WILD HORSE PLAINS MONTANA

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALISON SEIFFER
MAP BY DON OSBY

MONTANA FACTS

 Average Annual Wage (1986)
Montana $16.084
Sanders Co. $14,176

 Unemployment (1987)
Montana 7.4%
Sanders Co. 12.3%

At Home in Paradise

With all this to offer, it's no surprise that other old names for Wild Horse Plains were "Paradise Valley" and "Paradise Plains." Those names are still reflected in the tiny town of Paradise (pop. 200, "if you count the dogs and cats") just six miles south of Plains. The railroad passes through here, and across from the depot are the few business establishments that make up the town: a cafe and general store (newly reopened), the American Legion Bar (open to the general public), a filling station and garage, a post office (which, due to recent cutbacks, the federal government is threatening to close), the PairA-Dice Club (some folks say dice are what really gave the town its name) and the friendly Rails Cafe ("for all the railroad workers or 'rails'—past, present and future"), where you can get a bottomless cup of coffee for 35¢.

This small restaurant was the first stop of my visit to Montana (after an hour-and-a-half drive from Missoula); it became my second home while in the area. Just seven miles south, near where the Clark Fork joins with the Flathead River, is Quinn Springs, another long-time hot springs resort, now with a campground, cabins, general store, restaurant and bar. Local women meet three times a week, summer and winter, for water aerobics in the 86°F outdoor swimming pool and for soaks in the much hotter whirlpool.

Jim Stokes, who was born and raised on a farm in Ashland County, Ohio, first came west on a trip to the Canadian Rockies during a school break. "I went back to Ohio and started doing pretty well shoeing horses. But there were just too many people in Ohio, and I missed the mountains, so I came back out and stumbled into tree-planting near Salmon, Idaho, which is just south of here across the border. "At first, I liked the traveling involved in tree planting, but after a while it gets old. So, when the tree crew was based in Superior, Montana, I got to snooping around, and I found Paradise. Even if it were nothing else, it's just a heck of an address to have!" Jim bought 40 acres of wooded land ("I paid for it in two-and-a-half years," he notes triumphantly) five miles up from Paradise on McLaughlin Creek.

He lived in a tent all one winter while building a charming two-room cabin with a sleeping loft, using mostly a chain saw. He cut the logs from trees on his own property, and with the help of his horse Aggie, which he brought from Ohio as a colt, he pulled them to the site. "I'd never built anything before or read anything about building, either," he continued, "and all I had were green logs that I had just peeled. But this old guy, Ken Peters in Superior, told me what to do. You put uprights up and flatten them on the sides that the walls attach to. Then you notch grooves in the uprights with your chain saw, so you can put 2 X 4s in there. They stick out about halfway, and those are your tongues. Then you notch your logs with a groove.

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