Swan Lake man writes book about early life homesteading near Bigfork

By JACOB DORAN / Bigfork Eagle

A new book, written by a native of the Swan River area is now available from Scott Company Publishing and relates the experiences of three generations of a Norwegian family who homesteaded along the Swan River, northwest of Bigfork.

The author, Lee Rost, tells of how his great-grandparents left Norway in the mid-1800's to find farmland in Iowa. After the death of his great-grandfather, his grandparents traveled from Iowa to Montana by train. After reaching Polson, they made their way by boat up Flathead Lake to what was then known as Holt and chose to homestead on the bank of Swan River in 1887.

What began as a small cabin on 160 acres grew into a legacy, saturated with the wisdom and insights of life passed down through the stories that span four generations.

Rost explains that his father, Ludvig, was "the first white baby boy born east of the Flathead River after Montana became a state." His father attended the area's first school, which sat on the land just east of the homestead—land now owned by Rost and his wife.

Like many others, Ludvig moved up from working as a bunkhouse flunky for a nearby logging camp to become a skilled logger and, later, a "river pig" who rode the logs into the river and rolled them all the way to the logging camp. Although Rost's father taught him how to ride the logs, Rost never attained the same mastery of the art as his father.

After meeting Rost's mother, Clarice, at a logging camp in Idaho, his father married and returned to the Swan Valley to build a home with her on the 80 remaining acres of the family homestead. The 20'x24' log cabin soon became home to seven children to which Clarice gave birth to over a period of just 13 years—all but one born in that very cabin.

The book, titled, "For A Better Life," provides many insights into the day-to-day challenges and joys of life in the Swan, from the 1920's on. It was "a better life" that Rost's great-grandparents left Norway in search of and which—despite the many hardships—Rost's parents and grandparents enjoyed on the family homestead, along the banks of the Swan River.

"By age four or five," Rost explains, "I was catching and riding horses by myself. The trick was to take a handful of grain and put it on the ground. Then, when the horse put its head down to eat, I would lie over its neck, and then slide down to its back when it raised its head. I later taught my own kids to do the same."

Unable to harness the horses by himself at so young an age, Rost's sister Vinny, who was barely older than himself, would lift up the collar so that he could reach and buckle it from the horse's back, and then the two of them would work together—her pushing from beneath and him pulling from above—to get the hames in place.

"One time," Rost writes, "Mom was sick and couldn't do the cultivating, so I volunteered to do it, because I figured it would get me out of weeding. With Viny's help, I harnessed the horse and hooked it to the cultivator. Then, I got Maynard, who was three at the time, and put him on the horse to guide it, just like Mom did. I was about seven and the cultivator handles came about to my ears and slapped me alongside the head as we went.

"When we got to the end of the row and the horse turned, I had to lay the cultivator on its side. Then, when the horse started going down the next row, I had to stop again and wrestle the cultivator into the right position. It turned out that there was a lot more to cultivating than I thought."

Rost also relates the family's misfortune, when he was just seven years old. That winter, the family was afflicted with measels, mumps, chicken pox, small pox and scarlet fever, with everyone under quarantine except for their father. Ludvig, who was working on the road to Bigfork along the river when the family became ill, had to bring groceries to their gate each week, were he would inquire of their condition and then leave so that they could retrieve the groceries.

"With Dad gone most of the time and Mom sick since before Jon was born, the chores fell almost entirely on us kids. We had to skip a lot of school because it was a full time job for us kids to feed the cows, milk the cows, separate the cream from the milk, feed the pigs and chickens, chop ice, haul water, build fires, do it all over again, and keep wood on hand for the stoves—but even if we felt well enough and had all the chores done, we couldn't go to school anyway, because we were under quarantine."

Rost recalls when their cream and eggs served as the main source of income for the family and were traded to the local store for those items they had need of. He relates stories of hauling water—another responsibility that belonged to the children—from the river with a go-devil, which consisted of two small logs for runners and platform upon which one or two barrels of water could be pulled, depending on whether a single horse or a team was used.

The latter half of the book relates the stories of his own journey into manhood, working as a head wrangler and leading hunting trips from Spotted Bear into the Bob Marshall, taking pack horses to Idaho to help out with a major fire in 1961, starting a family of his own, adventures with his children and grandchildren, logging for Plum Creek and more.

Although it does not read like an adventure novel, "For A Better Life" is a story worth telling. It is one man's attempt to capture and preserve a legacy of love and hard work that has been treasured by the Rost family for generations.