Tough, Willing, and Able: Tales of a Montana Family

I visited the Lewis and Clark Library in Helena earlier this month. While there, I decided to see if they had anything in their collection that would be useful for my research. They did!

The book, Tough, Willing, and Able by Lois Flansburg Haaglund "tells the story of the Flansburgs, a logging family in Clinton, Montana, whose combined courage sustains them through the hardships of the Great Depression and beyond." Not only did the library have this book in its collection, it was in circulation and it was on the shelf, so I checked it out.

I'm pretty sure I had heard about this book before, but even when I had a copy of it in my hands at the Lewis & Clark Library, I didn't fully understand its potential relevance to my family history research. The Flansburg name was familiar to me, though, and since the book was about a logging family in Clinton, I figured it was worth a read, in case there was some useful information in it.

I realized later why the Flansburg name rang a bell. Rex Flansburg (the author's younger brother) had been the source of several facts and theories about the Betters and "Betters' Station" that Guy Howlett had passed along to me. While it didn't mean a whole lot to me at the time, I even have a note from my visit to Guy in Clinton that Rex's dad had known my great-grandpa, Phillip Betters. Rex's dad, Leland "Jimmy" Flansburg, is the central figure in Tough, Willing, and Able.

On that same visit with Guy in Clinton, he told me he thought that Starvation Gulch (which became part of the Flansburg ranch) had been part of the Betters homestead. While I haven't been able to find evidence for that, I discovered that another part of the Flansburg ranch was part of the Betters Homestead.

In 1910, after the Chicago, Milwaukee, and Saint Paul (CM&StP) Railroad condemned a strip of land right through the middle of their property, the McQuarries sold off the part of the Betters homestead (The parts of lots three, six, and seven in S2 T11N R17W that lay to the east of the NPRR right-of-way). The property passed through several owners before being acquired by Eunice Flansburg (Jimmy's wife and Rex's mom) in 1941.

So, this book is about a family that lived on part of the land that the Betters settled on when they first moved to Montana in the early 1880s. How crazy is that? The only published biography about a family in Clinton (according to the Library of Congress) is a book about a family that lived on my ancestors' homestead.

I found the book to be an interesting read. I learned a few things I didn't know, and it prompted me to revisit some of my notes and do some additional research, but I wouldn't call it a gold mine of information.

Here are some of the key things I took away from the book, as it relates to my research:

1. There was no mention of Betters' Station. If the Flansburgs lived on, or even adjacent to, property that was purportedly the genesis of Clinton, you would think it would have gotten some mention.
2. Ern Terry (son of Fannie and grandson of Austin Betters) was mentioned very early in the book (on page 10), which set my expectations extremely high for the rest of the book and caused me to start taking better notes, Unfortunately, it ended up being the only mention of an extended relation that I found. Ern was mentioned, by the way, because Jimmy rented a room from him in Clinton after his logging accident and about the time he started working at Johnny Baird's garage.
3. Lois notes at several times throughout the book that their place was two miles east of Clinton. Clinton is an unincorporated town, so it doesn't have legal boundaries, but this directional reference provides a clue to where Lois (and probably other people who lived in the area) thought that "Clinton" was. Since the Flansburgs' ranch was in essentially the same place as the Betters homestead, it seems unlikely that anyone would consider Betters' Station (if it existed) the genesis of Clinton.
4. Before I learned that the CM&StP had condemned part of the Betters homestead for railroad right of way, I had long assumed that the Betters' home and any ranch buildings had been demolished to make way for I-90. According to Tough, Willing, and Able, this is the fate that befell the Flansburgs' homestead. In the epilogue, Lois notes that her parents' home, shop, and ranch buildings were taken out by the freeway in 1969. Some of those buildings may have been on what was formerly the Betters' property, but based on information contained in the book, it sounds like all the buildings were moved from "The Old Place" or built there after Eunice acquired the property in 1941.
5. Fire destroyed Jim Flansburg's shop in 1937. Lois noted in the book that there was no fire department back then. I hadn't really given that much thought before, but at the time, fire was probably more often the cause of a building's demise than something like the construction of a railway or a highway.
6. The book has a nice map (below) and some interesting photos. None of the photos had anything relevant to my research interests that I could see, but the map made me think that I should put something like that together to highlight important places in my Montana family history.