Steamboat cordwood, a WWI cavalryman, silver-black foxes — and a house that now rests beneath Lake Koocanusa.
Marie Purdy's people, the Kuchenskis, homesteaded both banks of Big Creek where it meets the Kootenai River. Albert Kuchenski, born in Poland, worked the south side from about 1910, contracting cordwood to the steamboat companies — the creek mouth made a natural eddy where the boats could swing in and load.
His son Felix was in Eureka High School's first graduating class, 1915. He enlisted with the cavalry out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, served in France in the First World War, and came home in 1918 to a homestead across the creek from his father. In 1920 he took the area's first census — on horseback — and began three years of clearing land to build the Big Creek Silver Black Fox Farm, pens and guard fences and dens cut from the timber he cleared, stocked with a pair of Silver Black Foxes of the Milligan and Morrison strain. The pelts sold through Spokane for a decade, until cheap Russian furs crashed the market.
I ran to the creek with a bucket and ran it back to the house. It was running water.— Jim Kuchenski, on the comforts of the fox farm
Marie grew up on that fox farm. The neat two-story square house stood there until the dam went in and Lake Koocanusa rose over it — her brother-in-law went down and painted a picture of it before the water came. Her brother Jim liked to say they had running water on Big Creek: “I ran to the creek with a bucket and ran it back to the house. It was running water.”
Felix drove school bus, worked the highway, cut Christmas trees — the hard work gave him a hernia, and in 1947 a doctor who didn't yet believe in the new drug called penicillin repaired it; the infection took him. The family moved into Eureka in 1948, and the next year Marie married Dale Purdy and went to work on the dairy. Two homestead families, one ranch.