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I have a love affair with Ekalaka and Carter County. Compared with my entire life I didn’t spend much time there but it is embedded way down deep in my soul. Every time that I go there it is brought back to the forefront of my mind again. What is it about the area that affects me that way? I think that first of all, it is the area itself. We lived in several places near Ekalaka and I really liked all of them. I think that my favorite was what we called the Opechee Park place. Jesse LaBree referred to it once as the Kinsey p...
I have written a number of things in the past about my history in or near Ekalaka and the editor was gracious enough to publish them. I have kind of run out of things that will make a good story. So today I will attempt to write a story consisting of several things that happened. The first thing that happened, I call the most memorable day of my life. It was August, 1945. I was playing in the yard and all of a sudden my Mother burst out of the house saying, “The war is over, the war is over". She had two brothers in harm's w...
When I saw the news that a meat processing plant is being built in Belltower, I was happy, but somewhat perplexed. My first thought was, is Carter County growing? I mean growing in population, of course. Now when I ask that question several things come to mind. The first one is what it used to be like. I was born near Belltower in 1938. The first six years of my life was spent at various places around Ekalaka, although we did go to Washington very briefly when I was too young to remember. In 1944, we moved into Ekalaka and I...
I was very happy to see the article in the Eagle about the meat processing plant near Belltower called OCC Legacy Cuts. Probably nobody remembers but I wrote an article for the Eagle a few years ago suggesting this very thing. It is a little surprising to me it would be located in Belltower and not closer to Ekalaka, but that is probably closer to the center of the county. It is also surprising that they would be located in such a sparsely populated place. I really wish them all the best. A number of years ago, I was...
I was born in my Grandpa and Grandma Coons’ house near Boxelder Creek and about a half a mile from the Bell tower store and post office. My parents lived at various places around Ekalaka and even briefly in Washington as I was growing up. In 1944 we moved to Ekalaka, where we lived until my graduation from CCHS in 1956. That night, May 23, Charles and I got in the truck with my Dad and moved to Miles City, where Dad had bought a wrecking yard. In one of the first stories that I sent to the Eagle, I told how I considered E...
When we Lavells were frequenting our grandparents ranch near Belltower, there were three livable houses on their ranch. I have written about the first two. Today I am going to tell you about the Anderson place. It is worth repeating that Grandma and Grandpa Coons were a perfect team. He was a slow, solid worker. She also was a worker extraordinaire, and took a one hundred and sixty acre homestead and made it into a creditable, if small, ranch by buying other properties of people who didn’t make it. Despite being less than f...
My Grandma and Grandpa Coons had two other places with houses on them besides the home place. Grandpa was a hard working guy but he never got excited or hurried about anything. Grandma was just the opposite. She was shorter than five feet and less than one hundred pounds but she was made of high tensile steel. She was the one who finagled and was able to buy other places that made their original homestead into a creditable ranch. The Briggs’ place was one of these places. They bought it from someone named Briggs. The Briggs p...
My Grandparents, Fred and Lena Coons, homesteaded near Belltower in 1911. Grandpa came out and homesteaded and after some time Grandpa and my Mother joined them. My Mother was born in Malvern, Iowa on January 10, 1910. She was just a little one when she came out to Montana. They built a house, I don't know what year, which I loved and spent a lot of time in. They called this the home place. I was born in this place in 1938, with my Grandma attending Mother. At the time that I was around there, they had two other places with...
Those of you who follow Facebook probably know that I made a trip to Ekalaka last week. Actually it wasn’t so much a trip to Ekalaka as a trip to Camp Needmore for a family reunion. I did get to Ekalaka and will tell you of my impressions. First the trip; I flew from Sacramento to Denver and then rode to Ekalaka with my sister Marti and her husband Roy Cornwell. I asked for wheelchair service for the trip since I have trouble walking. That was a real lifesaver, instead of being worn out, I was quite able to function n...
I have been thinking about my Grandpa Coons and about all of the things that he did that we, his grandkids, loved. I have written a story previously where I called him the greatest man that ever lived and I stand by that. Grandpa was born in 1879, so he was old when I knew him. I have always marveled that it is 2020 and my Grandpa, born in 1879, was a huge part of my life. What a span of years. Grandpa sang me songs and told me stories that related to what the slaves sang and at least one song that went back to the Revolution...
Several years ago, Ernest Tooke wrote a story about all the business, present time or not, that had been in Ekalaka. It was fairly complete, but I am going to tell you about one business that he didn't mention and tell you about one that I know practically nothing about. Then I will tell you about a kind of business that my Dad engaged in. There used to be a creamery in Ekalaka. It was in a great big building close to where the Fairgrounds are now. They made butter and sold it. I don't know what else they made. I remember it...
A big thing as we were growing up in and around Ekalaka was the water supply. People out in the country or on the edges of Ekalaka had wells. You usually could find ground water at 10 or 15 feet but they would go on through that and go to another vein of water at 60 or even 100 or more feet. The deeper the well the harder pumping it was and I know that because I did a lot of pumping for the livestock. At our second house in Ekalaka, we had a windmill which, of course, pumped water when the wind was blowing. This was very...
I was looking at a memory on Facebook this morning where I had promised to write a story for the Eagle about people I had known in Carter County and those that I had met since then on Facebook. I have never written that story and really don't remember exactly what tack that I was going to take in it but I will try. Spending my whole twelve years of school in Ekalaka, of course I knew the kids that I went to school with. It would be boring to just go from one to another, saying something about them, so I will just hit a few...
