The story of Effie Dockstader — Bigfork’s doctor

This story was written from interviews conducted for the Bigfork History Project

In a time where it was rare for anyone from Bigfork to pursue a higher education, let alone a woman, Effie Dockstader took off to nursing school and came back home to serve her community— gaining a reputation for being the “town doctor.”

Dockstader, formerly Effie Clark, never wandered too far from Flathead Lake her entire life. Her family moved to Montana and reclaimed a homestead on the east shore of Flathead Lake in 1917. Dockstader and her six siblings grew up and attended school on the lake shore and then she went to school in Bigfork.

She graduated from Bigfork Elementary in eighth grade, but there was no high school in town at the time, so anyone wanting to go to high school had to move to Kalispell and board with a family there. While a few of her classmates from town did decide to board, her parents felt she was too young and wanted her to wait another year. So, she decided to go help teachers at the school. Dockstader’s daughter Mary Sullivan said she had a creative way to teach the students about fire safety while she was an aid.

“She came up with this great idea that we thought was pretty funny. They would have a fire drill occasionally, and so she thought that the kids should have an example of a real situation. So, before the teachers called the fire drill she set up these smudge pots, and she had green branches and there was smoke everywhere. She said kids were jumping out of the windows— a few kids ran home and didn't come back that day. So she was quite the teacher's helper,” Sullivan said.

Dockstader left her work as a teacher’s aid behind when she started high school in Kalispell in 1926. After she graduated in 1930, she decided she wanted to go to nursing school. This was at the beginning of the Great Depression, so it was unusual for anyone from Bigfork to pursue a higher education at the time, especially a young woman. The entire town threw a party for her in the old Rebekah’s Hall, which was a sister chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows. The same building later became the Bigfork Center for the Performing Arts.

Feeling the support from her community, Dockstader took off to Spokane Sacred Heart School of Nursing. She worked in Missoula after graduation for a while, then moved back home to Bigfork to help take care of her aunt who was dying of cancer.

After her aunt passed away, she met Jim Dockstader. He was the son of Jim Dockstader Senior— the Superintendent of the Somers Lumber Company at the time. His mother Annie Gonyer was the first white child born in Flathead County, during the days when it was still Missoula and Montana Territory. Gonyer’s father went on to become the first sheriff of Flathead County.

Jim and Effie Dockstader married in 1937— for a while they lived in Somers, then Hanford, Washington while Jim worked for the Atomic Project during World War II. But with roots so deep in the valley, it’s no wonder they made their forever home in Bigfork. The couple inherited Effie’s aunt and uncle’s house on Electric Avenue, which sits adjacent to the Pocketstone Cafe in present day. They moved there after the war and had three children together: Mike Dockstrader, Mary Sullivan and Maurreen Hines. Sullivan describes growing up in such a “wonderful, wonderful place.”

“It's on the water, so in the summer my sister and I would swim and then we'd swim across to the dock. That was the cool hangout for kids in Bigfork in those days. In the winter, we would ice skate and we loved watching the boys drive by. That was the main road when I was a kid. It was an idyllic place to grow up,” she said.

Jim Dockstader farmed and worked for J. Hoover Christmas Tree company and Effie, with the customs of the time, gave up her career to raise her children. But she wouldn’t leave her nursing skills behind.

There were no doctors in Bigfork at the time, so when someone got hurt they were brought to the Dockstaders’ or Effie would make a house call. Sullivan remembers a time when they overheard a wreck on the highway.

“I remember one night in the middle of the night, Highway 35 used to come down and make a horseshoe bend moving down before it crossed the old bridge, and in the middle of the night we heard this horrible crash, horrible, horrible crash from our house, which was quite a distance away. It was a pop truck full of soda bottles and it crashed on Horseshoe Bend, and there were bottles everywhere,” Sullivan said. “And dad told mom, ‘well you might as well get up and get dressed, because you know they'll be here for you.’ And so she did, she got up and got dressed, and sure enough there was a knock on the door and she went,”

Sullivan and her sister Maureen Hines remember all sorts of medical emergencies their mother tended to. Hines recalls a day when she and her mother had to put a baking project on hold to go to the scene of a boat wreck.

“My mom was a one-man cure-all. I remember I was about nine years old, and we were baking a cake because I was in 4-H. We had everything ready to go, and Joe Nelson came to the door and said, ‘these kids just ran through another boat and crashed and did all this damage.’ Because in those days, you could drive as fast as you wanted in Bigfork Bay, and these kids broke through this boat and a lot of people were injured. So we stopped what we were doing and Mom went and of course took care of everybody until the ambulance came and got them off to the hospital,” Hines said.

When Hines was in high school, she remembers having to help her mother tend to another accident when her classmates were returning from a skip day— this time it was critical.

“There were two boys that were hurt terribly and I know when the ambulance got there, they said to my mom, probably if she had not been there… that two of the boys probably would have lost their lives. One boy I remember, his head was cut from here to here and it was just loose. And at one point my Mom grabbed my hand, it was way before the days of rubber gloves or anybody didn't even know about AIDS and she had me push pressure on his head and then she bandaged him. It was one of the worst accidents I think I have ever seen, and then ambulance men really credited my mom for saving two of those boys' lives,” Hines said.

Between tending to gruesome injuries, helping deliver babies, and generally being her “cure-all” self, Dockstader did the important work of administering smallpox and polio vaccines. Sullivan said they would set-up at the school and her mother would take care of giving the shots to all of the students.

“She was the Quick Response Unit of the Bigfork. She really enjoyed helping people. She was very good at it. She received a distinguished citizen's award for her help at that time,” Hines said.

Dockstader continued to provide medical assistance to those in the community while also being an active church member and a caring mother. Hines said she was funny in her own way, for example, she remembers her being the place to go to for ear piercings.

“Some girls she did piercings for said they had permission from their folks. Then later it turned out their folks didn't, she got in trouble a few times for that,” Hines said.

Dockstader and her daughters took care of Jim at their home until his death in 1988. Later, she made a reconnection with her highschool sweetheart Ernest Holmes, who she called by his childhood nickname “Pruney.” So, Effie became Clark Dockstader Holmes and the two were married and lived together in Bigfork until her death in 2007.

Hines said watching her mother work growing up inspired her to become a nurse herself, and she went to St. Pat’s School of Nursing in Bigfork. Though she held the job in no official capacity, Dockstader’s work as Bigfork’s town doctor saved lives and touched many more.