Montana Articles

...And BS Walks

12/20/2019

The next campaign finance filing deadline for Montana candidates happens on January 5.

At that point we’ll have a better idea of how the various statewide candidates are doing, and what their chances in June are.

Nationally, the candidates running for president won’t need to file their next quarterly report until April 15...though beginning in January they do have to start filing monthly reports, beginning on the 20th of each month.

Currently Trump has raised $165 million. The various clown car Democrats have raised $476 million between themselves. Bernie Sanders is leading the pack, with $74 million.

Pocahontas is next with $60 million and Mayor Pete has $51 million. Poor Tulsi only has $9 million. The rich, buy-the-election-guys Yang and Steyer have $15 million and $49 million, respectively.

When we turn our attention to Congress we see that Nancy Pelosi has raised $3.7 million for her reelection bid, while AOC has $3.5 million. Adam Schiff has raised $4.3 million.

The leading Republican fundraisers in the House are Steve Scalise, with $8.8 million, and Devin Nunes, with $5.6 million.

For the Senate, the leading fundraiser is Rick Scott, with $85 million so far. Our own Jon Tester has $20 million socked-away so far, though I suspect most of that is leftover from last year.

Of course, nothing is helping candidates raise money as much as this impeachment stir is.

In the 72 hours after Pelosi announced her impeachment plan in September, various GOP candidates around the country managed to raise $15 million. In November alone, Trump raised nearly $21 million.

So far Trump and the RNC have spent $11 million to target vulnerable Democrats running for Congress. Much of this is happening in the swing states, like Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin, where 51% of voters disapprove of impeachment (44% support).

Dems in those states know that impeachment is poison. The Democratic outfit Priorities USA is spending $100 million on anti-Trump ads this cycle, yet not a single one of those ads will focus on impeachment.

Many Democratic operatives that make their money off of other people’s donations know that Trump is doing well, and that the current environment doesn’t support his removal, via impeachment or through the ballot box. Here’s how the LA Times put it recently:

“His dismal job performance ratings have changed little since impeachment began. The economy keeps humming. A significant trade deal was just inked. The courts are being reshaped in Trump’s image as White House judicial nominees cruise to confirmation.”

It’s going to be very hard for Democrats to run against that, both nationally and here in Montana.

James Conner tracks the approval rating numbers, and told us two days ago that while 51% of Americans support impeaching Trump nationally, here in Montana that’s probably not the case, as he won the state in ‘16 with 56% of the vote, and will likely pick up 88% of the GOP primary voters next June (Pocahontas is leading the Dems in Montana, with 44% support for the June Primary).

“These numbers should worry Montana’s Democrats,” Conner tells us. “Unless public support for Trump collapses, and it might, Republicans will be in a very good position to win all statewide election in Montana in 2020.”

There are 165 days until the June Primary, and a lot could change between now and then. Our primary is so late in the cycle that it’s a good bet most of the 15 Democratic candidates still left will be winnowed down to three or four by then.

I think many Democratic voters in this state are worried, not only by the prospect of Trump’s coattails sweeping so many GOPers into office, but also by the simply unelectable candidates running in so many of our statewide races.

For instance, we have Melissa Romano as the only Dem candidate for OPI, and her husband has a smorgasbord of drug problems that will dominate the news about her campaign.

For SoS, the Dems have just one candidate, and it’s a gay man from Missoula. I fail to see how he’s going to beat any of the four GOP candidates currently running. I personally believe his bid has more to do with impressing the Democratic fundraising/GOTV outfits located on the West Coast than it does with impressing Montana voters. At least that way he’ll have a job lined up come January 2021 when his bid fails.

State Auditor is another incredibly weak race for the Dems, with single-term legislator Shane Morigeau the only candidate so far. He’s also from Missoula, and taking on out-of-stater Troy Downing and some woman named Nelly Nicol.

Democrats need to do some serious soul searching. If they do so, they’ll realize that these three candidates don’t stand a chance winning against their GOP opponents, not when Trump is going to carry them through via his coattails.

All of these folks are incredibly weak candidates. Unless serious primary challengers appear before the March filing deadline, these races are lost to Dems.

Dems have about 90 days to find viable candidates for these races.

The clock is ticking.

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The Montana Historical Society: Then, Now and Tomorrow

8/19/2015

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This is the first post in a three-part series on the Montana Historical Society.

We’re going to take a look at the institution’s history today, as well as its current historical and political concerns. We’ll also look at the proposed Montana Heritage Center, the new building that’s been sought for quite some time now.

I hope this series of posts will give you a greater appreciation and understanding of the Montana Historical Society, and the direction it has taken and may take yet.

The Montana Historical Society’s Early History

The Historical Society of Montana started on December 21, 1864. The territorial legislature made it so when it passed Council Bill 15, introduced by Francis M. Thompson from Beaverhead County. Territorial governor Sydney Edgerton signed it into law on February 2, 1865.

Some big Montana names had a part in bringing the society about, including:

Christopher P. Higgins;
John Owens;
James Stuart;
Granville Stuart;
Wilbur Fiske Sanders;
Malcolm Clark.

Higgins would go on to pretty much start up Missoula with a few other men, while John Owens would stick near the fort that bore his name around Deer Lodge (unless I’m thinking of John Owen). The Stuart brothers had a long history in the state, and would continue to have influence. Malcolm Clark was killed in August 1869, something that spurred the Marias Massacre.

The society got to work, gathering records and making collections. Those records were housed in Virginia City, until the decision was made to move them to Helena. Unfortunately, that very year all of their work was destroyed in the Helena fire of 1874 that tore through the downtown area, where the Montana Historical Society was then located. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, as “the Society contacted many of the original pioneers” shortly after the fire, according to the Montana Historical Society Board of Trustees records, 1865-2006, “and obtained replacement reminiscences, diaries, and letters.”

To ensure that fire did not strike again, the new collections were stored in the stone Lewis and Clark County Courthouse beginning in 1886. When the Montana State Capitol was finished in 1902, the collection moved there.

By that time the society was called “The Historical and Miscellaneous Library,” a name given to it by the legislature in 1895 and not changed back until 1923. It wasn’t until 1963 that the Historical Society of Montana got the name we know it as today, the Montana Historical Society.

K. Ross Toole’s Historical Society

The society’s records remained in the Capitol until 1953 when the Veterans and Pioneers Memorial Building was constructed. The legislature had known a new building was needed as early as the 1920s, but “the Depression, World War II, and other factors delayed” this.

Building the Montana Historical Society in 1951 (courtesy Helena History)

The Montana Historical Society in 1962 (click for link)

One of the reasons the Montana Historical Society’s current building was built is because of K. Ross Toole, who had become the “first professional director” in 1951.

Toole reinvigorated that state agency. He started up The Montana Magazine, which became Montana: The Magazine of Western History in 1953, something that actually got history into people’s hands. Before that there’d only been the Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana, ten volumes that appeared from 1876 to 1941, or one volume every six and a half years.

The society had become a state agency in 1891. Up to that point the society only had a five-member board, the most powerful of which was arguably the Librarian, but when it became a state agency a Board of Trustees was appointed by the governor. In 1949 that Board grew to fifteen members, and to further complicate matters, an Executive Board is created from those fifteen members, which consists of “President, Vice President, and three additional Board members.”

Still, “during most of its existence, the Board has played a secondary role, leaving the active management of the Society to the paid staff.” That staff did a wonderful job under the direction of Toole until he retired in 1958. Why’d he retire? Primarily the fact that he was tired of fighting the Montana Legislature for funding. What’s more, raising funds had become increasingly difficult. “His espousal of liberal causes in Montana Opinion had earned him the enmity of a cadre of legislators, trustees, and the public,” historian Harry Fritz also tells us.

