Harmon’s Histories: Montana’s rich history of family stories, yours and mine

Jim Harmon

Here I am again, asking that you write your life story. Now! When you’re gone, all those memories are lost.

This summer, I’ll turn 80 years of age, and I’m finally taking my own advice.

I’m sharing the personal stories – not just my professional resume - with my daughter and her daughter...and, to a lesser degree, with you, in hopes it will spur all of you to your keyboards and document your lives.

It’s not easy, as my father knew, “When we look back on our lives and try to remember all of those happenings which go to make up our history and our parents’ history, we realize we did not listen too well.”

“Whatever is fact and what is remembered as fact may be miles apart, but the years can not be brought back to give us a second chance to correct our errors. I will relate these stories as I remember hearing them through time.”

For the basics, ancestry websites are helpful and easily available for chronological data, but my personal stories will only survive if I document them now, before, in a sense, “I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth.”

I must compliment my dad on providing a very good template to follow. Perhaps it will help you in documenting your life, as well. I particularly enjoyed learning about what it was like to grow up in a time, more than one hundred years ago.

My father’s mom, Pauline, born at Campbell City, Iowa, was one of ten children (a rather normal family size back in the early 1900s).

She attended Webster School in Des Moines, Iowa for eight years.

At age 13, she wrote an article for the paper, a family story describing the harshness of life on the Iowa prairie.

Typical of the times, after completing 8th grade, she was needed back on the farm to “help her mother take care of the eight younger brothers and sisters who were arriving regularly at their house.”

Dad wrote, “It was the day of gaslights and Mom remembered the man who came around each evening to light the street lights and in the morning, to come by and "snuff them out,” accomplished with the aid of a long pole to reach the light and put out the flame. It’s probably why she loved the tune, ‘The Old Lamplighter.’”

Over the years, the maternal side of my father’s family moved from Missouri to Iowa to Oklahoma to South Dakota to Washington, and finally, to Montana.

Again, it’s the personal stories that make it all so real. Dad wrote, “Mother told us they lived for a time at Newport, Wash., and went to school there for a short time. When they moved to Newport they traveled by train which had to go through the Stevens Pass tunnel.”

“The train did not have enough engine power to make it up the grade in the tunnel and became stranded for a time. A conductor who was deadheading east on the train put a wet handkerchief over his face and backed the train out of the tunnel. Everyone on the train was quite ill, and as recompense the railroad later gave all of the passengers a twenty dollar gold piece.”

Another great story involved my grandfather’s run-in with a quite surly, obnoxious fellow, with whom he had been teamed as a sawyer back in the days of the cross-cut saw.

“Gus Svedin had been sawing with another man and when the fellow quit Gus needed a new partner. Dad went out with Gus and had a very unique experience.”

“Gus had heard that a much-discussed and disliked man was going to be his partner. He jerked the saw and banged Dad's hands against the tree as they sawed and did a number of other things to make Dad mad.”

“At the end of the day Dad asked Gus just what he had done to make him act this way and he replied he didn't want to work with the so & so, and named the other man. Dad explained that was not who he was. Gus said he was sorry, and from then on he and Dad got along very well.”

“Living in a logging camp was not very exciting and Mother and Dad began asking Gus to come to Sunday dinner with them. He was living in the camp bunkhouse then and gladly ate a home-cooked meal on Sundays at their shack. Mother would make a batch of fudge and they would spend the afternoon playing whist.”

Such are the memories your offspring will treasure in the decades ahead – real stories, rather than your professional resume.

Good luck in writing your family history. And, please, don’t delay. All those great memories will be lost if you don’t document them now!