Against the backdrop of the Crazy Mountains, Jim Baldwin removes a wash tub and several other artifacts from an old homestead on the Thompson family ranch near Big Timber.
BIG TIMBER — Jim Baldwin is standing in a rickety shed so old and fragile that it looks like it might not survive another day of the fierce winds blowing outside.
He’s looking down at a large cardboard box brimful of dirt- and manure-encrusted books, letters and other documents. It doesn’t look very promising, but he’s learned not to trust appearances.
“This is one I was just going to let go to the dump, but I can’t now,” he said. “I’m afraid that down at the bottom here is the old stuff, and that’s what bothers me.
So he rummages around in it, pulling out books and papers and brushing away layers of dust and dirt. And soon he finds a keeper — a letter written from Gardner Field in Taft, Calif., dated March 10, 1943. It is a wartime letter from Alan Thompson to his wife, Anna.
A handwritten almanac or journal from 1902 is written in Norwegian and English.
That’s the sort of discovery that keeps him going, that prevents him from just hauling boxes to the landfill. He has also found a handwritten journal from 1902, written partly in English and partly in Norwegian, a silver medallion of Scandinavian origin, Norwegian newspapers, postcards, letters, citizenship papers and ranch documents going back more than a hundred years.
“I don’t know why I got started or where it’s going to end, but I think it’s important,” he said.
Carol O’Dell thinks it’s important, too. O’Dell, president of the Fjellheim Lodge 524 of the Sons of Norway, looked over a selection of salvaged artifacts that Baldwin brought to a recent lodge meeting.
“My hat’s off to this man who wants to save this,” she said. “There are connections with the stuff he has with many people in Sweet Grass County, and then some.”
A decorated letter, dated 1902, was one of Jim Baldwin's earliest finds.
The shed, in addition to an old homestead, a barn and various other outbuildings, is on the Thompson ranch just northeast of Big Timber. Baldwin, a retired body shop owner who lives in Big Timber, is an old friend of Tim Thompson, who lives on the ranch and is the grandson of Sven Thompson (sometimes spelled Thompsen or Thomsen).
In 2010, Baldwin helped Thompson organize a Mission Mountain Wood Band concert on the ranch, and last summer they threw a two-day fundraising concert to help establish what they hope will one day be a veterans retreat on the property.
Jim Baldwin goes through another box of artifacts in a shed on the Thompson ranch.
Baldwin got involved in salvaging Thompson family history when his friend asked him last year to clean out the old shed, which was full of miscellaneous family belongings, including all those boxes of books and documents.
As Baldwin explains it, the Thompsons had moved everything out of the old homestead in 2002 because there were no windows left on the house. Their hope was to secure the belongings in the nearby shed. But in time the shed itself started falling apart. Doors blew or rotted off, and innumerable cracks and holes started appearing.
The Thompsons had leased the ranch out for grazing, and cows got into the shed, causing all kinds of damage. And of course pigeons took up residence, too, creating messes of their own.
“Their intentions were wonderful, but the outcome was horrifying,” Baldwin said. “The wind blows, and away it blows.”
Baldwin looks at some of the letters he found.
Baldwin thought he was just going to throw everything away when he started. But on his way to the shed, his attention was drawn a collection of old license plates nailed to a wall of the barn. Going in for a closer look, he found a letter stuck in the wall. It was written in Norwegian and dated 1911, decorated with a drawing of a hand, cut out and pasted to the letter. Much more was to follow.
“Everywhere you look, upstairs and in the rafters, something was stuck in every nook and cranny,” he said.
Boxes and barrels of artifacts take up a large part of a spare room in Baldwin’s house in Big Timber. He’s sorted through a lot of them, but much remains to be done. He’d like to be able to determine who’s who in the letters and documents, to figure out what local families they’re connected to, what the significance is of each piece.
“The immensity of this challenge — I have to keep not thinking about it,” Baldwin said.
His favorite item so far is the 1902 handwritten almanac or journal. It was kept by Sven Torgerson, recording how he left Big Timber with John Helvig, on their way back to Norway. They went through Minneapolis and Chicago and then caught a steamship in New Jersey, bound for Liverpool. Baldwin says a nephew of Helvig, now named Helvik and living in Big Timber, told him his uncle died back in the old country.
Jim Baldwin, sitting in his pickup, chats with Bruce Townsend, whose grandfather, Sven Thompson, founded the Big Timber ranch.
Another curiosity is a letter from a Dr. Lamb, dated 1926 and addressed to Sven Thompson. Lamb was a Chinese herbalist in Butte, whom Thompson had consulted for something to ease his stomach pains. Baldwin said he was told by people at the Mai Wah Society in Butte, which documents the history of Chinese and other Asian people in the Rocky Mountain West, that Lamb was highly regarded and widely known.
An account book from the Scandinavian American Bank of Big Timber, 1920s.
If his letter to Thompson is any indication, he was also an insistent salesman.
“Come to Butte see me at once don’t let it go to long because if too long it always going to form cancer or ulcers in the stomach,” Lamb wrote. He closed the letter with this advice: “Thousands died in this country from stomach troubles every year. Bring money for herbs medicines. Our herbs are always have a good result.”
There are also account books from the Scandinavian American Bank of Big Timber, from the 1920s. A letter from the Dacart Fur Trading Co. in New York, dated 1926, lists the going prices for “raw fur,” including the pelts of mink, raccoon, red fox, beaver, wolf, wild cat and “house cat.”
There is a “Declaration of Intention” to become a U.S. citizen, dated 1912 and filled out by Forval Haldor Bustad. Just recently, Baldwin found Sven Thompson’s silver medallion, sewn inside a high-quality black coat.
A few worn-out dials cling to an old radio on the Thompson ranch.
Bruce Townsend, another grandson of Sven Thompson who also lives on the ranch, said his grandfather settled in Winifred about the turn of the last century, then made enough money breaking horses for the Army to buy the ranch outside Big Timber.
“Yeah, it’s real old-school stuff,” he said.
O’Dell, the president of the local lodge of the Sons of Norway, said the materials should stay in the area, perhaps at the Sweet Grass County Museum in Big Timber, after it’s been sorted.
“They don’t want anything thrown away that would have a link from someone to something else,” she said.
Baldwin knows that. It’s what keeps him inspired. Standing inside the shed, he gestures at boxes of materials that still need to be gone through.
“If I don’t come in here and take stuff like this and do something with it,” he said, “it’s ruined forever.”
