By Michael Howell
The upcoming auction at Bill Snedigar’s place north of Stevensville, scheduled for this Saturday, May 5th, marks the end of an era in blacksmithing in the Bitterroot Valley. Snedigar will be turning 90 years old in October and figures he will not be pounding out any horseshoes or building any more wagons, in his remaining years, so he’s selling off all his stuff. His stuff includes everything from an old set of harness rigs to a completely restored racing buggy that once belonged to Countess Margit Sigray Bessenyey. It promises to be an interesting auction.
Bill was born in eastern Montana on October, 26, 1928. He said his father was a “pretty big farmer” at the time, “then the thirties came and he went broke.” In 1932, when Bill was four years of age, they moved to the Bitterroot Valley and got a home on Lolo Creek. He went to Lolo School through the eighth grade. The original two-room building still stands there along the highway on the west side of the road, surrounded by the current Lolo School.
Bill attended high school in St. Ignatius and worked on a dude ranch where he lived in a bunkhouse for five years on the 7-Up Ranch. He came back to the Bitterroot in the fall of 1949 when his dad bought the place they currently live in on Porter Hill Road. He went to work in the woods felling timber and mostly stayed in lumber camps.
In 1953, he married and moved into a trailer house in southern Oregon where he continued to cut timber in the woods for a couple of years before moving to Portland and working as a welder in a truck body shop. Welding and blacksmithing was in his blood. His grandfather and his father were both blacksmiths. Welding was already second nature to him.
“My dad was an exceptional forge welder,” he said, “but he couldn’t weld with a welder.”
After two years in Portland he and his wife hauled their trailer house back to the Bitterroot and one night he got a call from Intermountain Lumber in Darby because they needed a welder in the sawmill. They put in a log chute, a de-barker, a chipper, and a car loader. After that he served as night millwright for a year. Then the mill closed down.
His next step in 1960 was to open up his own shop in Stevensville where he repaired almost anything that anybody could break. His motto was “if you can’t fix it, then don’t break it.” At one point he started pumping out horseshoes and got his boys to help him out. But when they got out of high school, he said, they went to Missoula and bought chainsaws and headed for the woods.
He ran his business in town for 40 years before selling the building in 2000. It is now home to Blacksmith Brewing. He took the proceeds and, “came home and built a good shop,” he said. He has worked out of his home shop until now, repairing most anything that anyone could break and building and restoring some unusual wagons.
He showed me one that was shipped over to the United States from Austria by Countess Margit Sigray Bessenyey, who had inherited her grandfather’s (Marcus Daly) mansion here in the Bitterroot. It was a broken-down racing wagon that was shipped to New York and then hauled out to Snedigar’s shop. She wanted him to build her one just like it so she could participate in some races with it. So he did.
“It was the only bill I ever sent her that she questioned,” he said. She showed him a picture from a magazine and said the English Air Force builds this type of racing buggy because Prince Phillip drives them. They cost $74,000 and were built with all aluminum pieces. She asked him what he thought about using aluminum. He explained to her that it makes the buggy lighter but that in this race the buggies are required to weigh in at 1500 lbs. and if your buggy weighs less you have to put lead weights in the bottom to bring it up to the required weight. Without using aluminum, Bill had built his buggy to weigh in at exactly 1500 lbs.
Not anybody could be in these races, according to Bill, you couldn’t just enter the race.
“You’ve got to be invited with a gold-edged card,” said Bill. He said he didn’t remember what the prize was, but he did remember it was a “winner takes all” contest. It was also a tough race. It was 27 miles long through mud, stumps and rocks. He said it takes four head of horses and you were allowed a groom for each team and it was “mostly young ladies.”
“She didn’t tell me she won the race,” said Bill. “She said she showed them how to run a race.”
Leaning on the old, but now restored buggy that she left him with, he said, “I had to build new wheels for this because they were all rotted out in the hub.” The wheels are made out of oak.
He recalled that “Mrs. B” owned a mansion just a thirty-minute drive from the Capitol in Washington D.C. along the Potomac River with a mile of river frontage.
“I did a lot of work for her,” he said.
And now, forty years of blacksmithing on concrete floors has taken its toll. He got his knees replaced about 17 years ago and pushed on. Now, he says, they are telling him nothing more can be done.
So, it’s over and he’s auctioning off everything in the shop.
He simply said, “There comes a time when you have to look at the hold cards.”
He’s still getting around, but with a cane. And he can still give good advice, even if he won’t be pounding on that old anvil anymore.