New Family History (at least to me)

 

Our grandson Collin, who is one of the librarians at Carroll College in Helena, went to the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Library near Medora N.D.  He was interviewed by the North Dakota Monitor newspaper and his comments appear about a third of the way in the article.

https://northdakotamonitor.com/2026/07/04/theodore-roosevelt-library-opening-recalls-past-calls-for-civic-engagement/ 

After I posted a link to the article, Jon's cousins, Kay Bush and Mary Burkgart Harris, who grew up in the Silver Valley commented about their great-grandfather, who it turns out was one of Roosevelt's Rough Riders.   His name was Fred Herrig and he came to America from Alsace Lorraine.  Along with being one of the Rough Riders, he also worked at Roosevelt's ranch in North Dakota.  

Later, in 1904, he was appointed by Gifford Pinchot (as requested by Roosevelt) to be the first Forest Service Ranger in Montana.  His posting was at the Ant Flat Ranger Station in the Kootenai National Forest.  Jon's Aunt Naomi was born there. 

The Ant Flat Ranger Station is now a historic site.  

 https://historicmt.org/items/show/839 

Theodore Roosevelt presented a rifle to Fred, which is now displayed in the Roosevelt Museum in Medora. 

The ranger station is about 2 miles south of Fortine, Mt. 

This is all so interesting to me.  I would love to take a road trip to visit both the ranger station and the library.  It would require two trips as Fortine is in the very northwest corner of Montana.   It's on my bucket list.

The logging job.

 We lost a lot of trees during the March windstorm and for several months Jon has been cleaning up his woods.  Our friend Bill did a lot of the sawing as it was a huge entanglement.  We hired Wyatt to skid the logs and then Travis had Russell come up the shale pit road to pile brush and deal with all of the stumps.

As you can see, some of the stumps are huge!

We shipped two loads of logs and while it was sad to see them go Jon says they will be part of someone's new house someday.  

We ended up shipping 7000 board feet.

Scott Peaster was our log truck hauler.

Once the logs were skidded, there was a LOT of cleanup to do.  Brush to pile and stumps to clean up.  Travis and Russell helped us out with that project.

Russell dusting off the stumps.  He is quite talented on his machine.

This is Russell, who is an artist with a skidder.  

Lastly, we hired Levi Servis to use the skid-steer to fill and smooth out the stump holes and also the road.   He did a great job!  There's still the final cleanup to be done because Jon is very particular about what his woods look like.  Let's just say that it's park like.

The wind events we keep experiencing seem to get worse every year.  Climate change is upon us.