Civilian Conservation Corps crew laying transmountain telephone cable line at Logan Pass near the Hidden Lake area. The photo was taken looking west toward Clements Mountain/NPS archives
Editor's note: The stated mission of the Civilian Conservation Corps was a work relief program to put unemployed young, unmarried men to work on public lands, but it also combined funds and manpower to perform needed projects in the National Park System. In many instances, CCC crews gained skills by cutting trails and building structures in existing units of the system, but in other cases they helped bring parks into the system. In an occasional series, the Traveler will highlight some of the work of the CCC in the park system.
Within several months of Congress's passage in March 1933 of legislation that paved the way for the Civilian Conservation Corps, camps for these crews popped up across the National Park System. Glacier National Park in northern Montana wasn't left out, as eight camps were established by June of that year to house hundreds of young men.
Initially, much of the work the crews were assigned was cleaning up the aftermath of the Half Moon Fire that burned 50,000 acres in the park in 1929 and the Heavens Peak Fire that burned 7,500 acres in 1936. But that wasn't all they did.
In a journal of his CCC experience at Glacier, Edmond B. Cherry, Jr., talked of his time in Glacier as "an exciting one to me, pleasant memories of a time when many people workng in the United States were economically depressed. Yet, a hardworking, honest people with high morals and a sense of destiny."
Among the tasks he and some of his fellow crew members were assigned in May 1938 was to build a camp for a larger contingent of CCC crew. Near the shore of St. Mary's Lake on the east side of the park the men went to work constructing "tent frames, a foreman and officers quarters, and a dispensary. The tent frames would be for the pyramid tents which would house five men and a stove. The tents would be wood-floored, with the flooring being about 18 inches off the ground," Cherry wrote in his autobiography, a copy of which is held in Glacier's archives.
"The two weeks of activity before the main body arrived was fun," he added. "We washed and shaved in an ice cold small stream behind the building. Our locked storeroom was behind the main building. Here a brown bear would come with her two cubs sniffing around the storeroom. A large brown dog had become our guest. He and the she bear would play a game every day. He would chase the bear to the road, and she would turn and chase him back to the building."
One of the CCC's more challenging tasks in Glacier was to run a transmountain telephone cable line across Logan Pass near Hidden Lake. That involved carrying 6.5 miles of lead-covered telephone cable from park headquarters near Belton, Montana, to Lake McDonald Lodge and then up and over Logan Pass and Hidden Pass, all by hand.
Cherry recalled that the telephone line "was constructed south of the Sun Highway out of the sight of tourists traveling it. Sometime that summer we were out of the timber and going over the mesa. To keep out of sight, on reaching the mesa we buried the line underground via cable," he wrote. "I led the way, I was the pathfinder. I carried the front end of the cable and hundreds of others carried a part of the cable across their shoulders as it was rolled from the spool and placed in a trench dug to receive it.
"When the line passed over the cliffs to the lower land below, it was necessary to enclose it in metal pipes to protect it from being scratched by the rocks of the canyon walls," continued Cherry. "We were given good coverage by the local papers. One paper, as I recall it, stated that we constructed the line over country that even a mountain goat would find difficult to travel."
According to the National Park Service, in Glacier the crews also readied more than "150 acres of campground sites for use and many miles of roadside cleanup accomplished. Buildings, trails, roads, and telephone lines were constructed and maintained throughout the park. Sewer and water systems were installed, enlarged, or repaired."
While the CCC was disbanded with the outbreak of World War II, one of the CCC camps in Glacier was reopened for use by conscientious objectors who filled the void in manpower created by the war.
"On about September 15, 1942, the first of this group of men began to arrive, to fix up the old CCC camp NP-9 for occupancy by those to follow," Donald H. Robinson wrote in an administrative history of the park published in 1960. "By the end of the month there were around one hundred and twenty-five men in camp; the number of men in the park for the duration of the camp stayed at approximately that figure.
"Foremen, mechanics, and a camp superintendent were appointed and these crews immediately started to work on projects of operation and maintenance that were to keep the park functioning during the war years. With the heavy drain of manpower because of the war, these men were an invaluable aid to the maintenance and protection of the park, particularly in the field of fire protection, since trained crews were just not available otherwise."
