A burned smelter worker on crutches met a homesteader's daughter at a pioneer gathering in Kalispell. Everything here started with that.
Arthur Purdy came west from Michigan as a boy, his family hunting a homestead to their liking. As a young man he worked the smelter at Anaconda until he was badly burned, and went to Kalispell to recuperate at his sister's home. Still on crutches, he attended a pioneer gathering — and there met Teresa LeBeau, who had come west at six years old, in the days when, as she put it, “people just picked a location and built a home.”
“Four years after I met Teresa, I married her,” Arthur recalled. They lived first at Foys Lake, where their first two children were born. Freighting up to Fernie, B.C., Arthur liked the country so much he located a homestead at Terriault Meadows in 1899, built living quarters, got a log-cabin school started for the children — and then made the decision that made this ranch: he moved the family back across the line and bought the old Sinclair place at Eureka. “Here we farmed and started our first dairy.”
People just picked a location and built a home.— Teresa (LeBeau) Purdy, remembering the 1880s
It was never easy money. Arthur once hauled a full hayrack of choice potatoes to town and couldn't trade it for a sack of flour. The family ground their own wheat for breakfast cereal and bread. His father, a cobbler by trade, made shoes from buffalo hide, hauled ice by team from Eureka to Kalispell, and freighted to Fernie — “homesteaders in those days did any honest work they could to make a living.”
Arthur served as a county commissioner and was known, simply, as a man others could rely on. In time his sons divided the ranch between them — Lynn kept this ground, and his brother Comet, born the year Halley's Comet crossed the sky, took the big meadow. The dairy stayed in the family, generation after generation, exactly as Arthur intended.