blackfoot-valley

summer, a Ford salesman came from Drummond to sell Michael Geary a Model T. Mike at first resisted the idea, but good salesmanship prevailed and he finally bought it for $500. Although his son Pattie learned how to drive, he refused to teach the girls. Miffed at his show of male chauvinism, they determined to drive it anyway. The following account of what transpired was related many years later in a short piece daughter Ita wrote in her tongue-in- cheek third-person style for Powell County: How it all Began: “One day Casilda and Ita went out to the old barn where the new car was housed. Ita turned on the switch and Casilda cranked on the Ford and finally got it started. Somehow Ita got it backed out of the barn (how, she’ll never know) and using the whole barnyard got it turned around and the two of them headed for Helmville. When they reached the main gate a few hundred feet from the house Ita couldn’t stop the thing so she crashed right through the gate and con- tinued on. The rest of the gates were open so they arrived safely in Helmville. Bill Coughlin was standing in front of the Post Office and as they went by, Ita shouted to Bill that they did’nt know how to stop it. Bill ran and jumped on the running board and told Ita to take her foot off the pedal. She had driven all the way from the ranch in low gear. Bill then gave her a few lessons on how to operate the car and from then on they were driving every day. There was a party at the Wales Ranch and on the way home Pattie upset the car and broke out the windsheilds. Casilda was slightly injured in the accident but when they got home, no one told father Mike about it. Every saturday Ita’s job was to drive Mike to Fred Nicholson’s barber shop in Helmville for a shave. As they drove along, the wind was whipping Ita’s hair and Mike’s beard. Finally Mike said, I thought this danged thing’d had glass in the front of it. Ita answered, Oh Papa - some do and some don’t. This satisfied Mike.” Although automobiles became a routine presence in the valley in the years just before America entered World War I, they didn’t begin to exert a real impact on the way most people lived until after the war. Even at that time, the changes wrought by the automobile were delayed in Montana by the agricultural bust of the early postwar years, since a great many people simply 150