Time Capsule: Lake raising, CSKT war donation, silly regulation
Ronan Pioneer, June 22, 1923
Distrusts Polson promoters
Polson, the City by the Lake side, has been building a brick building each year since the reservation opened. All kinds of promotive schemes have been tried. There has always been just one thing lacking, cash or collateral.
Now comes new Lake County, created on a policy committed to economy but now about to be subrogated to the designs of Polson’s promoters.
Ronan County Seat proponents pled with the tax payers to place the county seat down where the farmers and tax payers live, where it would not be dominated by city ambitions. We even offered to furnish a free court house and actually had an option upon a suitable building.
Polson, with her strong alliance with the small towns to the south, defeated the will of the rural population and now it is up to the Ronan Pioneer to stand by the interest of the people.
Flathead Courier, June 24, 1943
CSKT Council donates $1,500 to Red Cross
The Lake county chapter of the American Red Cross has received a check for $1,500 from the tribal council of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes of the Flathead Indian reservation.
This check has been designated by them as “a contribution to the 1943 Red Cross war fund, in honor of the members of these tribes serving in the armed forces of the United States.”
About 300 members of the CSKT are now in the armed forces. This is approximately 10% of the entire Indian population on the Flathead reservation.
Lake-raising proposal still alive
The opinion that the lake-raising proposal by the Bonneville administration authorities and the army engineers is far from dead and the possibly the fight has just begun was voiced unanimously Tuesday evening during a meeting of the Lake County citizens committee, held at the court rooms in Polson.
The Indians on the reservation are also opposed to the proposition of flooding their lands, stated S. C. DeMers, representative of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. He said that other tribes in the United States were also joining in the fight to protect the Indians’ water rights on the Flathead reservation.
In spite of the assurance given by Montana congressional representatives that the Flathead Lake proposal was “dead,” the issue seems very much alive.
Mission Valley News, June 22, 1983
Dirty air here? Machine says so
Although the winter air quality problem in Ronan is nothing to match Missoula’s, the local air did get a tad over the federal air quality standards in January, February and March, the City Council was told Monday night.
Thomas “Bearhead” Swaney reported for the Tribal Air Quality Department that its measuring device located in the city park had shown a particulate level averaging 76.53 micrograms per cubic meter. The federal maximum is 75 micrograms.
It is believed that the particulate level came from two sources: smoke from wood stoves and perhaps dust on roads near the monitoring site.
Silly regulation
Among the things the Montana publishers chose to get mad at during last weekend’s annual Montana Press Association meeting was the much-publicized matter of hospitals not releasing information about the condition of patients.
The legal theory is that without written consent of the patient any such information would violate his right to privacy, even though the report can (and should) be extremely minimal.
Of greatest concern are accident victims. As things now stand a reporter would have to hustle along beside the victim’s stretcher trying to get him to sign a consent form before the community which cares about him can be informed.
Most of us think that while perhaps legally sound, it’s a pretty silly regulation.