The Montana Historical Society after Toole

After Toole left there was a string of directors, most lasting about the same amount of time Toole had. The Montana Historical Society Director's records, 1951-2003 lists these directors. These men were:

Michael Kennedy, who had big shoes to fill when he took over, though he held the job until 1966.

Sam Gilluly and his able hand guided the society until 1974.

Ken Korte came in until 1979.

Robert Archibald was director for ten years, until 1989.

Larry Sommer had the job until 1992.

Brian Cockhill directed the society until 1998.

Arnold Olsen took charge until 2006, no relation to the former U.S. House rep, I believe.

Richard Sims led the society until 2010.

Former Montana Secretary of State Mike Cooney became interim director for ten months until 2011. The position had been offered to Hugh Ambrose, the famous historian’s son.

Currently the Montana Historical Society is directed by Bruce Whittenberg, who took over in September 2011. Prior to that he was executive director of Leadership Montana, Inc., “which trains leaders across Montana, and runs his own consulting group,” the Billings Gazette reported. He was also working at MSU Billings as “director of its Center for Business Enterprise.” Until his appointment, he’d “never dreamed of being director.”

Current Montana Historical Society Director Bruce Wittenberg

I’m personally not sure a businessman should be director of a historical society, myself. But maybe the intention of the director these days isn’t to educate the public, but to lobby for money. After all, even back in 2010 the director was trying to get $30 million for their new building. Let’s turn our attention to these political concerns.

The Montana Historical Society’s Historical Concerns

The Montana Historical Society is failing in its mission to educate Montanans, and out-of-staters, about the state’s history.

This is obvious to me when I enter the Research Center, dig around in files, and find nothing new, or a mere newspaper cutting from decades ago. The Yellowstone Pipeline folder in the Research Center is a prime example of this, and I discussed it a bit in that article this week.

In that folder you’ll find a 1955 newspaper cutting talking about the Helena refineries. Nothing else on this vital subject for Montana’s current business, environmental, and political climate is to be found.

A couple of months ago I pulled out the Harry Fritz file, which details the University of Montana historian and also a bit on his political career. The folder was sorely lacking. There should have been plenty of newspaper clippings going past his short 1987 lieutenant governor run.

Perhaps this is due to poor communication. But…why should people in Missoula have to send newspaper clippings to Helena? Shouldn’t all those papers be going to the Montana Historical Society’s third-floor offices, where “professionals” look at them and make cuttings for the file drawers?

I think so, and that’s because I go through those files so I can write information down and put it in books for the general public to read. When that information is not there then it’s clear to me we’ve lost a huge piece of history.

The current staff and director, and perhaps even the Board of Trustees, needs to address this problem. Or are they too busy thinking about a new building to fulfill their mission?

The Montana Historical Society’s Political Concerns

I discussed the Montana Historical Society a bit with the research assistants that were on duty this past Saturday. I talked with the women working the desk at the Research Center as well as the woman at the main desk to the museum. Here are some things I found out:

The Montana Historical Society is required by law to house the historical documents of the state. This is currently becoming hard to do, mainly because of space limitations.

The Research Center has a lot of space for archives, four compacted floors worth, in fact. Still, we’re talking nearly 175 years of history here, and the corresponding documents.

The Capitol Hill Mall had been considered as a new location for the Montana Historical Society, but it was determined the structure and area could not support the weight of all that the Historical Society has. The building would have to be demolished, which would have cost a lot.

You can have tours of the Montana Historical Society during the week, and you might be able to go into the archives.

The Historical Society museum only shows 7% of it’s collection at any given time, and that’s because there’s so little space. Imagine the things we don’t see, or just look:

Wittenberg showing off some of the hidden art of Montana Historical society

Gavel made of anthracite coal

Montana Historical Society Archives

Staff showing Pocket Army revolver

Charlie Russell Room in Montana Historical Society, c 1950s

The place gets about 100 visitors on a busy day, and those typically come during summer. The Research Center gets about 15 people on a busy day, mainly students and academics but also quite a few people coming in to look up genealogy or property or old relatives.

One of the things that kept coming up was how the Montana Historical Society has to pay rent on the building it’s in. Most state agencies have to do the same. I’m sorry, but how does this make sense, budgeting money to an agency so they can budget it back to you? I guess if you want to create more paper-pushers, it’s a dream come true.

Right now it seems that much of the public is being robbed. We’re paying to store these collections, but we can’t even see them. I’d love to see more art, but the Republican legislature won’t fund it, and the Democratic governor won’t call for any kind of funding that isn’t debt.

So nothing gets done. That’s a shame, as they’ve got quite the idea on the ol’ drawing board.

The Montana Heritage Center

It was determined during planning for the new building, mainly through assessing the current collections, public needs, and legal obligations, that the Montana Historical Society needs a new building. Together with the old building, this will be called the Montana Heritage Center.

The current Montana Historical Society building was completed in 1953. As we saw, the building is called the Veterans and Pioneers Memorial Building. It will be renovated to house the Research Center on the ground floor, a new wing for the Charlie Russell art, and to convert existing upper-floor areas into classrooms. The State Historic Preservation Office will also be brought into the building from its current location on 8th Avenue.

Montana State Historic Preservation Office

It’s been determined that a total of 119,805 net square feet of space are needed for the Montana Heritage Center. Thankfully, the current building will supply 66,995 net square feet, meaning the new building only has to be 45,330 net square feet.

The new building will include “museum exhibits, public gathering space and event center, outdoor courtyard and amphitheater as well as appropriate museum collection storage,” according to the informational brochure on the project that can be found in the museum’s entryway.

Proposed design for new Montana Historical Society building

Inside layout for new Montana Historical Society Building

Outside view of new Montana Historical Society building that people want to build

Total costs for this project are $37.5 million, though that’s likely to increase with commodity prices changing, interest rates going up, and all the rest of it. In 2005 the Montana Legislature said that $7.5 million could be raised through bonding. That means $30 million has to be raised, and only $3.5 million has been.

Let’s be completely honest here – this building was set to be built this year. The legislature would have passed the infrastructure bill, but six Republicans in the House voted against it and that started the log rolling and the bill died.

Let’s also be completely honest here – the infrastructure bill would likely not have been challenged if it didn’t contain so much debt. Governor Steve Bullock decided to bond for most of it, and that turned off conservatives.

The Montana Heritage Center can be built, and we have the money to do it. We have more than $400 million in the bank as of this writing. Let’s get that done so we have economic stimulus, more visitors to the Helena Capitol complex, and more great books and films made about the state.

Oh yeah, did I mention most of the historical movies about Montana only come about because of the research that people do at the Montana Historical Society? We’ll discuss that in tomorrow’s post. Thanks for reading!

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Tales from the Benton Avenue Cemetery

3/30/2015

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The Benton Avenue Cemetery has been in Helena since 1870.

The original Helena city cemetery was on Warren Street, where today’s Central School is. It came about in 1865 but the growth of the city required its removal by 1870. They didn’t get all the bodies, however. In fact, bodies were still being pulled out from under the school in 1893 when floods occurred or the ground shifted.

The bodies that had originally been buried in the Warren Street cemetery had been dug up in 1870 and moved to the Benton Avenue Cemetery. It’s a nice place, one that has tombstones you can walk around and get stories from. Some of those stories are below.

You can get a good perspective on the cemetery when you walk down Benton Avenue, right across from Carroll College. This is what it looks like:

Some wooden boards for headstones. The one in the upper left is of a 5-week-old boy

The view gets a little clearer the closer you get, and if you do some research or have the right books, you can get great stories.

