Remember When?

30 YEARS AGO • JULY 14, 1993

SOPHIE MOLES ARRIVES IN AREA AS A GIRL, 17

Land for Sale: $12 per acre; some pieces available for $3 per acre.

Firewood: Cut, split and delivered, $3 per cord.

Where? Thompson Falls, Montana - 1914.

Certainly prices back then sound more than desirable to today’s land lookers and wood burners. On the other hand, average wages in the same territory ran about $8 a month or maybe $60 a month if you could saw a cord of firewood a day - with a crosscut saw! Sophie’s husband could and did.

Sophie Moles of Belknap, grandmother to 17 and great-grandmother to 15, remembers those days homesteading out Little Beaver Creek Road with her late husband, Bert Moles, and raising their seven children. “It was a lot of hard work,” Sophie recalls.

The comfortable old unpainted Moles homestead still stands today with beef cattle grazing the land and a picket fence at the front of the house where sweet William, lupine and lemon lilies flourish.

Sophie recently celebrated her 90th birthday amidst the noise and laughter of two birthday parties - one with 56 friends and a second one with 67 family members… outdoor picnics at the homestead with “the young folks playing horseshoes.”

Sophie was born in Milwaukee and soon moved out to the Wisconsin countryside at Weyerhauser with her parents where they farmed. “People think parts of Montana are cold in the winter,” Sophie says, “but they should know a Wisconsin winter when we kids used to lick a hole in the icy window to see out. And it was cold like that all winter. Cold!”

In the early 1900s, land in the west enticed some Wisconsin and Minnesota farmers to hitch up and head out with dreams of prosperous farming in Montana. Not droves of would-be Montana farmer-ranchers, but those with an extra dose of curiosity about the west and able to muster up the energy and momentum to go, along with the desire and fortitude to stay.

When she was 17 years old, Sophie’s family moved to eastern Montana and later to Chester where they had to run down the clothes that were always blowing off the line. It was to be a large family of six daughters and three sons.

“My sister and I rode in a spring wagon to our jobs - had to change the horses at Whitlash. I cooked for the farmers at a ranch for $25 a month. But when my father came to visit me there and told me my friends back home in Chester were picking huckleberries and selling them for as much as I was making at the ranch, I got pretty homesick.”

In fact, one day Sophie decided she would return home to be with her friends and pick berries. She walked the seven miles. “You never forget how awful it was to be that homesick,” she recalls.

“My father didn’t believe in formal schooling for girls in those days. I spent one year in a schoolhouse and the rest I learned on my own.”

When Sophie was 21, her family moved to Gold Butte where she worked as a waitress and her husband-to-be was tending bar. Bert and Sophie married in the fall of 1913, came to Thompson Falls in the spring of 1914, and finally to the land they homesteaded up Little Beaver Creek in 1917.

“We bought the land from the ACM Blackfoot Co. Very nice people. When money was tight they waited and gradually we paid off the land.”

“Of course,” Sophie recalls, “the 1910 fire had burned over so much of the land that there were very few trees. We could see deer anytime up the mountain. And when the children picked berries across the field in the mountains I could see them wave to me with their buckets.”

In the early days at the homestead, Sophie put her children in a manger in the barn while she milked the cows. The cream she sold for $2.50 a gallon. Bert Moles earned his living at carpentry, painting and sawing.

“When Bert would deliver wood to the Belknap store and schoolhouse, we’d all go along in the wagon. When we went to Thompson Falls, we gave the children 25 cents to buy their candy at Weber’s store where the laundromat is today.”

They always raised a good garden, she says, and the children helped. They pulled their water up by hand from a well. They were not easy times, Sophie remembers, but “we made it without the government assistance there is today.”