Pearson An Immigrant Enterpreneur

                            

     

            

                                          Flume and Water Wheel at Mill Creek

 

I am not certain when the Nels Pearson ranch was established in the Philipsburg valley. Judy Pearson Bohrnsen gave me a copy of an article written by Arthur C. Howard, her maternal uncle that discussed Nels. This information was told to Art by John W. Pearson Sr. The date of the article is unknown, but describes John (born in 1912) and wife Alice (born in 1911), as senior citizens when it was written.

 Nels Pearson was born in Skane, Sweden November 3, 1867. He saved his money to come to America and arrived here at the age of thirteen. He was first known to be in Leadville, Colorado where he tried mining. Stories he heard about Butte were the reason he came to Montana in 1886. His first job was pushing a wheelbarrow full of slag from the Parrot Mine and Smelter to the dump, for the wage of $2.75 a day. Nels’ next pushed a wheelbarrow hauling coal in Havre, Montana and bought some stock in the company from money he saved. Apparently he did not see any future in manual labor so moved to Whitefish and staked a homestead there. Not happy with this life he sold the homestead for $3,000 and thirteen head of horses. With this stake he went into a logging business near the Anaconda Copper Company. Nels assembled a logging crew and began cutting in the hills south of Gregson Hot Springs. According to Nel’s obituary he set up residence in Anaconda in 1891. Research does not find him in the 1900 Census. In the 1910 Census, he has been married to Anna for one year and they are living in Deer Lodge School District # 9. The 1930 Anaconda census shows them with three children: Lillian (19), John (17) and Dorothy (12).

 When a sister in Sweden died, leaving a family of two girls and four boys orphaned, Nels brought the children to America. They were unable to speak English but worked hard in the logging operation. about this same time, a logging operation ran by the Anaconda Copper Company at French Gulch was being mismanaged and the local Anaconda men suggested the Company get in touch with the Swede’s logging at Gregson. Nels was contacted by Con Kelly of the Company and asked if he could leave his crew and assist the Anaconda operations. Nels left the crew with his foreman Oscar Nordberg and for $15,000 a year, a seven passenger Stevens Duryea car and all expenses he went to French Gulch and straightened out the logging operation. According to Art’s story Nels wore out the Stevens-Duryea, then a Chandler and then a Peerless, which were all seven passenger open touring cars.

 The Anaconda Copper Company had two logging camps: one at French Gulch and another at Mill Creek Junction where a fifteen mile long flume spilled logs, stulls, and cordwood onto ramps and a storage area where they were loaded onto B.A.& P. Railroad cars for the smelter and Butte. When logs became scarce at Gregson, Pearson’s crew was moved to French Gulch. After logging operations ceased in French Gulch and Mill Creek, some time before 1920, Pearson moved the crews to the Georgetown Lake area. The major part of the logging operation was at Grassy Point with forty, four horse teams stabled at the sawmill camp and as many as three hundred horses rotated for use. The logging was carried out across the lake. The downed logs were then skidded and pulled up a steep one-half mile incline by a “Donkey engine”. At the lake side the log booms were towed across the lake to the Grassy Point mill site by a steam tug, named Miss Anaconda. When the lake froze over the booms were moved by four horse teams pulling bob-sleds. This major operation “petered out” about 1928.

During all of these years, Nels had accumulated several properties and ranches in the Twin Bridges and Sheridan area and a ranch he operated near Philipsburg. The ranch “home was located just at the southwest corner of town and the property stretched far back into what is known as antelope country.” It was described as covering about ten sections of land with fifteen miles of woven wire fence that divided a cattle and sheep operation. They also pastured many other ranchers cattle. The home was destroyed by a fire shortly “after surviving a lightening storm that sent a ball of lightening across the living room floor.”

 Nels died March 17, 1936 from pneumonia at an Anaconda Hospital and besides the ranch owned a sawmill near Maxville. His wife,  Anna A. Pearson died at the age of seventy-three, during the last week of January 1952.