Kemp family plot in the Benton Avenue Cemetery, Helena

One of those stories involves the Kemp family, all four members. It’s a tragic story, perhaps one of the most tragic in the whole place.

Cyrus Kemp had been born in Pennsylvania in 1831. In 1868 he moved to Helena and became an assayer and “conscientious, unassuming businessman.” He was about 37 years old at the time, and was likely already married. His wife was named Mollie and she’d been born in 1840 in Missouri. Two years after the pair arrived in Helena they had a daughter, named Annie. She died four years later, just a few weeks into January, 1875. She’d been fighting cerebro spinal meningitis, a battle she waged for twenty hours before she could fight no more. The death must have been a blow to the family, especially the mother. It was January 23 that Cyrus bought the plot in the Benton Avenue Cemetery for his daughter. The ground must have been tough.

Life went on for the Kemps, until 1884 when another tragedy struck. This time the circumstances are a bit unclear, but what is known is that Cyrus and Mollie’s second daughter died. Her name was Ella and she’d been trying to prevent her mother from killing herself.

It happened on June 30 when Mollie had been “laboring under a fit of temporary insanity,” according to the coroner’s jury. Cyrus was in another room of their Edwards Street home. He heard a gunshot in the bedroom, and rushed in to see Ella with “blood oozing from a bullet hole in her left temple.” She was lying on the floor by the bed, and he looked over to see his wife holding his Smith & Wesson pistol.

“Oh, have I shot Ella?” Mollie called out as he entered the room.

“Yes,” Cyrus said. “How – why did you do it?”

“I wanted to shoot myself, and Ella was trying to prevent me from doing it. It can’t be that she is much hurt. She will surely be better after awhile?”

At that point “the poor woman wrung her hands in anguish,” according to the reports. Cyrus called for help and by the time doctors came Mollie was “wild with grief” and they gave her an opiate. Ella died two hours later, never regaining consciousness. When Mollie later woke up from her drug-induced sleep, she was told Ella had died from falling out of a carriage. She refused to believe that Ella could be dead, though on July 1 Ella was buried.

The family continued on, this time until 1889 when tragedy struck again. Mollie kept it together for more than five years before August 24 of that year. Cyrus had made sure his wife had been kept on medicine, which was likely laudanum or some other form of opium. It seemed on that August day she argued with him over it and never took it. After a time she settled down, or so Cyrus thought. When he went to the other room he saw she wasn’t there, and that the kitchen door had been left open. He went out, and realized his wife had gone. Search parties were organized, and eventually Mollie’s body was found in the Chessman ditch, “a stream of about twelve inches deep.” It was clear it was suicide, for on her body was found a note that read: “My body and mind are giving away; don’t leave me alone for a moment.”

Cyrus kept on for two more years, until he married one Anna Wood. It was 1891 and he was 60 years old. The pair had a son the next year, which no doubt joy to the remaining years of Cyrus’s life. He died in 1896 at the age of 65.

Not all the tales coming from the cemetery are sad. Oh sure, everyone dies in the end, but some do so in more…entertaining ways than others. One such was Elijah Dunphy, though his life too was marked with tragedy.

The Dunphy Family Plot in the Benton Avenue Cemetery, Helena

Elijah Dunphy was born on March 25, 1833 in New Brunswick, Canada. He got married to Mary Small in 1858 and then in 1862 he moved to Grasshopper Creek in Montana, no doubt looking for gold. He was 29-years-old. The Dunphy’s were members of the Fisk Expedition that came through in that year and they moved from one mining camp to another, hitting up all the hotspots – Benton, Alder Gulch, and Bannack. Finally they came to Helena, where Elijah got involved in “the mercantile business, sawmill and lumber, hotel and stables.”

Elijah and Mary lived happily in Helena until Mary died in 1885. It was a shocking affair, coming on Christmas Eve, and as Mary was nursing the children of some friends. They’d had diphtheria, and she caught it and was buried that same day. It must have been a cold and heartless holiday that year.

Elijah kept on with his business interests, but life had no doubt become listless. Four years later, in 1889, he married Susan Barwell, who was 27 years of age to his 56 years of age. They were married in August and Elijah held out for just over a month before succumbing to a heart attack. The coroner ruled he was a victim of “constant over stimulation.”

That may have been due to his young and likely beautiful wife. Elijah had been worth quite a bit of money at the time, and didn’t have a will. His holdings were large – the Dearborn Avenue house was $10,000 alone, and besides that there was a “half interest in the Sweitzer Bank” and the entire Dunphy Block located on Main Street. All told, Dunphy’s worth was $150,000. Both the Helena Daily Herald and the Helena Independent speculated on what had killed him, from “heart disease” in the former and “a fit of epilepsy” in the latter. In the end it’s likely he went out just as he’d planned – on top.

Notes

Spalding, Charleen. Benton Avenue Cemetery. Pioneer Tales Publishing: Helena, 2010. p 63-4, 121-2,

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A History of UFOs in Montana

1/22/2015

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Note: This is an excerpt from my book Paranormal Montana.

Update: Check here for 2016 and 2015 UFO sightings in Montana.

Montana has had an overwhelming number of UFO sightings, and still does.

Not only are these sightings reported by credible witnesses, but they’re also reported by the U.S. government. Yes, it would seem, Montana is indeed on the cosmic map.

But when did we get there? We know that the “first” recorded sighting of a UFO in America was on January 25, 1878. It was seen in Denison, Texas, by John Martin, who described it as saucer-size.

The term flying saucer wouldn’t take hold until pilot Kenneth Arnold made it popular after his June 1947 UFO sighting over Mount Rainier in Washington, however.

That wasn’t the first recorded sighting of a UFO, of course. The Japanese may have made the ‘saucer’ connection first, when they labeled a flying object an “earthenware vessel” on October 27, 1180, one they’d seen from a mountain in the Kii province.

Asia has always been a hotspot for UFO sightings, with the cave paintings in China’s Hunan Province showing cylindrical crafts, possibly with occupants getting out. The paintings are 47,000 years old.

In Montana we have a very long history of UFO sightings. One of the earliest occurred in September 1865, at “about 75-100 miles above the Great Falls of the Upper Missouri River,” in an area called Cadotte Pass.

Painting of Cadotte Pass, 1860

Fur trapper James Lumley spotted a “bright, luminous, body” in the darkening sky shortly after sunset. Suddenly the object moved to the east very quickly and then for no apparent reason, exploded, shaking the ground all around.

The sound was immense, like thunder, and afterward there was a “rushing sound,” something like a tornado moving through a forest. The wind kicked up suddenly before dying back down. The smell of sulfur filled the air.

Lumley must have been startled, to say the least. His courage can’t be doubted, however, for the next day he left his camp and went to where the object had crashed.

It was easy to get there – the trees had been chopped off halfway up, others had been uprooted, and even the earth had been shaved off in places, like tops coming off hills.

After following the desolation for two miles, Lumley found an immense rock or stone that’d been driven right into the side of a mountain. Examining it, Lumley found that it was divided into compartments and had writings or etchings on it, much like hieroglyphics.

That wasn’t all, however. Around the object were broken shards or fragments, which resembled glass more than anything. There were also dark stains on the ground, like some liquid had seeped into the earth.

Artist rendition of crashed UFO in Montana in 1864/1865

It wasn’t until October 19 that Lumley’s story was reported in the St. Louis Missouri Democrat, something the paper noted would “shake the foundations of the scientific world” if it were true.

