08/31/2026
Another Blackfoot story, this one a version of one by Kim Briggeman that appeared in the Missoulian on May 25, 2020:
If you’re in the canyons of the Blackfoot River some high-water season, listen for Fred Thibodeau’s holler. You still won’t hear it.
Thibodeau (1879-1950) was part of one of Montana’s most romantic and dangerous eras. He was a “river pig" and then river boss for the Anaconda Company’s early and late log drives down to the Bonner mill, the final one in 1928. “Born of pure French stock 48 years ago in the New Brunswick woods, log driving was in his blood from the start, and he still knows and practices it as a very fine art,” an unnamed reporter (let's call him John Hutchens) wrote in 1927.
The article appeared in the June 19 Sunday Missoulian, but it described in colorful terms the peak stage of the drive in May. The last of some 20 million feet of “gleaming yellow logs, mostly” were pushed, pulled, blasted and piked down the Blackfoot, some of them from 30 miles upstream.
On May 19, there was a jam of 200,000 feet of logs just below Goose Rock canyon. It’s a dry channel now, a couple walking miles upriver from Whitaker Bridge and the beach at Red Rock, and maybe eight miles above Johnsrud Park. Ninety-three years ago the river was “nowhere more ugly and treacherous than here,” our man John wrote.
It was apparently a press event, since above on the bank “camera shutters snapped … and a movie reeled it off.” Thibodeau (say TIB-uh-doe) and a small crew pointed a bateau, a “winglike skiff,” into the treacherous canyon.
“The boat shot into the rapids, catching the waves at just the right angle, then swerved slightly,” John said. “You could see Fred’s lips twist in a shout, but the roar of the water tossed the sounds away in fragments. The four oarsmen and two polemen leaned suddenly into a few hard strokes, and the boat left behind the gorge, left the muddy water breaking over thinly disguised rocks.”
They reached the logjam and drove into the center of it where a skiff held a dozen cant-hook wielding men. They “leaped out and went to work to cut a lane through the center” of the jam.
Paul Thibodeau, Fred’s cousin, sat silently in the boat “in constant anticipation of the necessity of rescuing a man overboard, or a man caught alone on a log too far astray.”
“A fellow might go all the way to Bonner on a log without touching either bank,” Fred Thibodeau remarked.
Apparently the logs were cleared with no casualties and sent on their merry way toward Bonner to become sawed into homes in Missoula and mine timbers in Butte.
It was the slower way of attacking a jam. Three days earlier John watched another method, this one “violent, quick and not always certain.” It employed dynamite to get 5 million feet of logs through Goose Rock canyon.
“It’s ticklish work,” the report went. “A skilled man who has sought and found the ‘key log’ — a single stick holding back perhaps thirty thousand others — fixes the dynamite strategically and lights the fuse. He has two minutes to get out.”
The scurrying “powder monkey” turns and stands at a distance, watch in hand to time the fuse.
“A dull roar. Several logs climb into the air, ponderous as in a slow-motion picture. … The pile gradually disintegrates at its edges, and the outside logs are drawn into the stream. Or perhaps not.”
If not, tense moments pass. We've all been there, with lower stakes, on the Fourth of July.
“The powder monkey steps cautiously back into the log cavern to investigate," John said. "His companions and you, if you are a spectator, watch him in painful silence, inevitably placing themselves and yourself in his shoes.
“But always he comes back. The work is always done somehow.”
The Blackfoot “behaved admirably” in 1927. Several warm days “bring the water singing upward,” John reported. If prolonged rains were to accompany or follow the heat, “foreman Don MacKenzie’s brow wrinkles, and at Bonner officials commence to be worried."
“There is a big dam at Bonner, and too many logs might — But two successive nights are cold; the river drops a foot or more and steadies down to work; everyone is satisfied, but wary, nevertheless.”
And then, high-water words to remember: “The river is a friend and an enemy and is never consistently either.”
The 1927 drive was the first on the Blackfoot since 1911, when the Big Blackfoot Railroad started pushing up the valley to provide a safer way to bring the logs home. Five years later, Anaconda Company logging operations moved to the Ninemile Valley west of Frenchtown.
Now they were back, with a camp centered in Greenough, but there hadn't been time to put in a railroad network up the river. Fred Thibodeau, 48, and working on the hot pond at the Bonner mill, was loaned to MacKenzie and lured back upriver.
“I’m getting on in years,” he said, but John the reporter begged to differ.
“Men don’t grow old quickly up there in the woods," he said. "There’s too much that’s thrilling to live for. And a log drive in the spring is a constant challenge.”
