Preserving
Whitefish History

The first children in the Whitefish area went to school in Columbia Falls, driven there usually by ox team, sometimes by horse or sleigh. The children were few, because pioneers tended to be young men, single or newly married, and both women and children were scarce in the earliest years.

The China Basin, approximately one mile north of Werner Peak was named for a Japanese trapper who died there during the flu-epidemic in 1918. To (many of the) oldtimers all Orientals were ‘chinamen’ so the China Basin.
 

By 1910, after five years as an incorporated town, Whitefish had 1479 people, a business district primarily along Central Avenue and Second Street, a water system, a light and power plant, telephones, some wooden sidewalks and a couple of crosswalks, some graded streets, some filled gullies.

In the days before penicillin, when inoculations were something new, there were frequent epidemics and people were in continuous fear of them. In 1904 smallpox was most feared, and for many years there was a 10 foot by 12 foot “pest house” set up about where the Whitefish Lake Golf course is today.