by Jeanine Buetttner
nammy@montanasky.com
The following is the text of an interview with Mabel Grosswiler (Mrs. Carl Grosswiler) published in the Daily Inter Lake in November, 1949.
In 1875 an immigrant boy from Switzerland landed in New York to join his brother. Their father had accidentally drowned when they were very young, and the widowed mother never saw her boys again after they came to America. Frank Xavier Grosswiler was just 18 years old when he came to America.
He worked at odd jobs in New York for nearly a year before going on to Chicage and Wisconsin. Eventually he went to Butte to work in the mines. In 1884, in company with three other miners he drove a team and wagon into the Flathead area.
It was a hunter’s paradise, and Frank Grosswiler loved to hunt. At that time the shooting of deer and wild birds was not only a sport, but practically the only source of meat, and meat was the principal food. Frank Grosswiler known always by his initials as F.X. went back to work in the mines at Butte, but returned to hunt again in the Flathead.
He and his friend Paul Fox, who had come over from Switzerland with him, talked about filing upon homesteads, and while they were camping on a place about three miles southwest of the present site of Kalispell, decided to file on homesteads in the area of the present Demersville school district in 1887. The grass covered that land to about a foot in height and seemed to be rich and fertile.
The horses in camp broke tether and wandered away and while searching for them Grosswiler went over what is known as Buffalo hill and down into the flat north of it. Here he found native grass grew to nearly three feet in height and here he found the horses. The lush vegetation convinced him that his was the richer soil and he filed for his 160 acre homestead on the land, now owned by Mrs. N.E. Johnson.
Built a Home
He built himself a two room log cabin and planted trees on his land. Each winter he returned to Butte on horseback to work in the mines to secure a “grubstake” as there was little opportunity to earn money in the Flathead. He decided to file another 160 acres later as a “tree claim homestead” by planting the required number to trees. In preparing the ground for trees it was necessary to keep it under cultivation for one summer.
Very little seed was available, but he planted turnip seed, as it was among the few to be had. In later years he told that the turnips are in excess of one foot in diameter in that virgin soil and that he dug a cave to store the more than two wagon loads gathered from his turnip patch. The following year he planted box elders on the prepared ground and some of them are still growing on the place.
The first lush crop of oats went unsold for there was no market, except for a few ranchers who came for an occasional sack or two. Most sales were made by swapping as there was little money for exchange. Soon many cattle were being raised in the valley. There was ample feed during the growing season, but the cattle growers often failed to put up enough hay for winter feeding. When a thrifty pioneer did provide a haystack, he often found other cattle feeding with his own. Even if the stack were fenced with stout rails. Lean cattle became very adroit about securing stacked feed.
Butter In A Boot
Mr. Grosswiler enjoyed the story he told of seeing a pioneer lady churning butter in a boot, and the butter found a ready market from a small company of soldiers stationed at Demersville.
Until his death he was a fine marksman and loved to hunt. The early excursions into the Flathead were hunting trips. Often in the pioneer days his neighbors would ask him to get their winter meat and he was alway happy to do so. He told of dragging several deer at a time tied one behind the other, over snow covered ground with his saddle horse.
The Rev. Ernest Wachsmuth, minister of the Trinity Lutheran Church of Kalispell, sent for his parents and sisters to come from Bayfield, Wisconsin to live in Kalispell in 1893. August Wachsmuth had been a weaver in Germany, but was a lumber dealer in Bayfield. When he came to Kalispell he bought the farm and stock owned by Frank Grosswiler.
Frank married Alvina Wachsmuth, one of the daughters, and a native of Germany. In 1900 they moved to the farm he bought in the Spring Creek district from Mr. Christian. It was at this farm the Grosswiler’s raised their family of 10 children. Furniture stores in Kalispell at that time would rent out baby buggies and the women would hitch their horses and buggies to the rail, rent a baby carriage for the children and go shopping.
In 1910 the pioneer made a dam across Spring Creek on the farm and installed a turbine to provide electricity for his place. It was one of the very few farms to have electricity at that time. He planted an orchard and shelter hedge and shade trees and particularly encouraged tree planting on school grounds.
Each year he improved his farm and became very interested in good dairy cattle. Milk from his holstein herd was cooled and kept fresh by water furnished by a ram pump that ran continuously. Neighbors living near the 160 acre farm included the Harrington’s, Conant, Walter Jaquette, Haymen, Willis, Thurman, Chris Prestbye and Paul Fox families.
The house, which was built nearly 60 years ago, has undergone many changes as well as the farm, but it reflects the foresight and planning of pioneer. Frank Grosswiler was also a pioneer in cooperative enterprises ing the community, such as the rural telephone, fire insurance and the farmers organization which has since become the Equity Supply Company. He had seen and welcomed many changes and progress since the day he came to hunt wild game and to homestead and take his place in the growing community.
From Jeanine Buettner:
I interviewed David Grosswiler in 2023 and he was telling me that he only knew his grandfather as F.X.
In an interview with Cliff Nordtom in 1987, Cliff said that when F.X. put in the electric turbine, it also provided electricity to the Nordtom farm about a mile away.
I was also told some years ago that the small pond by his place, that Spring Creek runs into, has no bottom, meaning it is very deep. My mother learned to drive at the age of 10 by hauling water from this pond to supply water for my grandfather, Milton Stiles’s dairy cows about two and half miles away.
A few of the fruit trees that F.X. planted in his orchard are still standing just north of his farm. The large trees in front of his home may have also been planted by him. And as he encouraged tree planting on school grounds, he may have been the one to plant the loblolly poplars which still stand today in what was the Spring Creek school yard on the corner of Four Mile Dr. and West Spring Creek Road.
F.X. Grosswiler was born in Switzerland on January 28, 1862 and passed away in Kalispell on August 20, 1944.
