Last Steam Engine Sold in Montana by J. I. Case

to move home. By stripping an older engine like it that dad had
worn out, we were able to get parts for it. We had to wait until
the day before Christmas to move it over because Claude, the oldest
brother, was running a sawmill in Lamedeer, Montana. He was taking
care of a 110 Case at the time. The only time he could get away was
the three-day holiday at Christmas. We loaded up our parts in an
old Dodge four cylinder truck, and went over and started to work on
the engine. We got there in the late afternoon and we worked on the
engine until about 12 midnight. We slept out–well, we had sort of
a tent stretched over between the engine and the truck. There were
some buildings close within a hundred yards from the engine up on
the hill. The engine sat down in the coulee. Anyway we went to bed
and along in the night, my brother, Floyd, yelled out: ‘There
is something going on around here.’ Claude answered back:
‘What is it?’ By that time I was awake too and Floyd yells,
‘everything is on fire?’ So we all came up from under the
tent and sure enough, the house, barn and everything around was
burning. In the light of the fire we saw a couple of guys running
toward the road. Rifle shells went off about that time due to the
fire, so we didn’t go near it. This was about 3:30 a.m. We
finally went back to bed but didn’t sleep much. When day broke
we got up and started to work again. When we were gathering up our
belongings to come work on the engine, we forgot to put in a frying
pan so we had to cook our potatoes and hamburger in a scoop shovel
over an open fire, which was quite a big deal.

Claude and Floyd went out with the truck to see if they could
find some water. I stayed in camp and worked on some pipe fittings
on the engine. Soon a car drove up and a couple of guys got out and
they came over to where I was working. I can remember real well
what I said to them. I said; ‘I know what you guys are wanting
to know. It’s how come the buildings burned?’ I told them
what we had seen and one wanted to know who I was and I told him.
He said: ‘I know your dad really well.’ He told me he was
Harry Mitchell and that he used to be on the 20 ranch at one time.
He seemed to have an idea who might have set the fire but he
didn’t tell me who he thought it was.

By that time Floyd and Claude had returned but they hadn’t
found any water. Floyd and I went to the water hole Harry had told
us about and we were pumping our tank of water and the wind went to
coming up and the sky got pretty dark and it started storming so we
went back to the engine with the tank of water. Claude had
discovered in the meantime that the piston rod wouldn’t fit the
crosshead so we had to drain the water out of the tank and head
back to home. We had to take the piston and rod to a machine shop
to have it fixed. While we were deciding on what to do, our dad
drove up. When he saw how everything had burned he said ‘what
the dickens happened around here?’ We explained what had
happened and told him that we had been thinking about staying in
that house that night, but Floyd had been up and looked things over
and discovered that somebody was moving in. It was all cleaned up
and there were bed rolls and different things that hadn’t been
unpacked yet, so we thought better of it.

We headed back home. It really got cold–about 20 below
zero–and it snowed. We got the piston rod fixed during that week.
The day before New Years we went back again. Buck Bouslaugh was
there with a load of coal and helped us. He was the one who located
this engine in the first place while he was working for the forest
service.

This time we knew where our water was so we went directly there
and loaded the tank. It took about three tanks of water to wash the
boiler out as it was real dirty. We worked on the engine until
about one in the morning, then we put a fire in it and went to bed.
We got up pretty early the next morning and by 7:00 we were moving
the engine out. It had been sitting there about 15 years I guess.
It took us two or three days to get it home. At Tongue River we
went through the ice. We got a log and chained it to the drive
wheels and raised it out on to solid ice again. There were several
Indians, women and children on the bank watching us. When the
engine raised itself out and belched a lot of smoke, everybody took
off arunning. After that we made it on home without any more
trouble.

We worked the engine all over and got it in working condition.
We used the engine in the saw mill up to 1948 and that is about
when we quit.

We used this engine mostly for sawing. It must have sawed half a
million feet of timber. A lot of houses in Forsyth were built with
this lumber. We also used it to thresh, skid rock, move houses and
lots of other things. Now it is pensioned off and it sits in a shed
here in Forsyth, Montana. The last it was used was during the
filming of ‘The Montana Bicentennial Film’ taken at the
Jack Bailey ranch in 1973.