Window To The Big Sky: Reflections From Montana

By Mary Ellen Connelly

The stories presented here have been taken from my memories of life in Montana. I have tried to feature a variety of events that shaped my life and the lives of my children. Because Montana is such a special place it was difficult to decide what should be included. I hope the sequence is interesting and informative. My family is truly unique and

• Language: English
• Publisher: TOPLINK PUBLISHING, LLC
• Release date: Feb 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948779135

Mary Ellen Connelly

Mary Ellen was born in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Her family moved to Montana when her father, a Section Foreman on the Great Northern Railroad, was transferred. She attended local schools and graduated from Whitefish High School. Mary Ellen has been an activist. She was elected president and district president of the Whitefish Woman’s Club, an international service organization. She completed a series of courses and worked as a Real Estate Appraiser before her election to the Montana House of Representatives in 1982. She served five terms on the powerful Appropriations and Budget Committee and chair of the Long-range Planning Subcommittee. Appointed to the Western Regional Economic Council, as the Montana representative, because of the district bordering Canada. Charged with economic development and regional oversight, the members were Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Alberta, Camada/. Mary Ellen also served on the Montana drug and alcohol abuse council. Asked to chair the United Way of the county, she raised the most substantial amount ever donated. She was selected “Woman of the Year” for Flathead County and received various other honors. Mary Ellen currently lives on an acre and a half on the Calaveras River in California.

Book preview

Esther and Virgilio

This book is a result of my interest in preserving a family history. I wanted to know more about my mother and her family and my father’s family as well.

My mother’s grandparents were born in Sweden. My greatgrandmother Matta was born August 9, 1836, and my great-grandfather Hans Nilsson was born June 5, 1835. Following their marriage, their first of six children was born October 20, 1858. Hans and Matta died within three months of each other. Hans died on August 9, 1909, and Matta died on November 2, 1909.

My grandmother Anna Hansson-Walden (the fourth child) was born in Vemmenhog Skane, Lan, Sverige, November 2, 1869. The family emigrated from Sweden and various members of the Hansson-Walden family settled in Illinois, Idaho and Spokane, Washington.

My grandfather, John Peterson was born in July of 1854. He came alone from Sweden in 1878. He was twenty-four and spent time in Chicago and Minnesota before going west. He found work in the UR gold mine near Granite, Montana.

John and Anna met and were married in 1893 in Minnesota. They had a male child born in 1894. He lived only a few months. Their firstborn daughter, Hulda Elvira, was born May 11, 1896 in Livingston. My mother, Esther Caroline, was born on July 25, 1898, in a small town somewhere near Butte, Montana, the middle child of the three girls. It is unclear as to the actual location of her birth. The courthouse burned down around 1904, the year Edna was born, consequently no records are available. Helena courthouse records had nothing because at that time, local records were in the local courthouse. At about that same time a fire in Washington DC destroyed the census records from 1880 to 1890 and those records were lost as well. Their fourth child, a boy, was stillborn. Eight years later, Edna Marie was born October 29 in Granite.

image_2.jpg

great-grandparents, The Nilssons

When the mine began to play out and was in danger of closing, John and Anna moved the family to Bonners Ferry, Idaho to be near her brother. Her family had a homestead there and John bought a ranch near them. My grandmother, Anna had severe arthritis and because Hulda was the oldest child she was expected to help. She did everything from milking to feeding the stock to weeding the garden, as well as heavy farm work. She was a sturdy child, whereas my mother was two years younger and somewhat frail for her age. Because Edna was eight years younger than my mother she wasn’t required to help with household chores.

Hulda and my mother attended school close to the homestead. Hulda finished 9th grade and my mother finished 7th grade at that school. There are no records of them attending any other school. My grandmother and Edna lived in Bonners Ferry temporarily so Edna could attend school. No records have been found of the fate of the school near the homestead whether abandoned, burned down or anything else.

Hulda married her cousin, Harold Walden in 1914 in Bonners Ferry and they eventually moved to Helena, Montana. An interesting fact I discovered while researching the family history is that the first name of the father becomes the last name of the next generation. Perhaps that explains why my grandmother had two surnames. Edna married Bert Lynn Hart July 10th of 1924 in Helena and they settled in Mercer Island, Washington.

