Like a tiny whirling dervish, the child bit and kicked at her father's assailants.While whiskey-runner Pat Thomas fought off the "punk cowboys" who jumped him, he also had to unsnarl his daughter from the fray.
"Margaret fought like a bulldog," he later said proudly.
While she began life in over-drive, Thomas tutored her in escaping the law and competitors in the nationwide liquor distribution system he designed. She made over 100 runs with Pat, whom she estimates transported "maybe one million" bottles of booze during Prohibition.
Today at 81, she's "stopped driving fast cars and chasing young men," grins the little red-head.
Cherished as Thomas' only child and subject to health problems, Marge survived encephalitis (sleeping sickness) caught from their horses, and then was diagnosed with severe blood eczema. Her Havre doctor said she needed ultra-violet treatments, but the nearest such machine was hundreds of miles away and it would cost $1,500 to buy one.
Thus Thomas had a powerful motive when he agreed in 1920 to ramrod the Havre smuggling cartel. The ultraviolet machine is now on display in the Blaine County Museum in Chinook. Her father also could afford violin lessons for Marge, but her violin case often held a 1920s prototype of the Tommy gun, as she rode the wild bootleg trails.
"I never learned to play the violin. But I never shot it either," she says mischievously.
"My father always told people, 'Don't shoot to kill even when they were shooting at us. He didn't ever want to kill anything. He did kill only when he had to butcher a beef for food."
The fierce little "bulldog" grew into a reliable partner, coddled darling of speakeasies and "whorehouses", links in a chain of safe houses from Canada to Denver -- "I learned from everybody." Before she was 18, Margaret Thomas ran her own bootleg route in Fort Peck boom towns.
Thomas' bootleg network called for safe houses, storage depots and emergency escape hatches. An unbreakable code of flagged drops, signalmen, and cryptic messages ensured safe passage.
For example, when word was passed to the child to get her red hair coifed on a certain day, that alerted Brownie to ready his underground garage for Thomas. A haystack that was really another garage disappeared Pat's cargos when pursuers got dangerously close.
Before Prohibition ended in 1933, Thomas had owned a flour mill in Lewistown,"resorts" in Thermopolis and Sheridan, Wyoming, as well as pool halls casinos,hotels, farms and ranches in a far-flung network. Two sisters operated hotels in Denver and in Lewistown for him. He imported a Detroit auto mechanic, who ran Brownie's Garage in Havre.
Pat Thomas did indeed support a sagging economy during the 1930s depression. Many banks that remained in business did so by playing a role in the major crime of the day. Elected officials and "pillars" of every community were plugged into the system.
Those were drought-years that broke the hearts of thousands lured here by the hype of Jim Hill's railroad. Most finally abandoned a losing proposition, littering the range with horses worth 50 cents. Their cabins were moved and attached Jiggs-comic-strip fashion to homes of those who survived.
The Thomas place 19 miles south of Rudyard was one such dried-out homestead.
"l've ate Russian thistles for spinach," Marge recalls. "We picked them young before the stickers formed, and soaked them in salt water overnight."
With his new affluence, her father was able share generously with others in need. Marge remembers facts of kindness as larger than life, and at six-foot-three-inches he was a muscular man who walked tall.
"If a man needed a harness or a horse, my dad gave it to him. He charged groceries for other people under his name, because his credit was good."
Though liquor was his principal business, he didn't drink -- "he always said booze is not for drinking, it's for selling." While waiting to be loaded, he often went to movies or spent idle time in libraries.
It was in a British Columbia library where he met his second wife, Bobbie.The pretty librarian, only nine years older than her step-daughter, became both sister and mother to Marge. Once invited by a banker to a dance in Sheridan, Wyoming, Marge had only dusty travel clothes, so Bobbie bought her a dancing gown.
Marge describes hers as a fairy tale childhood. "I have beautiful memories. Better than most people, I think."
Always happy with animals, she sometimes carried live mice in her pockets, "put your hand in my pocket," she would tell someone, teasingly.
"Sheep napper" was another fond nickname conferred by a neighbor who gave Marge lambs dropped in "dry bands" he fattened for market. She bottle-fed as many as 17 at a time, keeping covetous eyes on any ewes that happened to be pregnant.
"I killed two lambs," she sighs ruefully. "I liked to see their little tails wag so fast when they ate. I just fed them too much."
Travel with her father was an exercise in endurance and survival. He often drove for 50 or 60 hours at a stretch, sleeping in the car and stoking his energy with candy and fruit -- "it was survival, " Marge says, "he knew where every berry grew along the road."
Rum runners liked to travel under cover of storm, as it was easier to avoid detection and out run federal agents who pursued them. On one such trip in a hazard, he was shot in the leg after Customs officers locked bumpers with him and he fled on foot. Because of the cold and loss of blood, he surrendered, but was forced to walk to the hospital steps by John Castleberry, the officer who had trailed him for years. His doctor kept a fake cuff on his leg to keep him out of jail.
Marie kept him on the road by straddling the blood and pouring beer into the bullet-riddled radiator, as they limped to Denver.
Castleberry had a particular grudge against Thomas, who had escaped him many times over the years. The Customs man even supplied Marge with ice cream when he saw her, in an effort probe her father's whereabouts. Pat Thomas' runs were legendary on the Hi-Line. Hearing the roar of his powerful car, ranchers would turn over in bed, mumbling, "The feds must be after Pat Thomas again."
Shot several times, Thomas was wanted "dead or alive" in 47 states, his daughter recalls. Sometimes he would lead convoys of autos and trucks on the hazardous border crossing, forced to unload everything in a second, tipped that U.S. marshals and Customs men lay in wait.
Smuggling was big business, involving much more than liquor. Chinese were transported from Medicine Hat in grain-tank wagons with false bottoms, towed by trucks. One Wyoming prostitute described being dumped in the Havre tunnels.
Enormous profit made the hazards seem worthwhile to many in those poverty-ridden days. Dazzled by danger and glamor, they also found Marge Thomas' fairy tale world.
NEXT IN THE SERIES: The "milkmaid" meets the President.