I was released from the Army in March, 1959. I worked around town, Miles City, for several months in various jobs. After working several months in these less than memorable jobs, I went to work for Jim and Bettylou Thulesen on their ranch out by Powderville. I think that I went to work for them just after Christmas in 1960. Jim had a project that he wanted my help on. He had a hay stacker called a Farmhand. To use it you had to tie up a tractor. So he bought a truck frame, turned the gears around and mounted this hay stacker...
The January 3rd issue of the Eagle had an article about the Montana Greats Project which was recently published in the Billings Gazette. This article invited Ekalaka people to give their opinions on the greatest athletes from Carter County. I contend that this would be very difficult to do correctly because of the different sports and the time differences, I was in Carter County High School from 1952 to 1956. If I had to pick the best five athletes of my era, I would pick, Bob Lasater, Tom McCamish, Buddy Morrison, Milton...
As we were growing up in Ekalaka, Independence Day was a lot of fun and very important to us. We always went out to the Grandparents farm to celebrate. Our cousins, Hans, Gale, Ronald and Doris would always come out with their parents, Joe and Sylvia Christiansen, who lived in Miles City. Sylvia was my mother’s sister. They couldn’t leave Miles City until after Uncle Joe got off work and they always stopped in Ekalaka as they went. We were usually asleep when they came and they would gather around our beds and yell real lou...
I was so sorry to hear about the death of my classmate, Donna Sjoblom Smith. I started grade school in Ekalaka in 1944 in the first grade; we had no kindergarten then. Part of my class was Donna Sjoblom. Donna was cute as could be and was smart, sweet and nice. She was everyone’s favorite. She was my classmate all the way through school and graduated from high school with me in 1956. Donna’s parents lived on a farm a little west of Ekalaka but I think that she went to town school for her whole school experience. Donna too...
Rattlesnakes were a definite fact of life in and around Ekalaka. At that time we killed every rattlesnake we encountered immediately. I am not so sure that I would do that now, in fact, if they were not in a position to harm me or mine I would go about my business and let them live their little rattlesnakey lives. A lot of my encounters with snakes were with my Grandpa Coons. He was fearless with them. He would be riding along, encounter a rattlesnake and he would leisurely get off his horse, Snooks. He would then nudge the s...
I think that I might have written before about my mother’s garden when we were growing up in Ekalaka. In a recent Eagle, I saw Lois Lambert’s story about their garden and how it was so late getting in so I decided to write something else. I am sure that in the years we were there we had late springs and early springs. I do remember snow in May, June and even on July 3rd on one occasion. It didn’t amount to much as I recall. It seems as if they talked about getting potatoes in on Washington’s birthday Isn’t that awful ear...
Dear Eric, I am writing to correct a mistake I made in one of my stories. I told about an airplane crash that took the lives of two local men. I correctly identified one as Bud Hansen but incorrectly identified the other as Clyde Sandon. It was actually Ella Voise’s father, Stephen, I guess, Williams. Ella let me know and I apologized to her on Facebook. She was very gracious and said, no apology necessary. Anyway thanks to Ella Voise and apologies to you readers for my mistake. I do want to be accurate, but my eighty year o...
The forest behind our second house in Ekalaka was a source of great enjoyment to me. I spent a lot of time in it either alone or with others. We called this forest the short pine hills and the forest further south and east we called the long pine hills. I knew every inch of the short pine hills up to about seven miles back. We used to live in what we called the Opeechee Park place and it was seven miles from Ekalaka. Since then, Jesse LaBree called it the Kinsey place. I loved that place, I lived there when I was four. In tha...
My sheep herding experiences started at a young age. At probably age 9, I went out to my Grandparent Coons ranch on Boxelder near Belltower and stayed there all summer. I worked and they paid me something though not too much. This lasted through age 14 after which I began to work for others for real money. I will write more about that later. In the later years especially a lot of my work consisted of herding sheep. The sheep had a bedding ground at the base of a hill we called Palmer Hill on the Briggs place just north of...
As I was growing up in and around Ekalaka, coyotes were public enemy number one. Everyone killed them on sight. It was generally believed (and I believe it) that they were a terrible predator of lambs and even calves sometimes. They were shot on sight but they were so skinny and fast that it was hard to get a good shot at them. There was a bounty on them, as I remember it was $15 for an adult and either $5 or $10 for a pup. There was also a bounty on Magpies but I shot at many of them and all I could get them to do was jump...
I haven’t written a story for the Eagle recently and I thought some of you might want to know what I have been up to. My daughter Brenda, recently got a job in Sacramento in the field that she was in before she came up here to help me with her mother’s health. After Joanne’s death, Brenda and I threw our lots in together and we will live together, probably for the rest of my life. She was trying hard, but her online business, dyeing and selling yarn, was not doing as well as it used to so she went back to work. It is hard...
I have a crazy idea, I am a crazy idea sort of guy. Anyway, you know how we used to have several news columns from various parts of the county. Now we are down to Capitol News. How about having a news column about people who used to live in Ekalaka, but live somewhere else now, like me. I talked to Eric about it and he was willing to try it, but is skeptical whether we would get enough news to make it worthwhile. So am I. I would write it unless someone else wanted to do it. Obviously, people would have to give permission...
