Montana frontier family fights to return to mountains

HIGHLAND MOUNTAINS, Mont. -- Since 1878, four generations of the Stratton family lived as homesteaders on this mountain, much like television's "The Waltons."

Vadis Stratton and her late husband, Howard, raised seven children. They cut timber for nearby mines in Butte and even prospected for gold.

Their home was a 1912 log cabin with a wood-burning stove near the original 1878 dwelling. They made electricity with an 1893 waterwheel. Right through last year, Vadis Stratton used a wringer washer.

Chester Arthur was president when the government invited covered-wagon pioneers like the ancestors of the Strattons to settle the summits and valleys on the Continental Divide. Now it has ordered the family to leave, evicting the last of the frontier settlers that had populated this mountain and its namesake hamlet of Highland City, a nearly vanished town founded in the 1860s gold rush.

After winning a court ruling in 2005, the US Forest Service declared Vadis Stratton, 81, and her son David, 42, illegal squatters in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest and forced the matriarch in August to move into a senior citizen home in Butte, an hour's drive away.

Stratton, a great-great-grandmother whose brown hair is without gray after nearly a lifetime in the mountains, says the government has wronged her.

"I feel like I was railroaded out of the place," Stratton said in her room at the Continental Gardens home in Butte.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidizes her rent at $3,528 a year. She pays the remainder, $204 a month, from her $545 monthly Social Security check. Her son David is living in a trailer while he fixes up an old house in Butte.

The Forest Service maintains that the 140-acre Stratton spread, with its historic 10-acre mill site, was never officially homesteaded and that two previous government authorizations to occupy the land, in the 1930s and '70s, had expired.

Vadis Stratton is asking to be able to die on the mountain, where her late husband spent his last days before he died in 1994.

The family contends it applied for a homestead in 1912 and in 1913. The 1912 application was withdrawn by the family because the local forest ranger said the land was reserved for an administrative center, which was never built. The Forest Service says the 1912 application by Fred Stratton, Howard's father, states that he had "not settled on land," which family members dispute.

The 1913 application, according to the family, was submitted but never processed by the local Forest Service office. A spokesman for the agency, Jack de Golia, said he was unaware of that application.

The Forest Service granted the family permission to live on the mountain and operate a sawmill in 1939 and then two ore mills in 1979, but by 1980, milling operations ceased, terminating the mill claims and the family's tenancy, according to the government.

By 2000, the Forest Service began informing Vadis and David Stratton that they would have to vacate the land. Five years later, US District Court Judge Sam Haddon ruled that "the United States is entitled to possession."

Stratton and two of her sons, David and Mark, are appealing, contending they were unlawfully denied a jury trial. The case has become a cause célèbre in Montana, in part because of the family's place in state history.

The government has owned this mountain land since the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and established forest reserves here in the 1890s and early 1900s. In 1905, those reserves came under Forest Service control with the agency's creation, de Golia said.

But Stratton's daughter, Alice Lester, 57, of Camarillo, Calif., said her family and forest rangers had a gentlemen's agreement about the land.

The family is part of Montana's gold mining history. On Highland Mountain in 1989, Stratton's late husband and son Mark found a gold nugget that weighed 27.495 troy ounces and was shaped like a disk large enough to cover the palm of an adult's hand. Called the Highland Centennial Gold Nugget, it is believed to be the seventh-largest nugget ever found in Montana and the largest still in existence; it now sits behind glass in an alarm-rigged safe at the Montana Tech Mineral Museum in Butte.

The family and Forest Service accuse each other of acting in bad faith in seeking an arrangement for Vadis Stratton to continue living on the mountain.

"I believe the Forest Service has bent over backward trying to accommodate the Strattons, only to be stonewalled," then Forest Supervisor Thomas Reilly wrote in 2003 to the Butte-based Montana Standard newspaper. "The public interest is not served when private parties occupy public land without legal authorization."

The Strattons said they offered three mountain parcels they owned in exchange for keeping their historic spread. At one point, a well-to-do Butte real estate agent even offered prime land in the Elkhorn Mountains on behalf of the family.

All the Forest Service wanted, Stratton charged, was for her to leave the land -- without anything immediately offered in its place. "Their idea of bending over backward was forcing me to sign a quitclaim deed giving them everything."