The paper speculated, much like Lumley had, that this was a meteor that may well have been harnessed for use by some kind of alien beings. Furthermore, it devised a scenario where humans would be enslaved by these beings.

Trains were the fastest ways to travel at that point in time, and the idea of flying was still a fantasy. Most people had never moved faster than a horse could run.

There was no talk of UFOs or flying saucers or even a machine-like craft. People back then didn’t have much experience with machines. Is it a surprise that this object was therefore described as a rock? Perhaps not.

But could it still be there? We know that Ryan Dam is on the Great Falls of the Missouri now. Cadotte Pass would put the crash site right around Canyon Ferry Reservoir.

Or perhaps under it. The Canyon Ferry Dam was completed in 1954, which flooded the area. Still, it’s possible, and here are some likely spots:

Cadotte Pass, Montana

2 miles from Cadotte Pass

2.7 miles from Cadotte Pass (#2 circle from image above)

It’s also important to point out that before 2004 there was a blotted-out image showing up on Google Maps. Remember, Google Maps started in October 2004. Here’s a before and after:

Montana became a quiet place after that, at least as far as UFO sightings were concerned. Sure, there may have been a few here and there, and local papers may have even reported them, but there were certainly no more high-profile incidents like the Lumley case.

That all changed beginning in the 1950s.

In 1952 the United States Air Force stared Project Blue Book, though there were earlier incarnations called Sign and Grudge, in 1947 and 1949 respectively. The Cold War had begun, and America needed to know if UFOs were a threat first, and what they were second.

By clicking on the following links you’ll be directed to PDF files from Project Bluebook (Note: these links were removed. Look at comments to find the story behind that).

These were put together on a site called The Black Vault, and I’ve gathered together all the sightings for Montana. Most are 5 to 15 pages in length and have the original eyewitness accounts, often in handwriting. There are also drawings and sometimes even photos.

Montana UFO Sightings in the 1940s

May 1948 UFO Sighting in Plovna, Montana

April 1949 UFO Sighting in Dillon, Montana

August 1949 UFO Sighting near Hebgen Lake, Montana (49 pages)

February 1949 UFO Sighting in Dillon, Montana

Montana UFO Sightings in the 1950s

July 1950 UFO Sighting near Fort Peck, Montana

August 1950 UFO Sighting in Great Falls, Montana (10 Photos) This is also called the Mariana UFO Incident, and you can read more on Wikipedia about it.

May 1951 UFO Sighting in South Falls, Montana

August 1952 UFO Sighting in De Borgia, Montana

August 1952 UFO Sighting in Cutbank, Montana

January 1953 UFO Sighting in Craig, Montana

February 1953 UFO Sighting in Laurel, Montana

February 1953 UFO Sighting in Great Falls, Montana

February 1953 UFO Sighting in Dodson, Montana

February 1953 UFO Sighting in Great Falls, Montana

March 1953 UFO Sighting in Conrad, Montana

July 1953 UFO Sighting in Opportunity, Montana

January 1955 UFO Sighting in Kalispell, Montana

April 1955 UFO Sighting near Flathead Lake, Montana

July 1955 UFO Sighting in Glendive, Montana

May 1956 UFO Sighting in Alberton, Montana (objects fell like parachutes)

September 1956 UFO Sighting in Kalispell, Montana (25 pages, object appeared for 7 hours)

December 1956 UFO Sighting in Missoula, Montana: This document is 25 pages and details an object found near Harlowton or Shawmut, though the owner couldn’t remember where exactly.

It was “a dull black-gray colored volcanic type rock,” similar in type to the kind ranchers and herders found. These were “metal components of airborne meterological [sic] equipment.”

Typically these would be given to the Martinsdale Post Office, and then sent off to Malmstrom AFB. The reason was that Malmstrom was the only place in the country to be “sending airborne meteorological equipment aloft.” Still, locals were convinced it was a self-contained power unit of some spaceship.

Remember Lumley’s UFO and how it looked like a rock? Do you believe in coincidences?

May 1957 UFO Sighting in Great Falls, Montana

July 1957 UFO Sighting in Hamilton, Montana

July 1957 UFO Sighting north of Havre, Montana

August 1957 UFO Sighting in Livingston, Montana

August 1957 UFO Sighting in Helena, Montana

September 1957 UFO Sighting in Havre, Montana

December 1957 UFO Sighting in Sunburst, Montana

December 1957 UFO Sighting near Montana/Canadian Border (4 pages, pilot followed by object for a short time)

December 1957 UFO Sighting in Miles City, Montana (4 pages, object moving at 1,000 MPH)

Montana UFO Sightings in the 1960s

Sightings would continue into the 1960s, with 28 more specific incidents being recorded in Montana.

One of the most peculiar Montana UFO incidents occurred on April 30, 1964 near Canyon Ferry Reservoir in Helena. Burns of some sort were discovered in the ground, and looking at the 12 photos, one might surmise that they were prints of some sort.

UFO landing site near Canyon Ferry Lake on April 30, 1964

What happened was that several children of Harold Rust, as well as a woman named Linda Davis, saw an “egg-shaped object” the “size of an automobile land” about 150 feet away from them, leaving four indentations in the ground that were “4-8 inches deep, about 13 ft apart.”

It was even reported in the Victoria Advocate the next day, and the Montana Standard picked up the story closer to home:

What is it about this area…nukes? There’s no mention of the nuclear warheads begin turned off by a UFO at Malmstrom Air Force Base around that time.

Project Blue Book is also silent on the well-documented UFO incident that occurred on March 16, 1967, in Great Falls.

The last recorded UFO sighting in Montana was in Columbia Falls in September 1967. After that Project Blue Book was finished. The program was ordered terminated in December 1969 and by January 1970, all activity had stopped.

Or did it?

You could go into any bar in Montana right now and hear at least one UFO story, one that happened somewhere out there in the vastness of this state, and in our lifetimes.

But would you want to?

Would you want to see one of these UFOs? Many still are, like these form the National UFO Reporting Center:

A UFO watching New Year’s Eve fireworks over Kalispell on December 31, 2014;

Two red orbs over Bozeman on October 25, 2014;

Red, white and blue lights over Plains, Montana, for 20 minutes on October 19, 2014;

Huge object moving very fast outside Billings on October 4, 2014;

And hundreds more UFO sightings in Montana just like them in the past 10 years.

UFOs have always been coming to Montana, that much is clear. Too many people have seen them, and these witnesses are credible people in the community.

Oftentimes they’re benign sightings, with no harm done. Other times the results are more chilling, like with the incidents near Deer Lodge’s Red Gate.

The most sightings by far occur around Great Falls, however, and even as late as September 21, 2012, there were detailed UFO sightings around Malmstrom, enough to worry officials.

Still, sightings occurred long before those nuclear missiles were installed. What is it about the Treasure State that draws them here? And when will we know?

Notes:

“A Primer: UFO’s Throughout History.” UFO Evidence. Web. Retrieved 22 January 2015. http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc154.htm

Booth, B.J. “Before the Wright Brothers...There Were UFOs.” American Chronicle. Web. December 2006. Retrieved 22 January 2015. http://web.archive.org/web/20120819213938/http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/17732

Foster, Lance M. “Canyon Ferry UFOs.” Paranormal Montana. Web. 29 April 2010. Retrieved 22 January 2015. http://paranormalmontana.blogspot.com/2010/04/canyon-ferry-ufos.html

“Is Lumley’s UFO still out there?” Paranormala. Web. 22 September 2008. Retrieved 22 January 2015. http://www.paranormala.com/lumleys-ufo/

“Is Lumley’s UFO still out there? (1865)” Above Top Secret. Web. 6 December 2008. Retrieved 22 January 2015. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread417392/pg1

Warren, Frank. “Historic UFOs Amazing Story Of Alien Spacecraft Crashing In MO – 1865.” Web. 1 January 2011. Retrieved 22 January 2015. http://www.rense.com/general16/histufocrashing.htm

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Two Montana Territorial Representatives

4/28/2014

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Note: This is an excerpt from my book Braves and Businessmen: A History of Montana, Volume 3

Montana Territory in 1879

From 1864 until 1889 Montana was a territory and had one at-large congressional district. There were just six men that served in that post, and most did little more than two years. Those were men like William H. Clagett, who served from 1871 to 1873. Others served a bit longer, such as four years, or even longer than that. Martin Maginnis, for example, served from 1873 to 1885.