John and Anna divorced and she moved to Helena and lived with Hulda, until her death. She is buried in Helena.

image_3.jpg

LaProvence - ship from Italy 1907

My father’s parents Emelia Fabiani and Emilio Ambrogini were born in Masserella, Italy. My dad, Virgilio, was born on June 21, 1889. He arrived from Mayorella, Pescia, Italy, on November 2, 1907, departing from LeHavre, Seine-Inferior, France, and arrived on a French ship The LaProvence through Ellis Island. He was eighteen. He had a relative somewhere in Washington State but couldn’t locate him. Virgilio moved to Chicago and was hired by the Great Northern Railroad out of St. Paul as a section foreman. He moved several times as he bid on different sections.

Virgilio,__Esther,__Melvin.jpg

Virgilio, Esther, Melvin

He met my mother, Esther, and they were married in 1916 in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. My mother was sixteen and my dad was twenty-one. My brother Melvin and two of my sisters, Evelyn and Vera Mae were born in Pateras, Washington. My sister Dorothy was born in Renton, Washington. I was born in Bonners Ferry where my mother’s family still lived on the homestead.

We moved to Montana when Virgilio bid on a section near the Continental Divide as the section foreman for the Great Northern Railroad. The following year we moved to Nyack. My sister Helen was born in Nyack. She was delivered by an Army doctor and her birth wasn’t registered. It took many years and countless bouts with red tape before she succeeded in acquiring a birth certificate. When Virgilio bid on the Coram, Montana section we moved again. My youngest sister, Charlotte was born in Coram in 1938.

image_4.jpg

Grandmother Anna

Virgilio was naturalized at age forty-six on September 3, 1935. He kept in touch with his family in Italy for a few years. A letter from his sister, Ida and brother, Geno in March of 1939, stated the family was well. In two other letters, in November 1945 from Geno and his daughter, Paola and December 1945 from his sister Cisera. They informed my father that the WWII invasion had decimated everything they owned, and they were wiped out. My dad sent $50.00 to the family (a huge sum at the time) and a later letter explained they used the money to establish a small rope factory, which became successful. Apparently they lost touch with my father and I wonder what happened since no other letters have been found.

During a visit to Italy in 2007, I met several members of my dad’s family. My cousin, Paola told me that perhaps my dad lost touch because he wanted to assimilate into America, was not using the Italian language and his brother (her father, Geno) had been killed in the second world war. Some of the family members moved to France during the height of the war and continue to live there.

image_5.jpg

top to bottom - Hulda, Esther, Edna

My father continued to work for The Great Northern Railroad and bid on a section in northern Montana near the continental divide. Thus began another episode of events of my life. The following year we moved to Nyack. Following the move to Coram, a few years later, in 1943 he bid on the section in Sandpoint, Idaho.

My parents divorced in 1944 and my father continued to live in Sandpoint and eventually retired. Following the divorce, my mother moved to Whitefish, Montana; and Charlotte, Helen, and I lived with her when she remarried. We lived different places until Charlie bought 160 acres on the Lookout Road north of Whitefish. He later traded the property for a house a half-block from Whitefish Lake.

In 1949, my mother and Charlie moved to Sandpoint, Idaho. Helen and Charlotte were included in the move. I stayed in Whitefish. I graduated from high school. Working as a telephone operator at the power company I was planning to be married.

Following our marriage, Jim and I moved to Billings, Montana. My husband attended the University. Later, the GI Bill ran out and we returned to Whitefish, planning to go back when we had saved enough to continue toward his degree to teach. Meanwhile he was hired as a Fireman and later promoted to Locomotive Engineer on the Great Northern Railroad. The school plans were put on hold.

