On the Middle Fork of the Flathead, trains on the Great Northern line are said to have stopped on a whistle. Josephine Doody lives across the river in a remote cabin, and she makes the best moonshine on the line. Boone tells who she was, how the trade worked, and who finally came looking for her stills.
A locomotive takes a heap of stopping. On the south edge of this park, all it took was one small woman's moonshine. Her name was Josephine Doody, and her country was the Middle Fork of the Flathead, a river that lies frozen or deep most of the year. What comes first I'm handing you as legend. They say she shot a man in Colorado around eighteen ninety, claimed self-defense, and lit out for Montana before the trial. They say she landed in McCarthyville, a railroad boom town where the doctor was so bad, one historian wrote, nobody knew how many men he'd lost until the spring thaw. She danced in the dance hall, and she had an opium habit. And they say a man named Dan Doody saw her there, tied her to his mule, hauled her to his homestead on the river and locked her up until the habit broke. Folks have told that as a love story. You and I can call it a kidnapping. However it began, she came through it, and she married him. Dan was one of the park's first rangers, until they fired him in nineteen sixteen. Not for poaching, one writer says, but for excessive poaching. Josephine had the real gift. She ran at least three stills back in those woods. The Great Northern built a siding at the Doody place so Jim and Louis Hill could stop their private car, and the Hills took to her, cooking, cussing and all. A train pulled up at that siding and the engineer leaned on his whistle. One toot, one measure. Two toots, two. Then that small woman loaded a small boat and rowed it across the Middle Fork. Dan passed around nineteen nineteen, and she stayed on. At one point, said the man who wrote her story, she went seven years without seeing another woman. In February of nineteen twenty-eight the revenuers came and busted her stills. She was in her seventies. Her last trip to town came in January of nineteen thirty-six. The proper folks of Kalispell refused her a marker. Two park rangers came to the funeral, possibly customers. Seventy-three years that grave lay unmarked, until a group of history buffs raised a stone in two thousand nine. The Bootleg Lady of Glacier Park, it reads. A summer night on that river. An engine ticks on the siding. Two pulls of the whistle go out over the water. On the far bank, a small woman reaches for her oars.
Photo: NPS / Glacier National Park · Public domain