The majority of Montanans today have no idea who those two men are, nor do they care. It’s unfortunate, and it’s probably one of the reasons we have so many out-of-state interests pulling our purse strings and choosing which candidates we’ll vote for.

Things weren’t a whole lot different in the 1870s and 1880s, back when the territorial legislature was still putting officials in office. But that system also led to breakdowns, such as when Montana had no senator for several years in the 1890s. The 17th Amendment finally did away with the practice altogether, allowing voters to choose who’d represent them.

Before then, however, it was still the days of the good ‘ol boys, and that’s why men like these were chosen to represent common Montanans.

William Horace Clagett (1871-3)

William Horace Clagett was born in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, on September 21, 1838. By 1850 he’d moved to Iowa with his father and eventually started to study law there before attending a law school in Albany, New York.

He passed the bar in 1858 and returned to Iowa to practice, then headed west to Nevada in 1861. He became a member of the Nevada Territorial House of Representatives in 1862 and then the Nevada Assembly in 1864.

By the mid-1860s he headed up to Montana Territory and once again practiced law. He was popular enough that the people chose him to represent them in Washington, and he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1870 as a Republican.

It was while serving in the House that Clagett probably did the most for Montana. On December 18, 1871, he introduced the Act of Dedication bill, which led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park.

The park wasn’t very popular in Montana at the time, however, and Clagett lost his reelection bid to Martin Maginnis in 1872. He headed back to Montana but suffered some serious wanderlust and practiced law in most of the western states. In 1889 he was president of the Idaho Constitutional Convention and tried to get elected to the U.S. Senate from Idaho in both 1891 and 1895, but failed each time.

He finally settled down in Spokane, Washington, and worked at the law until his death on August 3, 1901. He was 62 years old.

Martin Maginnis (1873-85)

Martin Maginnis was born in Pultneyville, New York, on October 27, 1841. His family moved to Minnesota in 1852 and attended Hamline University there, becoming a forceful voice on the schools Democratic newspaper.

When the Civil War broke out Maginnis joined the Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment and rose all the way to major by war’s end. In 1866 he and his brothers moved to Helena and got started in mining. Maginnis’ newspaper skills got him with the Helena Daily Gazette, and his and Wilbur Fisk Sander’s Helena Herald battled it out for the hearts and minds of the citizenry.

Maginnis proved better at it, and he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1872, a position he’d be reelected to five times, finally stepping down in 1885. He tried again for the seat in 1890, but lost to William Dixon. Instead he was given the Commissioner of Mineral Land of Montana position, which he held until 1893.

He stayed in Montana until 1915 when his health forced him to warmer climes. He moved to Los Angeles, California, where he died on March 27, 1919. He was 77 years old.

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Why Did Montana Oppose the Creation of Yellowstone National Park?

1/21/2014

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Note: This is an excerpt from my book Braves and Businessmen: A History of Montana, Vol. Three

Yellowstone Falls by Thomas Moran, 1872

Yellowstone National Park has a short history. It wasn’t formed until the 1870s, at least on paper.

The geologic history of the park goes back eons, although white men didn’t come to learn of it until the late 18th century and early 19th century.

Nothing much happened after that. Montana was a sleepy backwater until the 1860s when gold was discovered, and while more travelers may have stumbled upon the park both purposefully and otherwise during that time, it largely remained untouched by man.

That’s how most conservationists wanted it, and they lobbied hard for Congress to protect the park, something that was done in 1872. Much of that lobbying, however, didn’t come from Montanans but from people that often weren’t even in the state.

Yellowstone Falls

The citizens living around Yellowstone relied on the park for hunting, fishing, trapping, and resource extraction. Protections would mean the end of their livelihoods.

Even when the park was protected, poaching and other illegal activities remained endemic, and seriously threatened both the park’s existence and reason for being. After all, the creators had envisioned a place where all could come and enjoy wildlife, not hunt it.

Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is how the short-term gain of those living around the park can in no way be measured against the long-term economic and cultural benefit that Yellowstone Park has brought to Montana and its people, as well as citizens from around the world.

Yellowstone National Park and its creation is just another of many examples where Montana’s own citizens have been short-sighted about what’s best for the state long-term.

The Early History of Yellowstone

Map of Yellowstone River

Yellowstone National park is located right at the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. The name probably came about from the Minnetaree name “Mi tsi a-da-zi,” which means Rock Yellow River. The French called it “Roche Jaune” which the English trappers then switched to Yellow Stone.

The first white man to lay claim to discovering the park, or at least getting the word out to the rest of the world, was John Colter. During the winter of 1807-8 Colter wandered into the area that would become the park and the place was known as “Colter’s Hell” for some time to come.

Many other travelers saw it the in the years that followed, especially as more people began coming into the area as the fur trade took hold and declined. One, Jim Bridger, entered the park in 1856 and told about it, but most never listened to what the known-teller of tall tales had to say.

The Raynolds Expedition

William F. Raynolds

A few years later Captain William F. Raynolds, a U.S. Army Surveyor, was commissioned to conduct a two-year survey of the area. His party left St. Louis on May 29, 1859, with the intention of mapping the area around Fort Pierre in the Dakota Territory all the way up to where the Yellowstone River began.

Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, 1860

Accompanying Raynolds on the expedition were Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, a geologist and naturalist, and James D. Hutton, a photographer.

While many may have dismissed Bridger’s tall tales, Raynolds did not, and he hired the mountain man to guide the party. He had the money, the federal government had authorized $60,000 for the expedition, and he also had protection in the form of a small detachment of infantry.

The group made it as far as Wyoming before winter set in, and then in May of 1860 they made to cross the Continental Divide at Two Ocean Pass, where the unusual “Parting of the Waters” is located.

Here the North Two Ocean Creek splits into two different creeks: Pacific Creek which flows west and Atlantic Creek which flows east. Both eventually join other rivers and empty into their respective oceans.

Unfortunately no waters were flowing to either ocean at that time of year as the pass was still snowed-in. The group turned back, upset, but determined to make another go of it in the near future.

Wind River Range, Wyoming

The near future held conflict, however, not exploration, and the onset of the Civil War prevented any further consideration for Raynolds and his expeditions. Illness also plagued the captain, and it wasn’t until 1867 that he was even able to present his report.

The group did manage to explore the Wind River Range extensively, as well as other areas of the Rocky Mountains and what would become Wyoming.

One tall peak was named by Raynolds – Union Peak – and they also came down into Jackson Hole. All of this only emboldened other explorers to visit the area.

The Cook-Folsom-Peterson Expedition

Raynolds wasn’t the only one out exploring. The Cook-Folsom-Peterson Expedition set off in 1869 and made it as far as Yellowstone Lake. Led by Charles Cook, David Folsom, and William Petterson, the men explored the area for a time before setting back.

