The Canavan story
Letters from Montana
By 1933, Mortimer Canavan had made his home in Yaak, Montana, thousands of miles from his family’s farm at Sandfield, County Clare.
He breakfasted on steelhead trout caught in the stream beside his cabin, which emptied into the South Fork of the Yaak River. The cabin measured sixteen feet by twenty-four and stood near the Mount Henry trailhead, barely a dozen miles south of the Canadian border.
Mortimer had spent much of his working life in mines across Montana and Idaho, among them Dixon, Alice, High Ore, and Pay Rock. His search for work was matched by a hunger for adventure:
“Prospecting for gold in the Mountains I have lived among the Indians [sic] & didn't take my clothes off for weeks at a time. I slept out under trees, clothes & shoes on & my rifle at my right hand side ready to defend myself. As luck happened, I never had to use it.”
He was also a prolific correspondent, writing on most days. He had learned his distinctive running hand from a “Zaner man,” trained in professional penmanship in Columbus, Ohio. Writing was a craft in which Mortimer took particular pride:
“I use a feminine hand & use muscular movement all thru. I can write for 20 hours & never tire.”
In letters to my grandfather, his nephew, he repeatedly asked for news from Ireland:
“Yes, nephew, pictures of home or anything pertaining to home or brother Michael will be welcome. But like letters, I like a clear picture, and the longer, the better.”
He wanted to know about life and work at home.
"How much did Henry Ford pay? What was my grandfather’s salary?"
In another letter, Mortimer described his life in Montana to Margaret Buckley, whom he would later marry:
“I am writing here in Summer shirt, and it does not cost me anything. Just a little elbow grease to saw wood that I can very well afford as the wood is tall and straight two hundred feet from my door. A beautiful stream of crystal water murmurs alongside my cabin. Oh, sister, this is real life.”
As the Great Depression swept across America, Mortimer wrote to his brother Michael, who had recently built a house in Boston:
“I travelled over one stretch of road running North to Canada. I never saw a human being for a distance of 200 miles, nothing but homes gone to wreck, horses inside fighting flies & poking their heads out through holes what once was windows. I saw two thousand men standing in a bread line waiting for something to eat, yes in a once prosperous city. Such is life out West.”
At age 58, an 11-year old Coleman "Quick-Lite" gasoline lamp malfunctions, tragically consuming both Cabin and Mortimer on a sub-zero Montana November night in 1933.
After his death, his wife Margaret wrote of the place he had chosen:
“Tho he did love this Montana. I can appreciate he chose to live here among the mountains when his favorite recreation was hunting, fishing and ever in search of new trails and adventure. This is a most wonderful country for anyone interested in the out of doors. He had searched for a location for several years before finding this place he had here. It was his ideal spot for a Home, and he made a large effort to improve it.”
For all his love of Montana, Ireland remained the country of Mortimer’s imagination. Among the lines preserved in his letters are these:
"Ireland o Ireland the land of my dreams
I long to be strolling there
Along the breakers of County Clare."