Divers find historic houseboat in Somers Bay

The first privately owned houseboat ever to navigate the waters of Flathead Lake — a beauty of a boat launched in 1928 — has been resurrected from Somers Bay almost 80 years since the luxury vessel burned and sank.

Dorothy McGlenn, 90, of Kalispell was 2 years old when her father, John Sherman and his business partner, Bert Saling, set out in the Kee-O-Mee in May 1928 as a crowd of 1,000 people gathered to witness the launch of a boat touted in the Daily Inter Lake as “a handsome and comfortable little ship.”

For nine years the boat was a social hub on the lake, entertaining guests who ranged from the Copper Kings of Anaconda to local lawyers and schoolteachers. It went up in flames while Sherman and Saling were taking the Kee-O-Mee for the first cruise of the season in May 1937 to test two diesel engines that had been installed.

The two men escaped in a lifeboat. All of these years, members of the Sherman family have wondered if the wreckage could ever be found.

“I never thought we’d find the boat,” McGlenn said.

Four years ago while Northwest Dive and Recovery Service was retrieving sunken logs in Somers Bay, McGlenn contacted the divers and asked them to keep a look out for the family’s long lost houseboat.

“She told us it’s out from the [Somers] dock somewhere and I thought, shoot, we’ll take a look,” said diver Jody Bakker. “We did a search that December but the visibility was zero. It was so black I couldn’t see my finger in front of my face.”

A few months ago the divers tried again with help from James Murphy, a dive instructor who works with veterans, and via sonar imaging detected the shape of a boat. Bakker’s dive partner Jay Barth sent him the image.

“I dove on that; the visibility wasn’t bad and sure as heck, that was it,” Bakker said. “It was upside down, buried in the silt. It was in fairly good shape. I kind of reached in and grabbed something that I thought was a ladle. Ironically it was a fire extinguisher holder.”

Inter Lake archives note that Sherman and Saling tried to quell the blaze with fire extinguishers but “the flames had gained such headway under the floor that attempts to save the boat were futile.”

The remnants of the Kee-O-Mee, a Blackfeet word that means “far away” or “reverie,” were located at a depth of 50 feet.

By mid-September the divers had recovered the 225-pound anchor along with a number of other artifacts, including pieces of a porcelain bathtub, pieces of dinnerware, ice tongs, a tea kettle, the ship’s flag pole and assorted other items.

The artifacts were delivered to the Museum at Central School in Kalispell, where McGlenn volunteers. Museum Executive Director Gil Jordan noted in a recent newsletter that the museum staff is exploring the possibility of mounting a display with the anchor as part of the History of the Flathead Valley exhibition.

“We get lots of fun surprises on a regular basis as folks bring us historic treasures from the Flathead’s past,” Jordan said in his fall newsletter column. “But it is rare, indeed, when a discovery of this magnitude lands in our lap.”

John Sherman was a prominent Kalispell businessman who “delighted to be first with everything,” Inter Lake Managing Editor Dave Oliveria noted in a column he wrote in the late 1970s about the Kee-O-Mee.

Sherman, a former New Yorker, owned the Flathead’s first dishwasher as well as the first electric refrigerator. He founded Flathead Motor Sales Co. in 1916, and Saling was made a partner two years later. Even the first mobile home in the Flathead was built by one of Sherman’s mechanics, Artie Henderson. Sherman financed the unique mobile home built on a Buick chassis that could hold 15 people.

It likely was no surprise to Flathead folks when Sherman decided to have the Flathead’s first houseboat built. J.W. Swanson took on the custom building project. The boat project was kept in the public eye, with the Inter Lake detailing the layout and amenities of the vessel a couple of months before the inaugural voyage, describing “a good-sized lounge and dining room ... four staterooms, each equipped with hot and cold water...”

The Kee-O-Mee measured 54 feet in length, with an 18-foot beam.

McGlenn has a home movie showing a social outing on the boat that has been made into a DVD that will be part of the museum display. It shows guests laughing and dancing on a fine summer day.

“We would take turns with the Salings in using the boat and we would spend three to five days at a time on the lake,” McGlenn recalled. “I called it my lake.”

The Kee-O-Mee was the epitome of summer pleasure.

Somehow the log book that recorded the names of guests and the date they were aboard the boat survived. It’s a who’s who of early-day Kalispell.

Guests were encouraged to write poems about their experiences on the houseboat, such as this ditty: “When you’re old and getting gray, come down on the Kee-O-Mee and have a real day.”

“People had the time to do that then,” McGlenn said.

The day the Kee-O-Mee burned is seared into her memory. She was 10.

“It burned on a Sunday. We always had dinner at 2 o’clock, and Dad didn’t get home for dinner,” she remembered.

When he arrived, he was covered with soot and it was obvious there had been a tragedy.

“The boat’s gone,” Sherman told his family, recounting the details.

Within three minutes after the hatches had been opened the entire boat was “a raging mass of flames,” the Inter Lake reported. A Somers Lumber Co. tug towed the burning houseboat farther out into the lake where it sank. It was a windy day and “it was feared that the flaming vessel might drift into shore and ignite the docks.”

Luckily, a 300-gallon gas tank failed to explode.

“Dad was just devastated,” McGlenn recalled.

The only keepsakes the family had from the boat were the barometer and clock, which were at a jewelry shop for repairs. McGlenn’s mother had taken home a plate and platter from the boat’s dish set, so those survived, too.

In hindsight, the fire could have been deadly. McGlenn’s sister Betty and a group of her college sorority sisters had planned an outing on the Kee-O-Mee for the week following the fire.

Sherman never had a replacement houseboat built. Later that year one of McGlenn’s brothers, Roger, was killed in a horse riding accident near Swan Lake, a devastating loss for the family.

The name of the boat lives on, though. McGlenn’s grandson, Ben Lard, purchased a houseboat in January that will cruise around Flathead Lake. He dubbed it the Kee-O-Mee II in honor of the original boat that gave the family so many memories.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.