 As stated in the Nels Pearson article, a large portion of his business enterprises were dependent on the teamster, horse and wagon or skidding apparatus. They were the only means of conveyance to handle logs, people, freight and ore for the various business establishments. Art Howard describes them thusly: The men were called: Hostlers, Teamsters, Grooms, or Stablemen. The teams were: Two and Four, Six, Eight or more. There were buggies, spring wagons, buckboards, low-beds, ore wagons, and stage coaches. They came in as many combinations as the trucks of today. The connotations such as Two and Six indicated the number of wagons pulled by a given number of animals.

 To operate such a business as Nels had it meant moving where the timber was. Envision a nomadic type of caravan: hundreds of horses, wagons, buildings, shops and personnel at two to three miles per hour moving over a period of days (such as from Mill Creek to Georgetown). Then the reassembly of the entire operation and the adoption of a new method under the supervision of Nels and his foremen.

 According to Art Howard, there were fights, drunks to bail out of jail, equipment breakdowns, sickness to handle, men to feed and horses to be shod and fed. Without iron will management and instant decisions, confusion would have reigned. An emergency bank-roll, iron fist, very little hierarchy interference or union intervention won the assault at the new logging camp.

 Those remembering the Georgetown Lake operation either had transportation to or stayed at the camp. It was operated both from the Big and Little Trout Creek sites on the far side of the Lake and the sawmill, blacksmith shop, stables, corrals, bunk houses, mess hall, horses and grazing pastures were on the Highway 10A (Now Hwy 1) side of the Lake at Grassy Point.

Forty, Four-Horse teams were stabled at the sawmill camp and as many as 300 head of horses were in use altogether because of the need to rotate due to shoulder sores and injuries. Just imagine the size of the stables, the hundreds of harnesses, the wagon sheds, the amount of horse wrangling and all the other details to meet daily needs.

Across the lake where the Choppers did the falling, logs were loaded by use of skid horses, man power and improvised cranes onto heavy wagons in good weather and onto bob-sleds in the winter. An endless cable hooked into a blacksmith forged heavy ring in the end of a wagon or bob-sled tongue and a steam powered engine (known as a Donkey Engine) operated by an engineer guided the load, horses and all, up two tough ½ mile climbs. The teams being unable to negotiate the steep climb sat back on their breeching harnesses and did only enough walking to stay on their feet while the Donkey and cable pulled the load up the hill. At the top the Donkey was unhooked and another device eased the load down the incline. The well trained horses seldom fell and animal accidents were few.

Very similar teaming occurred at the many mines and mills operating mines in the area. All of the sapphires from the Ewing, McLure and Fusz site on the Skalkaho and Rock Creek were teamed to Philipsburg often by Fred Barbour. The Metcalf’s, Bauer, McDonel, Hammond’s, Keim, Kennedy & Scherring, O’Neil, McLeod, Rohn Teaming and Alec McDonald were all involved in freighting ore, timbers or stage coaching passengers from camps at Garnet, Quigley, Sunrise, Gold Coin, Pioneer, Granite, Rumsey, Cable, Combination and Black Pine. I am certain their were many more teamster I have failed to mention.

 The picture of the team and coach states on the back: “Black Six” owned by Rohn Teaming Company 1917-1918 at Old Tower Grade near Brewery. Wheelers named “Sharkey” and “Dorkey” killed driver near George Town Lake. Driver Alec McDonald. 5/8 buttonhole; ¾ button (apparently this describes the harnessing).  I have failed to find any mention of the killing incident in the newspapers so do not know when the incident happened only some time after this picture was taken.

The next generations of the Pearson"s were:

 

                                                           John Pearson Senior WWII

                                              Alice Howard Ballard Pearson circa 1940's

When the Georgetown operation “petered out” about 1928, Nels Pearson and his son John then operated several smaller operations employing about ten to twenty men. One of these was at Hidden Lake; one at Storm Lake and one at Twin Lake. In 1934 John married Alice Howard Ballard and they supplied these camps with needed food and clothing. Alice frequently moved from camp to camp assisting John by cooking and supervising the different operations. She told many stories about the men bathing in the flumes and the fast water tumbling them about a mile before they could get out.

