In the early days of the U.S. Forest Service, pack animals carried critical supplies and equipment to crews fighting forest fires. In 1929, a severe fire season exhausted the supply of trained mules and skilled packers. Forced to use unbroken animals, inexperienced packers, and poorly fitted tack, the Forest Service saw serious delays and injuries to animals and humans. Regional Forester Evan Kelley vowed never again. A former World War I cavalry officer, Kelley acquired the Ninemile Ranch to breed and train mules. Between 1933 and 1935, the Civilian Conservation Corps built roads, fences, and Cape Cod style buildings modeled after U.S. Army Cavalry remount depots. The Ninemile Remount Depot became the largest mule ranch in the Northwest with sixty Forest Service staff and some two hundred pack animals prepared for immediate dispatch during fire season. Depot shops provided packsaddles to the entire Northern Region and supplied horse and mule shoes to Forest Service animals across the U.S. The site accommodated both the Ninemile Ranger District and the Remount Depot. Aerial firefighting diminished the need for pack animals and the depot closed in 1954, but mules and horses continue to fulfill a critical need. Still a working ranch and district headquarters, the site is now home to the Northern Region Pack Train and Ninemile Wildlands Training Center, providing training in horsemanship, packing, and traditional skills. The crisp white siding, shuttered windows, and green-gabled roofs of the shops, barns, and residential buildings have been carefully preserved. Although some buildings have been repurposed, the grounds visually recall the facility’s original function.
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While prairie homesteads dominate the popular imagination, agricultural land in Montana’s western forests also attracted settlers. The Forest Homestead Act, passed in June 1906, opened land within the national forests. Three months later, a presidential proclamation established the Lolo Forest Reserve (now Lolo National Forest). Not long after, Elmer Breen of Missoula became the fourth applicant to file for 160 acres within the reserve boundary. By 1909, Breen had built a cabin and plowed ground, but he never proved up. In 1913, Great Northern Railway car repairman Guy Ressler filed his own homestead entry for land included in Breen’s original application. Ressler’s mother Elizabeth, who ran a boardinghouse in Missoula, filed on the adjacent 160 acres. Guy (and possibly his wife, Mary) moved into Breen’s cabin in 1913. Over the next ten years, he cultivated rye, timothy, and hay and built many improvements, including an irrigation ditch, root cellar, hen house, two barns, a wagonshed, and log cabins for both his mother and himself. Guy’s 18-by-24-foot, one-story, saw-cut, peeled-log cabin is the only structure that remains on the property. Although Elizabeth never lived steadily on her land, both she and Guy were issued homestead patents in 1923. Within a year, they sold out to Seattle merchant Sanford Manheimer. Guy, who suffered from diabetes, died soon after. Norwegian immigrant Fred Thisted bought the land from Manheimer’s estate in 1938. Thisted first homesteaded in Cascade County, but he sold that land to move west of the divide where there was water. The Thisted family raised cattle here into the 1980s.
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