Frank and Mabel 1904

When Frank married Mabel, he was forty years old. She was twenty. She had grown up in Montana, living in Dillon when they met. They were married in 1904. Frank had been elected to the state senate in 1903. They moved at some time to northern Montana, settling in Kalispell. They had four children, a son, SFR III and another son, Sidney, both of whom died very young. Their first daughter, Dorothy, was born in Libby in 1908 and their youngest daughter, Grace, born in Kalispell in 1911. Around this time Mabel worked for the Daily Inter lake newspaper and Frank worked as a guide and eventually supervisor of Glacier National Park. After he retired from the Park in 1917, he returned as a guide for several well known visitors, including Mary Roberts Reinhardt and Emerson Hough. He met the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. family in the early 1920's and was offered a job working for the Rockefeller's in Seal Harbor , Maine. He agreed, and moved his family to Mt Desert Island in 1924.

Frank Ralston

And who was Frank Ralston, son of the first wave of pioneers to reach Montana in the early 1860's?

His daughters remembered him as their dignified, daddy, whose shoulders were so broad they couldn't sit three abreast in the front seat of their car. He was the man whose hand Grace had to piece back together when it was run over by a railroad car, the man who had teeth fixed at the dentists without novicain. He was the man was too old for both World Wars, but admired General MacArthur and whose favorite actress was Jeannette MacDonald. He was the older father who married his twenty year old bride when he was forty and outlived her by four years. He was the one his daughters dates stayed and talked with when they wanted to go to the movies or out dancing. How many times did they sigh, "Oh, Daddy!" They loved him and he took good care of them when dates and husbands didn't measure up. He was the man who made them gasp when he finally shaved his handle bar moustache off when it looked old fashioned. He never gained weight, never lost his hair and, in his eighties, asked his doctor if a shot of whiskey at night to help him sleep would become habit forming. He was the man at 86, after his wife's death, told his daughter that he bought a new house for himself. And then he ordered a life subscription to Life Magazine.

As the years passed, he moved on with his life, returning to Montana to visit old friends and family. He was always a son of Montana and attended Montana Pioneer Picnics in California and kept up with old friends until his death at 90 in Los Angeles. Although he never returned to live in his native state, his daughters, both moved to Montana in their mid lives in the 1970's. Dot's son, Jay Cahoon, moved to Helena in the 1970's and eventually brought his mother to the Prickly Pear Valley. She returned to Hollywood, her adopted home in the late 1970's and died there. Grace's son, Stephen, transfered to Havre from Los Angeles with Amtrak on June 25, 1976, the one hundredth anniversary of Custer's Last Stand. He moved his mother there shortly afterwards. Stephanie and Alexis Snow born in Havre in 1978 and 1979 to Stephen and Hilda Snow.

The family returned to Los Angeles in 1980. It had been over one hundred years of family history in Montana, from territory to state.