All three men were from a cold camp called Diamond City off Confederate Gulch near Helena. Cook and Folsom in particular were good at keeping diary records of what they saw and did, and it was those accounts which interested the men setting out the following year.

Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition

The following year, in 1870, the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition left for the area and followed the same path set the year before by the previous expedition.

This group included Henry Washburn, Nathaniel P. Langford, and Lieutenant Gustavus C. Doane. Langford had become famous as a vigilante while Doane had taken part in the Marias Massacre earlier that year. The men stayed around the area for a month collecting samples and making recordings in their notebooks and diaries.

Henry Washburn, 1869

Nathaniel Pitt Langford, 1870

Gustavus C. Doane, 1875

Those records would come in quite handy, and go a long way in ensuring Yellowstone would enter the public consciousness. Lieutenant Doane filed his official report with the Department of War in Washington while Langford hit the lecture circuit in the East over the winter and spring, finally writing up his account in an article for Scribners called Wonders of the Yellowstone which appeared in May of 1871.

One person with them, Cornelius Hedges, advocated that the area should become a national park. This was really nothing new, as Thomas Francis Meagher had suggested the same thing back when he was serving as Acting Governor in 1865.

What was different this time is that Hedges wrote a series of newspaper articles in the Helena Herald from 1870-1 that really got public opinion behind the idea locally. Together with Langford’s push back East the issue was gaining steam.

Hayden Geological Survey of 1871

In 1871 Jay Cooke suggested to Congressman William D Kelley that Yellowstone should be made a national park. He wrote as much to Ferdinand V. Hayden in 1871, eleven years after the man had taken part in the first failed expedition to the park.

The Hayden Geological Survey of 1871 was organized, and it was Hayden’s reports and also the photographs and paintings made by others, particularly Thomas Moran, that convinced Congress to not offer the land up for public auction as they had been planning to do, and instead they recalled it.

On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant put his signature to The Acts of Declaration, the law that created Yellowstone National Park.

Montanans Were Not Happy About Yellowstone

Many in the area where the park was to be created were none to happy with the decision.

To them it seemed like federal meddling in their affairs, and on their land. There was widespread speculation that the area would lose its economic value, that it couldn’t be used for its resources. Thankfully such short-term thinking didn’t take hold.

The Helena Gazette declared in 1872 that the creation of Yellowstone was “a great blow to the prosperity of the towns of Bozeman and Virginia City.”

These were legitimate observations as many in the area were worried for their livelihoods. Locals wanted mining, hunting, and logging to take place within the parks boundaries, and they urged their representatives to Washington to introduce legislation to do so, which they did.

For every session of Congress from 1872 until the 1890s there were bills introduced seeking to strip the land of its park designation. Fortunately there were wiser heads in the capitol and these efforts all failed.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

The Lacey Act in 1900

It was the job of the U.S. Army to administer and govern the park, and the poaching problem never really started to get under control until they stepped in. Still, a string of superintendents in the 1870s and 1880s couldn’t solve the problem, although it would have been surprising if they had, what with no salaries or funding.

Finally in 1900 the Lacey Act was passed by Congress which finally gave the poaching laws the teeth they needed in the form of adequate funding and legal support for prosecutions. By the time the National Park Service was created in 1916 Yellowstone was a model for the nation. On October 31, 1918, the U.S Army formally turned over governing duties of the park to the NPS, which as had them ever since.

Any resource exploitation engaged in by the locals would have been short-lived, helping only a generation at most, perhaps some of the children that came after. Yellowstone National Park has created countless jobs and billions of dollars in revenue for the State of Montana.

It goes to show that many times those in Montana don’t always know their own best interests. If short-sighted opinions of a few locals around Yellowstone had been acted upon, opinions put forth only to ensure their own economic gain, countless generations would have lost out.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone by Thomas Moran, 1893 to 1901

Notes

Bartlett, Richard. Yellowstone: A Wilderness Besieged. University of Arizona Press: Tucson, 1985. p. 12-73.

Grusin, Richard. Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2004. p 54-69.

Haines, Aubrey L. Yellowstone Place Names-Mirrors of History. University of Colorado Press: Niwot, 1996. p. 45-55.

Langford, Nathaniel P. The Discovery of Yellowstone Park: Diary of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870. The Haynes Foundation: 1905.

Schullery, Paul and Whittlesey, Lee H. Myth and History in the Creation of Yellowstone National Park. The Yellowstone Association: Gardiner, 2003. p 2-4.

Wilkins, Thurman. Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains. The McCasland Foundation: Duncan, 1996. p 5-23.

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Henry Plummer and the Montana Vigilantes

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The Marias Massacre - A Montana Disgrace

12/19/2013

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Note: This is an excerpt from my book, Braves and Businessmen: A History of Montana, Volume Three

Historical Sign at Site

Sunday, January 23, 1870 dawned a cold day in Montana. It was about to grow a whole lot colder.

Major Eugene Baker, a man known for his fondness for alcohol, was leading his Second US Regiment cavalrymen through the snow and toward a band of Piegan Blackfeet Indians led by Mountain Chief.

He’d been ordered to do so by General Philip Sheridan, the head of the Department of the Missouri, which was the department of the US Army responsible for protecting the Great Plains. The reason? Horses.

Cavalry and Indians, 1899 (artist unknown)

A Horse Deal Gone Bad

The reason Sheridan had done this was because of one man, Malcolm Clarke. Clarke was a white trader that had moved to Montana and who had some of his horses stolen from him in 1867 around Helena, and specifically the Sieben Ranch. The theft had been perpetrated by a Piegan Indian named Owl Child.

Near Helena's Sieben Ranch

At that time the Blackfeet were three separate tribes: the Blackfeet, Blood, and Piegan. The horses were stolen because Clarke owed them as a debt, according to Owl Chief. After all, he argued, it was Clarke that had caused him to lose his own horses in the first place.

Clarke wasn’t buying that for a second so he and his son tracked down Owl Child and beat the living daylights out of him. That might have settled the matter, but the beating occurred in front of other Blackfeet Indians. Owl Child had lost face and now had to regain his honor.

On August 17, 1869, Owl Child and several of his Piegan friends tracked Clarke down, shot him to death, and nearly killed his son. The killing shocked the people of Montana and they demanded that something be done. The Blackfeet were given two weeks to hand over Owl Child’s dead body. When the two weeks were up Sheridan ordered Baker to “strike them hard.” (Welch, 30)

And so Baker found himself in the freezing snow on a cold January morning, a village full of Piegan women and children before him. He most likely took a drink and thought on what to do. His choice would prove to be a fateful one.

Montana and the Blackfeet Indians in the Mid-19th Century

Whites had always ignored the land claims of the Blackfeet Indians, and in the last few years of the 1860s the tribes were really faring bad. The Blackfeet had originally been named as one of the tribes that would claim areas of Montana. That had been established with the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

To further cement that deal, which many Blackfeet felt hadn’t included them enough, Washington Territory governor Isaac Stevens travelled to them in 1855 and made a new treaty with them specifically. This treaty, called Lame Bull’s Treaty, gave both the Blackfeet and the Gros Ventre large swaths of Southwestern Montana.

By 1865, however, white settlers were encroaching on their lands. Homesteaders were flocking to the new territory of Montana for gold, and treaties were drawn up to exclude the Blackfeet from the very lands that had been given to them by Stevens, who by that time was long dead from wounds suffered at the Battle of Chantilly during the Civil War. No one cared about them, and the same thing happened again in 1868.

What’s more, John Bozeman had blazed his trail right through their lands, angering them even more. Coupled with the rising resentment of the Sioux tribes further to the east toward the US Army and white settlers and you had a real powder keg waiting to explode.

