Description

Outdoor portrait of Joseph B. “Frenchy” Duret. Duret was born in December of 1861 in France; his immigration from his homeland may have coincided with his desertion from the French army, according to Lee H. Whittlesey in Death in Yellowstone: Foolhardiness in the First National Park. Whittlesey cites the official records of Park Superintendent Horace Albright as his resource for this assumption. Horace did have a negative view of “Frenchy,” as Duret was known for supplying wild game to a number of buyers, both in and out of season; he had also been caught at least one time as he trespassed over the Park boundaries with his pack string. As forest ranger and author William Marshall Rush put it in his novel Rocky Mountain Ranger, a fictionalized “Frenchy” was “crafty in all his dealings and his bank account had grown slowly but steadily through the years until now it was a sizable one.” Also, this may be the photograph discussed in More Haunted Montana: You Can Visit If You Dare (page 196) when a ghostly figure of a miner appeared close to the intersection of the Lake Abundance Trail—then disappeared—before an unnamed witness referred to as Ranger X; the miner was later tentatively ID’ed as “Frenchy” on the basis of an unspecified picture. X’s description of the oldtimer—“a man wearing a woolen checked shirt and gray trousers tucked into knee-high black boots . . . with long black hair and beard. He wore a black ‘old style’ brim hat with...

Record Contributed By

Museum of the Beartooths, Stillwater County, Columbus, MT

Record Harvested From

Big Sky Country Digital Network