He caught the bug from a cousin, who shared with him some genealogical research she was doing into the Helterline family tree.
The bug grew into a notion that blossomed into a dream that ultimately became the all-consuming focus of Helterline's life since 1980, namely local historical and genealogical research.
He's scoured history books, genealogical records and what few maps exist of Plains and Sanders County in the 19th century, seeking references to Plains and Sanders County communities.
More recently, he's located and visited each and every cemetery in the county, including tiny private plots with two or three graves, recording all information on each and every gravestone, which he laboriously copied by hand into a spiral-bound notebook, then typed, one-finger-one-letter method, into an obsolete computer, saving the files to floppy discs.
He describes his passion for local history in the one-page preface to his self-published book, the spiral-bound 155-page history "Horse Plains, Montana Territory" (The Printery, Plains, Mont., 1984).
"The poorest of all men, and poor beyond all doubt, is not the man without money, but the man without a dream. ... A man can always dream, and sometimes his dreams come true. A man without a dream is like a man without a country. Both lead to a mundane existence, with little hope of ever gaining from life that which is meaningful and great."
Helterline, 66, has followed his dream of recording local history for almost 40 years, setting aside other dreams and pursuits for which he is less well-suited - the pursuit of wealth and fame, the comfort of wife and children, the satisfaction that comes from contributing to public affairs, the security of steady employment.
His health has suffered; he remains a bachelor; he's poor as a church mouse in an unpeopled parish. His curly white beard is tidy, and he has a good shock of curly white hair remaining above his broad forehead, overshadowing his deep-set scholar's eyes.
But he can barely walk without a cane, his clothes are ill-fitting, his person unkempt, his ancient Ford sedan, a jalopy, really, full almost to bursting with books, old newspapers, a chess set he turned on a lathe many years ago, and underneath it all in the back seat a cardboard box full of unbound copies of his book.
He lives in a dilapidated trailer fronting the railroad tracks in Plains. He has no job, no phone, no e-mail and his mail comes to a post-office box which he only occasionally visits, and then only to clear out the accumulation of unsolicited envelopes addressed to "occupant" and 'householder." He survives by living frugally on a tiny Social Security pension.
His dream is modest: To record and on occasion interpret the history and folklore of his own community, preserving it in the best way he can for the enjoyment and benefit of his fellow citizens and, he hopes, for the profit of other scholars, now and in the future.
"This writer has the good fortune of having the creative and inquisitive mind, as well as the time and energy," to do this sort of work, he said in his book.
Helterline was born in a Missoula hospital, but grew up in Plains, where his grandfather - one of three brothers who immigrated from Bavaria - homesteaded on a wheat farm just west of town, and where his parents farmed as well.
He attended the University of Montana in the 1960s. He was a familiar face on campus, walking everywhere, a solitary figure, contemporaries recall. He was off-beat in an old-fashioned, non-modish way, obviously scholarly but a little odd. It was a busy time in a busy, helter-skelter place, and few people slowed up long enough to say "hello" to Helterline, much less to ask his name.
He received his bachelor's degree in anthropology - Carling Malouf was his major professor, he recalled fondly - but once graduated, there were no jobs locally in anthropology without an advanced degree, and given his lack of resources, graduate study was not an option.
So he returned to Plains, possessing a liberal education, an inquiring mind and not much else. In recent interviews with the Missoulian, he said he occasionally held jobs at a local sawmill after returning to Plains.
But "for 10 or 12 years, I didn't do much of anything at all," he acknowledged.
Sometime late in the 1970s, his cousin shared her genealogical research, reaching back in the Helterline family tree for five generations. When she died, "I took up where she left off," he said. "I added my mother's side too."
That genealogical research occupied him through about 1980. Sometime in 1980, he said, "I got to thinking about John Rhone." Rhone, dead now, was Plains' first amateur historian. His father, John Rhone Sr., was a pioneer newspaper publisher in Sanders County, and father told son many marvelous anecdotes about the early days of what he called "Wild Horse Plains."
In 1967, the junior Rhone published an 80-page booklet, bound with staples, based largely on his father's anecdotes and stories.
So Helterline decided to write his own history of Plains, not relying on Rhone, but doing fundamental historical research with all original sources fully annotated.
'"I felt there was more there in Plains history than Rhone's book covered, a deep mine to be plumbed. It took me four or five years of research," he said.
He moved back to Missoula, where he again became a familiar figure at the University of Montana, laboring away in the microfilm room of the Mansfield Library day after day. He recorded his research in spiral notebooks, the three-holed kind with bright blue and red and green covers.
For the next few years, he virtually lived in the UM library, immersing himself in the microfilms and microfiches of old newspapers, including the Missoulian, consulting an exhaustive list of early Montana history books and seeking out other archival sources, including early day maps by the U.S. Geological Survey and photographs from the Montana Historical Society.
The result was "Horse Plains, Montana," published at The Printery in Plains and which has enjoyed slow but steady sales.
