Skip to content Neighbors Laughed When He Built a Cabin Inside a Cave — Until It Saved Him During Blizzard
December 1872. The Montana territory stretched cold and unforgiving under a slate gray sky, and Henrik Bjunstat stood at the mouth of a limestone cave 3 mi west of what would someday be called Red Lodge, staring into darkness while his neighbors called him a fool. The Norwegian immigrant had spent six weeks hauling timber up a rocky hillside when perfectly good flatland sat waiting below. And now he planned to build his homestead cabin not on the prairie like every sensible settler but inside this cave.
“You’ll freeze in there,” said Thomas Witmore, a former army sergeant who’d survived two Dakota winters. “Stone holds cold like a dead man holds grudges.”
Henrik just smiled, set down his axe, and kept working. The thing about frontier wisdom is that it often looks like madness until the temperature drops to 40 below.
Henrik had arrived in Montana territory in May of 1872, one of 43 Norwegian families who’d pulled resources for the westward journey. Most had claimed valley parcels near the Clark’s Fork River, Good Bottomland, for wheat and cattle. Henrik’s claim sat higher in broken country where ponderosa pine gave way to limestone outcrops and seasonal springs. His neighbors, practical men who’d already endured Montana winters, watched him pass up a decent creekside meadow to file on land that included a south-facing cave with a 30- foot wide opening and a ceiling that rose 20 ft at its highest point.
“Man’s building a tomb,” said James Conincaid, an Irish homesteader who’d lost three toes to frostbite his first winter. “Stone don’t burn worth a dam, and you’ll need fire 6 months of the year up there.”
But Henrik had grown up in the Setdal Valley of Southern Norway, where his grandfather had maintained a stab, a traditional storehouse built partially into a hillside, using the earth’s constant temperature to preserve food year round. He’d watched his father angle their family home to catch winter sun while the back wall pressed against a granite slope. Observed how the stone absorbed heat during short winter days and released it through long winter nights. The cave wasn’t a tomb. It was a tool.
Through June and July, while his neighbors broke sod and planted late wheat, Henrik hauled lodgepole pine logs up the slope using a single mule named Olaf. Each log measured 16 to 20 ft, stripped of bark, and notched with a precision that spoke of old country craftsmanship. Thomas Witmore rode up one afternoon to find Henrik constructing not a simple cabin, but an elaborate structure that would stand entirely within the cave’s mouth, using the natural stone ceiling as a roof, and the cave walls as protection on three sides.