Page 30 - Flathead Living Fall 2014

Nobody has drawN bouNdaries here, but it
wouldn’t be hard to do. You only need to draw one. This is the Thronson side of town. That’s the Burns side. Case closed. There are no other sides, nor have there really ever been.
Dating back to around the Great Depression, with only scattered exceptions, two families have owned every business in this small ranching community on the western edge of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park. Babb has fewer than 200 residents, though perhaps a couple hundred more live in the vicinity, along an isolated stretch of windswept Highway 89 just south of Canada. Summer brings thousands of tourists. At one point or another, almost all of them, locals and tourists alike, show up at the doorstep of the Thronsons and Burnses.
Bob Burns, a Blackfoot tribal member, owns the Cattle Baron Supper Club, Bunkhouse Café, and Babb Bar, once called the second rowdiest bar in the U.S. by Playboy magazine, while his son runs Charlie’s Place bar across the highway. The land has been in his family since the beginning of the 20th century. Burns, who turned 71 in August, is a little younger than the land, but he’s still “been here longer than electricity.”
A couple hundred yards north, Mike and Debbie Thronson own Thronson’s General Store and Motel, Glacier’s Edge Café, the gas station and a seasonal antique shop. Mike’s great-grandparents opened the original store in 1920 and now his two daughters, 23-year-old Katrina and 21-year-old Cassy, are learn- ing the ropes to become the fifth generation to run the family businesses.
That’s the extent of the business district. There’s a K-6 school just north, as well as some restaurants sev- eral miles out of town, but between the two Babb road signs it’s all Thronsons and Burnses.
“The only thing we don’t have is the post office,” Burns says. “Can’t buy that one. That’s the government’s.”
But if you can’t own it, you can run it. Most of the town’s postmasters have historically been Thronsons, and the post office once resided inside their gen- eral store before moving to its own location. These days, however, the Thronsons have more than enough responsibilities in Babb without overseeing everyone’s mail, too.
While it’s not uncommon for a rural town to feel like a time capsule, the cycle of business turnover and family migration typically ensures compound- ing degrees of change. In Babb, however, this cycle has been effectively absent. No changes in name. No changes in values. Just a few paint jobs and a couple new buildings.
The Internet arrived, stubbornly, and a visitor might even get a bar or two of cell phone reception – Verizon only – but if you ignore the modern cars out- side Thronson’s store and the 21st century goods inside, you don’t need an overly active imagination to envision
LANDMARK DATES
IN BABB’S HISTORY
1905
establishment of Babb post office
1920
Thronson family opens general store
1954
Babb Bar opens after reservation alcohol prohibition ends
yourself in the 1920s. The original cash register rests behind the counter, small-town banter fills the air instead of background music, and an 86-year-old epi- phyllum orchid cactus hangs from a planter in the front window, still clinging to life. Surrounding the store, near-century-old laborer cabins stand untouched.
“It’s kind of like stepping back in time,” Katrina says. “We like it this way.”
FollowiNg the passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902, the U.S. federal government launched an am- bitious irrigation project along the St. Mary River ba- sin in the area of modern-day Babb, eight years before Glacier National Park was established. The lengthy un- dertaking would ultimately construct dams on Swift- current Creek and below Lower St. Mary Lake to di- vert and store water, as well as a canal to transport water to the Milk River basin for agricultural use on the semiarid Hi-Line plains. The Swiftcurrent dam created Lake Sherburne.
To accommodate the large work crews, a post office was established in 1905, named after chief project engineer Cyrus C. Babb. A year later, frontier mer- chant J.H. Sherburne opened a trading post, according to a written historical account by Joe Sherburne. An act of Congress in 1908 formally identified Babb as a town site, along with Browning.
28 FLATHEAD LIVING | FALL 2014