"We published it in 1984, then in the mid-1990s and then again in 2001 or 2002. Every 10 years or so, he goes back and makes a revised edition," Garrison said.
The book did not bring fame or fortune, but it did bring him much satisfaction, especially when he made corrections to the record left by Rhone.
For example, Rhone's term for the area, Wild Horse Plains, is mere folklore, Helterline said - a secondary appellation that does not exist in any known source prior to 1911.
"In researching the history of Horse Plains, this writer has never found an original source that designated this locality as 'Wild Horse Plains,' " he said. "Every original source before 1870 known to this writer give the name as 'Horse Plains' without the final 's,' (i.e. Horse Plain), and from the 1870s to the mid-1890s, in every known source, the locality bears the name of Horse Plains and was then shortened to simply Plains."
The book contained floridly written tales taken directly from newspaper accounts of the time: of violent crime, swift punishment, including the vigilante lynchings in Weeksville, a railroad construction camp west of Plains. But it also contained much detailed information about early day businesses, farming, transportation, land disputes and the trivia of everyday life on the frontier.
A sample: "Mrs. Sansome, who lives across the river, had quite an adventure this week. A pair of bald eagles attacked her poultry, and she picked up an iron bar and went to their rescue. One of them she captured alive, which measured 7 feet, 4 inches tip-to-tip of its wings. Mrs. Sansome did not realize what kind of creature she was attacking until it was all over." (The Plainsman, Sept. 7, 1900).
The book finished, he moved to Seattle for about a dozen years in the late 1980s and 1990s. He slept in a rescue mission most nights, and spent days in the Seattle Public Library. Folks visiting the library from Missoula in those days recall him as a familiar fixture, consulting old newspapers and other documents, and continuing his historical and genealogical research of the Plains area.
As at UM, he'd copy entire articles out long-hand in his spiral-bound notebooks.
"I could get the Plains paper and others on interlibrary loans and I had a lot of spare time," he said.
In the early 1980s, he had joined the Western Montana Genealogical Society, headed by Paulette Parpart, who works at the Missoula Public Library. She is a trained researcher, and an energetic amateur historian.
"We have two projects. One is to index the Missoulian (newspaper) for vital records. The second is to catalog the cemeteries, so we know who is buried in which cemetery," she said. The group has taken responsibility for cemeteries in seven counties in western Montana. It is original historical research at its most basic, grunting, unrewarding level, and is done completely by volunteers.
Parpart recruited Helterline to do cemetery research in Sanders and Lincoln counties. He agreed.
Since then, he's visited each and every known grave site in Sanders County, recording burials from 1881 (a drowning) to recent years. He's also consulted resident morticians and their records, church records, mortuary records, district court probate records and all those old newspapers again.
(He's finished with The Plainsman, 1900 to present, and is now going through the Sanders County Ledger, published for the last century in Thompson Falls. In Lincoln County, he's done the same with recognized cemeteries, but has not sought out the small private cemeteries likely scattered throughout the county.)
He's visited and documented the gravestones in all of the county's 21 recognized cemeteries, of course, But he's also unearthed what he calls miscellaneous burials scattered all over the county. Such burials were common in the early days of white settlement, the latest one in 1978.
His research has also documented numerous unknown and unidentified people buried in the various cemeteries. "Livery stable victim (December, 1882). Chinamen (two, October 1888). Smallpox patient (Dec. 1888, Thompson Falls). A tramp (February 1896, Plains).
"I have 6,000 names in my burial index, covering the entire county through 1992," he said.
Helterline attributes much of his interest in local history to his mother, Rose Ellen Green Helterline. "She loved to talk about her family's history," he said.
Helterline himself has traced the Green family tree back to royalty in France and England, and the tree includes one famous patriot of the American Revolution - Major General Nathanael Greene (1742-1786), second only to George Washington as a commander in the Continental Army.
Helterline's routine keeps him busy - up early, breakfast at the Plains Service Center, into the library for three hours or so once it opens, then back home for two or three hours of transcribing the day's research into his computer.
He makes occasional trips to Missoula on the local Senior Citizens bus, where he often visits Parpart at the Missoula library.
Having visited literally thousands of tombstones in two counties, he has a favorite inscription from the Loberg grave in Murray Cemetery at Lonepine, about 10 miles north of Hot Springs.
"Wherever you wander; wherever you roam; be happy and health, and glad to be home."
Maurice Helterline has that saying in mind some days when he walks up a hill outside of Plains to the same cemetery where 20 to 30 Helterline family members are buried.
The graves of his relatives are on the highest ground of the hill, in the Catholic section. They overlook the Horse Plains Valley where his grandparents raised wheat, and where his parents raised him.
He intends to be buried there.
"My historical papers I'll bequeath to Paulette (Parpart). She's a librarian, and she's been with the Genealogy Society for many years. She's the one who asked me to do the Sanders County Cemetery Index, and after 20 years, I'm still at it," he said.
Reporter John Stromnes can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or jstromnes@missoulian.com
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