ENNIS -- Mark Perrault of Ennis has worn out three typewriters writing the history of the Ruby Valley.
He's also been busy "making that history for 95 years," he said.
Over the years, he's held a number of jobs, taking whatever was available at the time. He worked on the railroad, mined for gold and raised hundreds of cattle. He was a wartime engineer, designed new ways to build houses and owned The Madisonian newspaper, which he has passed on to his son and daughter.
And now, at 95, he's published three books about his stomping grounds that tell the stories few others can tell firsthand.
His ties to the area extend back at least to the Gold Rush. His grandfather was Magloire Perrault, a 19th century explorer who came to Montana from Montreal in search of fortune -- not for gold nuggets, but for the land itself.
In 1876, Magloire became one of the first non-native settlers of the Ruby Valley when he bought a 160-acre ranch near the Shoshone River, then called the Stinking Water.
Half-a century later, in 1925, a 10-year-old Mark Perrault bought a yearling heifer from his uncle for $12 and raised it on his grandfather's land, when it was "all open range with no fences and free grass."
THE WORKING YEARS
By the age of 21, Mark Perrault had accumulated about 100 head of cattle.
But it became harder and harder to tend a ranch, so Perrault switched gears. He ventured into mining, where he worked as a carpenter and timberman starting around 1938.
One particular story sticks in his mind.
"At 4 a.m., I was on the night shift, and every bell started to ring," he recalled. "I thought someone was hurt, so I went running. But there was a man standing there with a purple rock the size of a football, and we could all see the streams of gold in the rock. Most people were still in their nightshirts."
He married his "childhood sweetheart" Julianne in 1940 and took a job in a smelter in Anaconda.
Together the two moved around the Northwest, as Mark took jobs in Tacoma, Wash., Pendleton and Portland, Ore., and Seattle.
He recalled that was doing construction and engineering work in Seattle for the Union Pacific Railroad when he heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
His civil engineering work then led him into the home design and construction business, where he worked until the mid-1980s. He claims to be one of the first designers to draft a plan for a bathroom with all interior walls, which was unheard of until he included a fan.
"From that day on they allowed bathrooms inside with a fan," Perrault said. "I made some money from that, let me tell you!"
WRITING IT DOWN
Around 1990, Perrault began writing and collecting pieces of Madison County history.
His first book, "Cowboy Memories of Montana," is a story of growing up in the Madison River Valley. Described by the publisher as "Perrault's exhaustive personal recollection of a boyhood spent on his grandfather's ranch," the book was released in 1997.
Perrault said that volume covers a span of time beginning with the early ranching days through about 1940, and including many of his own memories of the Great Depression.
He subsequently penned a historic novel, "Yellow Gold: The Montana Frontier," about the early pioneers. He collected correspondences to form accurate portrayals of the era, he said.
His most recent book, "Ruby Valley, Stinking Water Country: The Cradle of Montana History," goes back as far as possible to the native populations near the river and "the beginning of history in Montana," Perrault said.
Perrault's wife Julianne died three years ago, after 67 years of marriage to Mark. Right around that time, he relinquished his role as owner and publisher of The Madisonian newspaper.
At this point, he said, he has no concrete plans to write another book, but that doesn't mean he's stopped wearing out typewriters. These days he is inventorying and compiling stories about vigilantes from the Gold Rush days.
And he said he has "a wealth of information," more than enough for another book.
He feels a responsibility to history.
"If nobody wrote this down, it'd be gone," he said.
Michael Gibney can be reached at mgibney@dailychronicle.com or 582-2638.
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