Quadrants News from the Four Corners of the Nation


WATCH THE MOVIE


STEVEN GABRIEL GNAM WHERE HOMESTEADERS MADE HOOCH


In the early 20th century, trains traveling through northwestern Montana often stopped along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. Tugging on the train’s whistle, the engineer would send a signal to Josephine Doody, who lived with her husband, Dan, across the river in what is now Glacier National Park. Each toot on the whistle would indicate how much of Josephine’s homemade moonshine the train crew desired. Josephine would then row her homesteader hooch across the river, and the train went on its way. Today’s visitors to the old Doody


COURTESY OF GLACIER NATIONAL PARK


homestead can easily grasp why Dan staked his claim there in the early 1890s. A popular stop for rafters along the river, the land lies at the junction of historic trails where Harrison Creek rushes down from the glaciated peaks of the high country. When the park was created in 1910, the homestead became a private inholding and Dan the park’s first ranger. Because of the land’s history and value for recreation and wildlife, the National Park Service has long wanted to protect the Doody property, but finding funds has been tough. The


66 LAND&PEOPLE Fall/Winter 2012


federal Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF)—the primary source of funding for federal land acquisition—has been subject to dramatic appropriation cuts; it currently stands at about a third of the $900 million authorized when Congress created it in 1964. (The money comes from offshore oil and gas royalties, not taxpayer dollars.) As a result, the Park Service has only a fraction of the funding needed to acquire even the most important national park inholdings. But this summer, thanks to critical support from Montana’s congressional delegation and the National Park Service, The Trust for Public


Land finally was able to purchase the land using LWCF fund- ing. “We’re so grateful to be able to help protect this unique- ly colorful, historic, and important property,” says Kathy DeCoster, director of TPL’s federal affairs department, which works to promote federal conservation funding. “We’re work- ing to make LWCF funding more robust, so we can protect additional national park inholdings for the public.” For more information on TPL’s work in Montana, go to tpl.org/montana. To learn about federal land conservation funding, visit tpl.org/federal.


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