And explode it did during Red Cloud’s War, the conflict that swept through much of the area to the south of Montana Territory in those years. The US government came out victorious and many Indian tribes were left wanting. Things were coming to a boil once again.

The Piegan Blackfeet Village of Owl Child

The village that Eugene Baker stared at as he drank his liquor that cold January morning rested on the banks of the Marias River. You’ll find the Marias River near Cut Bank, Montana, right at the confluence of Cut Bank Creek and Two Medicine River. It flows for sixty miles before spilling into Lake Elwell, and then another eighty miles after that before it flows into the Missouri River near Loma, Montana.

Marias and Missouri Rivers

Baker Ninth from Left (leaning on railing), 1870 at Fort Ellis

In 1869 there was no twenty-seven mile long Lake Elwell, however, as the Tiber Dam wouldn’t be constructed for another eighty-seven years, in 1956. And the place where the attack occurred was nearly 100 miles to the west of it, around Willow Rounds, thirty miles from today’s Shelby, Montana.

Baker left Fort Shaw with a total of six companies, which comes out to about 200 men. And the weather they went out in was a frigid -43°F that they bore primarily at night, when they marched.

It’s easy to think the men were making good time, moving as fast as they could so as to be out in the cold for as little time as possible. And perhaps that’s the reason they stopped at the first village they came to, which wasn’t even that of Owl Child, but of Chief Heavy Runner, who had nothing at all to do with it.

So why didn’t Baker know, or why didn’t anyone tell him he was at the wrong place? There are many theories for this. Perhaps the men were cold and tired, and wanted to get back to Fort Shaw as soon as possible, and if that meant attacking the first Indian village they came to regardless if it was the right one, then so be it.

One story has it that Baker was warned, most likely by his half-Mandan guide Joseph Kipp, but he was suspicious and mistrustful of the man, and even threatened to shoot him. And it could very well have been that Baker was drunk and intent upon seeing the job through no matter what. It was common knowledge that Baker was a drinker, but then many in the army at that time drank.

The men arrived very early in the morning, near dawn, and Chief Heavy Runner himself came out to greet the men. Instead of greeting him warmly, however, the soldiers opened fire. Accounts of children running through the snow and being cut down with gun and bayonet dominate. It’s what its name implied it was – a massacre.

The Aftermath of the Massacre

By the time it was all said and done there were Indians lying dead everywhere. The soldiers suffered but one death, and that from a man who fell off his horse. Baker himself counted 173 Indians in his report, as well as more than 100 captured women and 300 captured horses. Indian estimates were higher, around 217 dead, and most the women, children, and the elderly.

And the people of Montana couldn’t have been happier. On February 10, 1870, The Bozeman Pick and Plow newspaper thanked the soldiers for braving the inclement weather and the “deserved though terrible punishment inflicted upon them.” (Schontzler)

Not all voices were singing the Army’s praises, however, and it was actually from within the army that the first calls questioning the whole affair originated.

General Alfred Sully, the Interior Department superintendent for Indian affairs, wondered why there were so few men of fighting age that’d been killed. Lieutenant William Pease, who was then the Blackfeet agent for Indian affairs, told him that just thirty-three men had been killed. He was also quick to point out that ninety women and fifty-five babies were slaughtered that day.

Somehow that information was leaked to the press in Washington and things really went downhill. By March the Chicago Tribune was calling the event a “most disgraceful butchery,” even while Phil Sheridan defended the actions of Baker. He wasn’t alone, either, as The Helena Daily Herald likened Baker’s actions to hunting down wolves.

The support wasn’t enough, however, and Baker was feeling the pressure. He made a new report that quadrupled the number of men killed that day in January, from thirty-three to around 140. And it worked. Washington and the U.S. Army covered the massacre up and it was largely forgotten.

Ulysses S. Grant, 1869

Phil Sheridan, 1864

No one was ever tried for the crimes committed there, although the Army did suffer somewhat. Before the massacre they’d been pressuring President Ulysses S. Grant to grant them oversight of Indian Reservations. Following that day in January that oversight was given to the Interior Department instead of the U.S. Army. What’s more, U.S. Army officers would no longer be allowed to serve as Indian agents, something that would now only fall to clergymen.

Eugene M. Baker was brought up on charges of drunkenness at a later date, and he’d eventually die in 1885 from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 48.

For the Piegan Blackfeet it was a different story. However much they may have wanted to fight, they couldn’t. Already their numbers had been drastically decreased by smallpox.

So what ultimately happened? The papers applauded the version they wanted to accept instead of reporting the facts; the U.S. Army expunged their own records of the event fearing more public backlash; and business went on as usual and like nothing had happened. Overall the Marias Massacre, or Baker Massacre as it’s sometimes called, is a stain on American history and a shame for Montana.

Interested in More on the Blackfeet Indians?

Montana’s Indian Tribes: The Blackfeet
Montana’s Indian Tribes in the 1850s and 1860s

Notes

Ewers, John C. The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains. The University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1958. p 238-50.

Fifer, Barbara. Montana Battlefields, 1806-1877: Native Americans and the U.S. Army at War. Farcountry Press: Helena, 2005. p 31-9.

Schultz, James Willard Keith and Seele, C. Blackfeet and Buffalo: Memories of Life Among the Indians. The University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1981. p 282-306.

Schontzler, Gail. (2012, January 5) Blackfeet remember Montana’s greatest Indian massacre. Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Retrieved: http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/sunday/article_daca1094-4484-11e1-918e-001871e3ce6c.html

Welch, James and Stekler, Paul. Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 1994. p 25-30.

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Henry Plummer and the Montana Vigilantes

8/18/2013

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by Greg Strandberg

This is an excerpt from the book Priests and Prospectors: A History of Montana, Volume II

Henry Plummer

Those prospectors were striking it rich, and that $10 million in gold that came out of the ground in and around Virginia City in 1863 was enough to set most men up for life.

It’s no surprise then that highway men rose up in the area to take that gold off their hands. Robberies to and from the finds around Bannack, Virginia City, and the other upstart mining communities increased markedly in 1863, many of them resulting in murders.

What point was there in breaking your back in the mines if all you worked for could be taken at gunpoint? Something would have to be done to stop this, and if the local law couldn’t do it, then Montana’s citizens would take matters into their own hands, giving rise to the vigilantes.

As robberies continued and increased many in the communities began to suspect the attacks were planned and coordinated. And soon the finger was pointed at Bannack’s very own sheriff, Henry Plummer.

A Promising Young Man

William Henry Plummer was born sometime in 1832 in Addison, Maine. He was the last of six children and his last name had originally been spelled as ‘Plumer,’ something he’d change when he later moved out west.

By 1852, when he was nineteen years old, Plummer decided to head out to California to try his hand at gold mining. His luck proved strong and within just two years he’d managed to buy his own mine, ranch, and bakery in Nevada City, California.

Plummer was quite handsome and also very articulate. Ed Purple traveled the gold camps and described Plummer as being under six feet tall with brown hair and light eyes, which, when he grew angry, became “black and glistened like a rattlesnake’s.”

Purple goes on to describe him as speaking in a “low, quiet tone of voice, a habit which never deserted him, even when labouring under such intense excitement as the Murdering of a human being must produce.” He was also said to be quite the neat person, often being the “best dressed man in town,” according to Purple.

But when he got drunk people knew to keep their distance, especially when he began grinding his teeth, a habit which told those who knew him that he wasn’t in a happy mood. (Purple, 139)

He quickly became popular with the people of Nevada City despite his drunken behavior and by 1856 they’d elected him sheriff. So popular was he, in fact, that there was quite the talk of him running for the state assembly, the lower house of the California legislature, as a democrat, but the divided part couldn’t quite get its act together to support him.