August of 1968, my sister Charlotte notified us that Dad (Virgilio) was in the hospital, not expected to survive. My children and I left immediately, and I notified my husband to meet us there when his train arrived home from a run. The next day he deadheaded into Sandpoint.

image_6.jpg

Evelyn, Melvin, Mary Ellen, Dorothy, Babe,

Helen, Charlotte at Virgilio’s funeral

Charlotte and I sat by Dad’s bedside through that night, and he died in the morning around eleven on August 26, 1968. I hadn’t been in touch with him for years, and I was unexpectedly overwhelmed by his death. It hit me in the gut when I realized I didn’t really know him and that I had missed so much. He wasn’t a part of my life or my children’s life. I could not control my emotions during and after the funeral, sobbing hysterically. For months, I couldn’t think of him without bursting into tears and to this day, I sometimes get weighed down with grief. Life sometimes gives you an unexpected kick in the teeth when you least expect it

The House at the Summit

Part of growing up was living at the top of the world. Actually, it only seemed like the top of the world. My dad was a section foreman on the Great Northern Railroad in charge of maintaining a designated area of track. In 1935, he used his seniority to bid on a tiny place in Montana called Pinnacle. And that’s how we got there.

Pinnacle was at the highest point of Marias Pass. A wide spot in the road, about forty houses and a population of less than a hundred. The one room school had eleven students of various ages. Church services were held in the school. There was no gas station or grocery store. The only telephone was a company phone in the section house.

The section house where we lived was twenty to twenty-five feet from the track. When a train went by everything shook and rattled and sometimes a cupboard door would fly open. We had a lot of broken dishes and dented pans. My mother often remarked when my ship comes in I want a house that doesn’t move.

The first winter at Pinnacle the snow started in late September. As the snow drifted deeper and deeper the rotary plow used to clear the tracks threw it against the house. It continued to pile higher until it reached the upstairs windows. The snow was so deep my dad shoveled a tunnel from the doorway out to the tracks. Tunnels through the snow became a maze—from the various houses, to the school, to the tracks.

With the snow piled against the house, my brother thought it would be great fun to go out the window with his sled. The momentum of the slide sent him flying across the tracks and up the hill on the other side. When our mother caught him, he got a good switching. She shook him by the shoulders and exclaimed that he should know better. Were you trying to get yourself killed doing such a foolish stunt? He was properly contrite until the next time he did it. But he never seemed to learn to let well enough alone. He took risks and did reckless things because he never thought about anything ahead of doing it or what the consequences might be. I was totally envious because I never had enough courage to try anything even slightly forbidden.

It continued to snow, and the temperature hovered between 10 and 40 below zero. After a fresh downfall everything looked sparkling and clean for a few hours until a thin film of soot from the coal used to power the trains covered the snow piles and left black streaks.

When my mother mopped the kitchen, the water turned to ice on the floor and she sighed, I guess I’ll have to forego cleaning floors until spring. We had fun sliding across the kitchen in our stocking feet until the constant motion finally melted the ice and our socks were dripping. Our feet felt like icicles and we would spend the next hour with them propped against the fender on the coal heater.

Most nights my father wasn’t home till late. There was always some kind of emergency or repair needed, or the ballast would shift under the tracks or a switch would freeze. My dad said he had seen a head-on crash once. The twisted steel of the rails and the engines stacked like toothpicks, cars pointed every direction and upended. He said the wreckage was unbelievable. He said he hoped that never happened on his watch.

The snow continued and the banks on either side of the tracks grew higher from the snow plow. The deer and elk had trouble getting out of the way of the oncoming trains. They would try to climb up the bank. Quite often they didn’t make it in time. The engineer would sound the horn and blow the whistle in short spurts, but they would get so disoriented they would slide back. The carnage was an almost daily occurrence and sometimes my dad would have to go out with a sledge hammer and hit the animal in the forehead because the impact with the engine didn’t always kill them immediately. On those days he didn’t talk much and seemed withdrawn and morose. We learned to keep quiet and stay out of his way.

I was home alone one Sunday afternoon when the telephone rang. Under no circumstances were we allowed to answer because it was a company phone. But there wasn’t anyone around. It continued to ring, and I sat there thinking I shouldn’t answer but finally got enough courage to say, Hello.

A man asked if this was the section house at Pinnacle and I said, Yes it is. He asked me if I knew the