10/06/2026
Speaking of music in Bonner, which we were doing a lot last week during BMHC’s tour of the Kettlehouse Amphitheater, here's one of our favorite photos from the more than 1,500 in the Jack Demmons Bonner School collection.
We don't know who took it, or where or why, so it's open to speculation. What are those pipes all about? Loving the leggings. The cutline suggests that the tall man on the right might be John Mattson and the little girl up front is Margaret Mattson. Zero in on her and the scene takes a tragic turn.
If this is indeed in the Bonner area, as most of the Demmons photos are, and it is indeed Margaret Mattson, the photo was probably snapped around 1915. Margaret was born in Bonner in November 1910. John and his wife, also Margaret, were natives of Sweden who came to the area in 1905. According to John's obituary in 1961, he worked first as a lumber grader for W.A. Clark's Western Lumber Co. in Lothrop before that mill moved to West Riverside in 1911.
In 1917 John Mattson moved the family to Deer Lodge and worked as a mechanic for the Milwaukee Railroad for the next 25 years. Anna went through school in Deer Lodge. As a youth she was an active member of the First Methodist Episcopalian Church and the Rainbow Girls, as well as the Epworth League, a Methodist organization for young people.
Anna was a sophomore at Powell County High when she contracted spinal meningitis at Thanksgiving time in 1926, a week or so after her 16th birthday. The little girl dressed in white in the happy picture with the doll and the big bow in her died on Dec. 2.
Here the story turns a bit personal. Young Margaret was buried at historic Hillcrest Cemetery in Deer Lodge, where she was joined in the Protestant 3 lot by her brother Carl, who died in a hunting accident outside of Deer Lodge in 1938; her mother in 1941, and her father in 1961. The graves in Protestant 3 are roughly 400 feet from those of my parents, Martin and Dale Briggeman, who met in Deer Lodge when Mom taught first grade there, and my sister Lynne, who along with two other siblings and me, was born in the same St. Joseph Hospital where Margaret died decades earlier.