Alice, born on December 3, 1911 in Great Falls moved to Anaconda as a child. John W. Pearson Sr. was born on May 5, 1912 in Anaconda. He attended school there and after marriage to Alice in 1934 they moved to the Philipsburg ranch. John served in the 184th Infantry during WWII and was awarded the Purple Heart. John also worked for the Trout Mining Company and with his logging business supplied timbers for the mines to the company. He was an active member of Flint Creek Lodge No. 11 AF&AM and the VFW No. 2935.

John and Alice managed the ranch while raising their family and operated several timber camps and the stull and timber loading siding at the Lime (Brown’s) Quarry. As many as twenty car loads of timber a day were shipped to the mines and smelter from the Quarry site. The Quarry was a small community until as late as 1940.

Alice brought a son, Gordon Ballard into her marriage with John. Gordon, born on May 22, 1930 to Alice  and Judd Ballard from Utah, was given the nickname “Squeak” Pearson, after the Pearson marriage. The August 8, 1952 Mail, stated, Gordon had been ill with jaundice for the previous two months at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Mares Island, California.

Gordon married Ferne Graham on October 24, 1953. and became a thirty-year career Navy man. Gordon and Faye had three daughters; Bonna Jean was killed in a motorcycle accident in Morocco while Gordon was stationed there. A mountain was named after him in Anartica when Gordon was one of the first person’s to winter over in the south pole. After traveling the world Gordon and Ferne retired in Albany, Oregon. Gordon died February 22, 2001 in Oregon. He was preceded in death by his daughter, parents, and step mother Fontella Ballard. Survivors were: his wife, daughter Jody Ballard and her husband Colonel Roy Panzarella, and daughter Susan Lindsay and husband Ralph; five grandchildren; brother John and wife Sylvia and sister Judy Bohrnsen; and many Grahams and Ballards. Services were held at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church with burial in the Philipsburg cemetery.

Alice’s mother, Mrs. James A. Howard died at the age of fifty-nine on February 20, 1943, in Anaconda. She was born on July 22, 1883, in Virginia City and lived her life in Montana. Survivors were: husband James; sons: Arthur and Bud Howard of Portland and Jimmie T. Howard an ambulance driver in the U.S. Army in Texas; daughters: Mrs. Alice Pearson, of Philipsburg and Mrs. Lucille Verlanic of Texas; and eleven grandchildren.

John and Alice’s son, John W. Jr. was a teacher in a Junior High School in Albany, Oregon when his uncle Art wrote the article. Their daughter Judy married John Bohrnsen and had five children: Niki Hardin and Heidi Annau who lived in Great Falls, Dan Bohrnsen in Seward, Alaska, Mark Bohrnsen of Denver and Chris Bohrnsen of Seattle. Judy worked until retirement as a District Clerk in the Forest Service Office at Philipsburg. She lived her last few years in Great Falls with her daughters and died there at the age of 73 on April 30, 2011 from ALS.

Alice died at the Galen State Hospital on June 7, 1978. She was an active member and Past Matron of the Eastern Star; the American Legion and VFW Auxillary and the St. Andrew Episcopal church. Survivors were: son Gordon Ballard of Hermiston, Oregon and John Pearson of Albany, Oregon; daughter Judy Bohrnsen of Philipsburg; two brothers: Art of Helena and Jimmy of Deer Lodge; sister Lucille Verlanic of Deer Lodge and eight grandchildren. She was given Eastern Star burial rites with internment in the Philipsburg cemetery.

John died from lung cancer at his home on February 21, 1988 at the age of seventy-five. His funeral services were held at the Masonic Temple with Father M.M. Beatty officiating. His cremated remains are interred in the same plot as Alice. Besides those listed when Alice died, John was survived by: sister Dorothy Pearson of Anaconda and Ken and Karen Pearson; great grandchildren, Chelsey Annau, Nicki Hardin, Allison and Ryan Panzarella.