Harmon’s Histories: Of old-time forest rangers and Cedar Run Whiskey

By Jim Harmon

Jack Puckett is a good friend of mine, and as I mentioned back in 2018, a great storyteller. He turned 97 this year.

Recently, Jack told more of his stories to the Missoula Senior Forum and I had a chance to record the presentation, from which I will share today.

First some background. Jack (given name, John V. Puckett) was born in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania on April 18, 1927, entered the U.S. Navy in 1945 (serving briefly on a destroyer in the South Pacific) and in 1950 graduated from Penn State with a degree in Forestry.

For the next 32 years, Jack worked for the U.S. Forest Service in north Idaho and Montana. Along the way, he encountered, or heard about, a variety of backwoods characters like “The Norwegian,” “Swede John,” “Old George” and “Rastus Reed.”

Here’s part of Jack’s latest presentation, called “Cedar Run Whiskey.”

“I worked all my career for the Forest Service here in Region One. I've worked on five different national forests, in six different ranger districts. In between (I was with) Simon's Air; I was a leader of a fire team and we traveled all over the West fighting big fires.

So I'm kinda glad to be away from fires, the way they’re going nowadays.

A lot of my memories stem from brief encounters, like one day, maybe. But they left a lasting memory because I keep remembering the stories.

Whether you had experiences like that or not, I don't know, but I keep remembering these stories.

I worked on the Bonners Ferry, Idaho District to start with, then I went to Priest Lake. And then I was kind of in between for a while and got married, and then we moved to St. Maries, Idaho.

I worked out there for a year on timber inventories, mainly.

In 1949, there was a big blow up of trees in the high country; the spruce stands took a real beating there for a number of years. One of the timber sales that was made at the time was made to Potlatch. They had they had a camp up near Avery, Idaho.

I was up I was up there, at Camp 44. It was a pretty big camp. I don't know how many people were there, but probably well over 60. The camp was like a little city.

I stayed in a cabin that would hold four people. Each staked out a corner of the cabin. These cabins were about the length of one of these tables, and about 12 feet wide or so.

This was in the winter time. There was a lot of snow; like four or five feet. Normally they wouldn't be logging, but they wanted to get the spruce out, so they were logging big time.

They had a lot of a lot of bulldozers to skid the trees into the landing and they had had a number of sawyers and each had a helper.

Well, anyway, one evening after dinner, one of the helpers who was staying in a cabin that I was in motioned to me, he said, “Come here!”

So I walked over to his bunk, and he says,”Sit down.” So I sat down and he says, “You know, Poluski?” I said, “Who?” I said, You mean Polaski? And he says, “No, Poluski. Me and him put out the 1910 fire.”

I kinda wondered about that - but, that wasn't really what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to talk about some of his work with the Forest Service. He was one of these people that apparently likes to work.

He'd gotten a letter from a forest supervisor or district ranger who sent him a letter and asked him to come and pile brush for him. That was kind of unheard of at the time, but this fellow was so proud of that.

He reached in his pocket and took out his wallet. He had a letter that had been written by a district ranger, on Forest Service letterhead, inviting him to come and pile brush on his district.

In those days, a lot of the slash from logging was hand piled and burned. Some districts had big crews to pile brush. And when I was on his district, we had a 10-man crew there and that's all they did- pile brush all summer.

This fellow's name was Antone Johnson. He had been carrying the letter around for quite a long time and it was all yellowed by age. He was very proud of the fact that he was asked to come work, doing kind of a menial job of piling brush.

He was probably in his early 60s. He worked on the 1910 fire. That story kind of stuck with me. I kind of wondered about it a long time. But that was a man who showed pride in his work and in the fact that he would be asked to come and help do work like that.

A number of years later, I was appointed as ranger on the Lolo District, which is now part of the Missoula District, up Lolo Creek. There’s a campground there now.

I had to learn about the district, so I looked into files and got out and drove around and looked at things. There was a letter in the files that was written about a little creek called Cedar Run Creek.

Now this letter was written by one of the earlier rangers who had been on the district and it turned out to be the ranger whose daughter is one of our esteemed Senior Forum members, Myra Schultz.

I had worked for her father in Bonners Ferry, but he had been on this district a long time before I got there. He described this creek called Cedar Run Creek, which flowed north to south into Lolo Creek. It was just a little stream.

At that time, there might have been a road up to Lolo Hot Springs, but it could have been earlier than that when it was just a pack trail. Anyway, it kind of made me wonder. Looking at the stream, there was no cedar around there for miles. So, I’m wondering how it got the name.

As it happens, that's where the trail or the road crossed the mouth of the stream, there was a whiskey bottle in there called, “Cedar Run Whiskey.”

Now being a being somewhat familiar with whiskey, I wondered about that name. And I didn't find out for a long time.

But anyway, in another year or so I moved over the hill to the Lochsa Country. That was one of the neatest districts for me to work on all my career. I was there for a number of years as the ranger. I enjoyed it all.

Besides looking in the files, I traveled around the district to find out what was what, and just to get acquainted.

The Lolo Pass road, at that time, terminated at the Powell Ranger Station. We had a cabin there, built by the CCC, a real nice cabin with a little porch and there’s a fellow standing on the porch - no cars around or anything.

So I stopped and went up to introduce myself and talk to him. He said his name was Bert Wendover.

Now, having been in the area for a while, I knew there was a stream of that name and a high point called Wendover Ridge. And it turned out that they were named for Bert Wendover.

I looked up his background. Bert Wendover came from Oregon, over to this country after he was told by a doctor that he had five years to live.

Now this is back in the early teens when he moved into the Lochsa Country and found a place. He built a cabin and had lived there for the five years the doctor had given him. But he hadn’t passed on. In fact he was hale and hearty and doing well. It turned out he was a trapper and had a little pack string.

So I visited with him a little bit and asked him a couple of questions and he was one of the ones that liked to talk. So he started telling me about about the trappers who’d been in the region.

There was a number of them who trapped there in the wintertime. There was no access at all up there, except as far as Lolo Hot Springs. It was all wild country.

They were trapping marten, which is a pretty nice little animal that had a very valuable hide.

And they would move in there in the fall. Each one of them had a cabin and a trap line. They would trap all winter and would come out in the spring. And that was their season, close to five months or so.

Well, anyway, he said that when the trappers came out in the spring, Hermon Gerber, who was the owner and the manager of Lolo Hot Springs, would save them some Cedar Run Whiskey.

So I've kind of answered my question of where that came from. I don’t know if he brewed it or not, but anyway, he saved them Cedar Run Whiskey.”

Jack Puckett, Retired U.S.F.S.

Jim Harmon is a longtime Missoula news broadcaster, now retired, who writes a weekly history column for Missoula Current. You can contact Jim at fuzzyfossil187@gmail.com. His best-selling book, “The Sneakin’est Man That Ever Was,” a collection of 46 vignettes of Western Montana history, is available at harmonshistories.com.