique things about this,” she said. “All the ordeals he went through.”

In the prelude to the book, Freeman’s father Harry explains in a letter that he was named Freeman after a boy in a story who starts out alone in the world with nothing.

“He met many struggles and difficulties, but he was clever and stuck to what was right. At last he made good and prospered,” Harry wrote in a letter in 1941.

Just like the literary Freeman, Halverson-Hull’s father and his cousin Fred faced one challenge after another like getting stranded in Dayton with almost no money then jumping on an opportunity to take over a restaurant without any experience running one. This excerpt about their operation provides insight into the hardship of the day.

“The water for our establishment, we carried from a spring at the edge of Flathead Lake. The dishwater got rather dirty at times, but what we could not wash off the plates, we could wipe off. Our kitchen was a little addition at the back. The walls were one layer of boards going up and down with the cracks between. The flies were so bad that on chilly mornings we would shake them out of our coats hanging on the wall, and sweep them up by the dustpan full, while they were still too stiff to fly. A few flies in the soup just added flavor. We were so short of funds, I recollect running to the store after taking an order to get the supplies necessary to fill it.”

Prior to the boat breakdown, the two had decided to leave Montana to go to Seattle or Alaska because of the misery inflicted by the record forest fires of 1910. But by fall, rains had doused the fires and refreshed Fred and Freeman’s desire to find their homesteads.

“A Man from Montana” follows them on foot out to find a homestead over the hill west of Dayton, past Black Chief Rock to a hillside west of Elmo, through the Big Draw, then south along Sullivan Creek and west into Little Bitterroot Valley. Freeman staked his claim on an 80-acre piece and Fred claimed a 120-acre adjacent homestead about three miles from present day Niarada.

Freeman later established Hub Supply Company, a successful general store, and became postmaster of Lonepine, located between Niarada and Hot Springs. Like his namesake, he overcame mountain-sized obstacles to achieve his dream of a family and successful businesses.

In his chapter 26 “My Faith Life,” he provides his eight-point prescription for right living and spiritual development, which offers inspiration worth the price of the book. Each offers gems of wisdom like No. 6:

“Realize that a person roused to his divinity can accomplish miracles. Live yourself as helpfully, positively, and triumphantly as you possibly can and see what happens. Remember, ‘a little leaven leaveneth the whole.’”

“A Man from Montana” is available through www. Amazon.com. For additional information, contact Halverson-Hull at eahull1@comcast.net.

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