All roads, and before that trails, lead to Bigfork

In the closing credits of the Bigfork documentary, the narrator states that “the distances and difficulties of travel that so long buffered this place from the march of history that swirled around it, have now faded into time” makes not only for wistful commentary but stands as being largely true. Until the late 1930s, Bigfork wasn’t really a town that one traveled through. It was and has been a destination in and of itself.

To that end, in two previous articles it was discussed how early travelers had to first use ferries, and then later and now, several bridges to travel around Bigfork. The old steel bridge figures in many stories about how people first experienced the village. And as has also been discussed, because the roads, or more aptly wagon tracks were rough in the late 1800s and early 1900s, many people came by steamship. But that isn’t to say ground-based routes were non-existent.

As part of the interviews for the documentary, Darris Flanagan, an author and historian based in Eureka, noted that when he was doing research for his book Indian Trails of the Northern Rockies he came across the following quote, “Well, the deer started a trail, the elk followed it, and then the buffalo followed it, and then the Indians followed it. Then along came a military man, and he found it.”

The trails and roads that we use today have likely been well-trodden for centuries if not millennia. The primary trails used by the Kootenai, Salish, and Blackfeet tribes served multiple purposes, transiting between the seasonal hunting grounds in eastern Montana and the summer villages in the Flathead Valley, trading, and visiting holy sites.

Most of these trails appear to have passed by Bigfork slightly to the north and east. Several of those primary trails merged roughly around today’s Echo Lake where predominantly the Kootenai, depending on the season, could travel either up over the Swan Range around Mount Aeneas or south along the east shore of Swan Lake. Many of the trails used by the tribes in some places align almost perfectly with a current highways map.

While the west shore of Flathead Lake had the “easier” trail, still strewn with boulders and only open seasonally, today’s Highway 35 also has its origins as a route used by the Kootenai and Salish people. The modern era of transportation started in 1912 when Flathead County in an agreement with the state and prison began construction on a 27-mile gravel road between Bigfork and Polson.

Using convicts from the state prison in Deer Lodge, the 20- to 24-foot-wide road was completed two years later in 1914 at an approximate cost of $32,000. The road remained gravel, however, for a few decades with the first stretch from Bigfork to Yellow Bay getting asphalt in 1938 with the remaining stretches not being paved until 1949. Even with the asphalt and a highway, the road still ran through the heart of town, and it wasn’t until 1954, when the Highway 35 bypass and new bridge were built, that downtown Bigfork was no longer directly sitting on a major throughway, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

The last little vignette is a fun inverse example of the general trend. Another primary route that was important to the village was the road from Bigfork out to the Swan Valley, what we now know as the Bigfork Nature Trail.

The wagon track, reportedly called the Chicken Rocks Road, was eventually opened to car travel around 1914 and gradually improved over the years and would connect to the road that led down the Swan Valley via the Kearney Rapids bridge. With the completion of Highway 200 in the late 1960s, on the south side of the river, however, the road fell into disuse and continued to degrade. Bigfork residents rallied together though and in 1995 the road was transformed into the non-motorized nature trail that we have today. Needless to say, our transportation uses and needs continue to evolve.

While things have sped up in considerably in the last 100 years, and one could argue that march of history may have finally caught us here in Bigfork we still know that even with two highways running close to town, anyone that wants to visit must turn off those thoroughfares, slow down, look around, and enjoy the village on the bay.