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  ROY--For Harold "Casey" Jones, the Slippery Ann station on the west end of Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge has come full circle.
  Jones retired recently after 27 years at the station as foreman and work leader. He has seen a lot of changes during that time. For the first six years, he was the only employee there.
  "I started it from nothing," he recalled, "and when I left there was nothing left."
  Jones was referring to the fact that the buildings, except for two houses that are to be sold, have been removed to a new location on Highway 191, just south of the Missouri River. The old Slippery Ann was on the north side of the river, about nine miles east of the highway.
  When Jones took over at the station in 1954, jurisdiction of that particular river bottom had just been turned over to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service from the Army Corps of Engineers. The task of establishing a wildlife refuge lay ahead.
  Jones remembers helping establish the captive Canada geese flock that led to population of the refuge by the geese. In the early part of this century Canada geese were native to the area, but there were none there when Jones took over. He has built goose ponds and helped lure the geese back to the river.
  Jones also remembers building roads, planting wild turkeys on the refuge and growing cereal crops to provide food for the wildlife.
  But some of the most vivid memories he and his wife, Vernadine, have of their years on the refuge are of their constant struggle with the elements.
  The birth of their third son, is an example. With no telephone, Jones had to use a two-way radio to call the office in Lewistown and ask for help in getting his wife to the hospital in Malta. "They made it from Lewistown to the bridge (70 miles) and it took me that long to come from the station to the highway," Jones recalled. "It was in the fall and very muddy."
  Shortly after the Jones' moved to the river, their second son, then about a year old developed pneumonia. The mud was so bad that it was impossible to take him to town or to get a doctor to come out.
  "But there was a doctor apparently on a hunting trip mudded in across the river from us," Jones said, "and I hollered across the river to him. Then I rowed across the river and he gave me some pills and told me to cut them in half. We dropped the stuff on strawberry jam and fed it to that little cuss.
  "We put his crib up on four chairs. We put the teakettle on the stove and ran the vacuum cleaner wand from the teakettle spout to his crib and covered the crib with a sheet. Damned if we didn't break his pneumonia by morning."
  One year Mrs. Jones taught at a small rural school which her oldest boy attended, seven miles from the station on the Stan Gar ranch. Each morning Gar would pick up Mrs. Jones and her children and take them to the school on his tractor, equipped with a special seat on the back.
  "He could turn that tractor loose at our place and never turn the steering wheel," Jones said. "The ruts were so deep, it stayed in them all the way."
  One time both the Jones and Gar families ran out of groceries and propane gas, so the two men attempted to go to Zortman on the tractor for supplies. The trip there took a full day and the return most of the night.
  The next morning, after unloading the last of the supplies, Jones started to take his wife to school when a rear wheel fell off the tractor!
  The Jones' first home at Slippery Ann was a two-room log cabin "with a path". They got a better home in a couple of years, but didn't have electricity until 1961.
  Many are the stranded strangers they have taken into their home over the years. "And we had to deliver a lot of messages to hunters who were down there," Mrs. Jones recalled, "or fishermen in the summer time." The Jones now live in Roy, close enough that they can get to the river now and then, but with a few more conveniences then they once had. Jones plans to do "as little as possible", now that he is retired, but he'll undoubtedly get back to the river now and then for some hunting or fishing.