On the Wrong Side of the Law

Plummer became popular with the citizenry of Nevada City, and also its women. This caught up to him when he’d been trying to resolve differences between a couple, John Vedder and his wife Lucy. Plummer even went so far as to rent a room opposite Lucy Vedder in the hotel she was staying in following the couples’ separation.

John Vedder accused Plummer of adultery, and their relationship quickly soured to the point that on September 26, 1857, Plummer shot and killed John Vedder. Plummer was put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years in San Quentin. He served nearly two years before the governor pardoned him, both because of the amount of letters he’d received from Plummer supporters and the fact that Plummer was suffering from tuberculosis.

Free from prison, Plummer became a citizen once more and did well for himself until 1861 when he shot and killed William Riley, an escapee from San Quentin that he’d been trying to carry a citizen’s arrest out on. The killing was ruled justified by the police, but with his earlier prison record, they advised him to leave California.

Moving On to Montana

Paris Pfouts, Vigilante President

Gold had recently been discovered in Washington Territory so Plummer headed there, and soon found himself in another gunfight that resulted in a killing. It seemed that nothing was going right for him and he decided to head back to Maine.

He and a horse-dealer friend from California, Jack Cleveland, made it to Fort Benton, in what was still then part of Idaho Territory. While waiting for a steamboat to take them down the Missouri River they were approached by James Vail. Vail explained that he was trying to get a mission started up in Sun Valley and wanted some protection from local Indians. Seeing as how no ships were coming through, both men accepted the offer.

And it didn’t take long for both men to quickly fell in love with Vail’s sister-in-law, Electra Bryan, with Plummer eventually asking for her hand in marriage. She agreed, whereupon they, together with Cleveland, decided to move to where gold had just been discovered the previous summer, Bannack.

Henry Plummer in Bannack

Bannack in 1880

The trio moved to Bannack in 1863 but things quickly went south. In January Cleveland got into an argument with some men in a saloon about a supposed debt. Plummer assured him the debt had been paid and told him to cut it out. One of the men went to his horse and Cleveland boasted of how he’d draw his guns when he came back.

With that comment Plummer had had enough: he fired on Cleveland and hit him below the belt. When Cleveland fell to his knees and begged Plummer not to shoot him, Plummer told him to get, and when he did, proceeded to shoot him in the heart, the eye, and even grazed another man watching.

Nothing was ever done about the shooting, and most people had the attitude of ‘why should there have been?’ Scenes like that were a near-daily occurrence in and around Bannack, and most thought that Cleveland was to blame. After all, he’d been ready to go for his guns and shoot down some men that had supposedly already paid him.

The citizens of Bannack didn’t seem concerned with it, an even elected Plummer sheriff a few months later in May by a fifty-vote margin. Granville Stuart was one that met Plummer before he’d been sheriff, when he was first coming to Montana and stayed in Gold Creek for a time.

Plummer left a good impression on Stuart, who was also interested in the politics of the democrats like Plummer was. When he met him the following year in Bannack, however, he had a different impression. By that time Plummer was sheriff and Stuart noted that everyone in Bannack was “afraid of him” since Plummer could “get about half amuck and go and scare it straight out of them,” in reference to Plummer’s ability to collect debts.

As historian Clyde A. Milner puts it in As Big as the West: The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart, the people of Bannack knew what they were doing in electing Plummer as sheriff, and it was exactly those qualities that scared them that they also hoped would protect them.

“They wanted someone whose experience and demeanor would enable him to control the criminal element,” Milner writes. “As the months passed, many came to believe that Plummer coordinated that element.” (p 89)

And it’s there that the story of Henry Plummer gets a bit muddled. There are two trains of thought regarding it, both plausible. In one, Plummer was an innocent sheriff of Bannack who got caught up in a wave of unlawful vigilantism and was hanged without trial. In another Plummer was hanged for being the leader of the Innocents Gang, a group that preyed on gold shipments around the territory and was responsible for more than 100 deaths.

The Innocents Gang

Virginia City in 1866

Henry Plummer wasn’t doing the best job as sheriff. Over the course of 1863 robberies along the gold camp roads increased substantially. As time went on many began to believe this was a coordinated group, led by a very smart man.

The group had many hideaways, but was headquartered twelve miles outside of Virginia City at the Rattlesnake Ranch and was called the Innocents Gang. The group of possibly more than 100 members preyed on miners and were so named because they’d answer to a secret password, “I am innocent.” Most knew one another by the special knot they wore in their tie and the special cut of their beards.

Plummer was known to frequent the ranch, and everyone knew him to be a good shot with his pistol. Another favorite haunt was the Cottonwood Ranch, owned by a man named Dempsey who had no connection with the road agents, but did know enough not to bother them.

The group would split themselves up into smaller units of men so they could hit different mining camps simultaneously, even having men watching out at mining offices so that they’d know exactly when gold was to be shipped out. They got most of their plunder between the seventy miles from Virginia City to Bannack.

Plummer became implicated with the gang when two residents claimed that he’d been present during their robbery. Still another claimed to have been offered some of his money returned when he complained to Plummer about how dangerous the roads were. Those cases may or may not have been true, but what was glaringly obvious was how bad the attacks were becoming, and how little was being done to stop them.

The Vigilance Committee Forms

Wilbur Fiske Sanders, Vigilante Lawyer

The citizens were getting fed up with the road agents stealing from them and formed a vigilante committee to hunt the men down. The people of Bannack began to have those feelings, but it was one episode in particular which caused the feeling to form into action.

In December 1863, a young Dutch immigrant named Nicholas Tiebolt, or perhaps Thiebalt, disappeared. He’d had a bag of gold on him, and many suspected that he’d simply taken off with it. When his employer, William Clark, heard of it he suspected the man had been killed, however.

His suspicious proved true two weeks later when Tiebolt’s body was discovered. It was revealed that he’d been shot in the temple, although didn’t die. He’d then had his hands and neck tied with rope before being dragged through the frozen grass to die of exposure.

Tiebold’s body was discovered on December 17, and it was just four days later, on December 21, that the Vigilance Committee took revenge, rounding up George Ives, a man that had been along with James Stuart on his Yellowstone Expedition to find gold earlier that year. The Vigilance Committee suspected Ives for the sole reason that he’d acted suspiciously at the mule ranch he’d been working at.

A quick trial was held outside on the Main Street of Nevada City, one of the mining camps running along Alder Gulch. Lawyers were there to present a defense, Wilbur Fiske Sanders was chosen as the prosecuting attorney by the vigilantes, and a jury of twenty-four was chosen to decide Ives’ fate.

Twenty-three of them delivered guilty verdicts, but the last felt that not enough evidence had been presented and a hung-jury looked inevitable. The crowd, which numbered between 1,000 and 1,500 at that point, would have none of it however. Ives was strung up from an unfinished dry goods store and hanged. Two other men that’d been arrested with him, George Hilderman and John Franck, were released.

Following the incident the Vigilance Committee drew up formal papers. Twenty-four men joined right then and there, including the man who found Tiebold’s body as well as his employer. They even chose a president, Paris Pfouts. And the vigilantes quickly chose their next targets.

When Ives had been given a chance to speak before being hanged he’d said that the true killer of Tiebold had been a man named Alex Carter. A group of vigilantes rode out looking for Carter, and when they were given wrong information from a man named Red, who was actually Erastus Yeagher, they arrested him and his friend G.W. Brown and hanged them both. It would be Yeagher that would give the vigilantes most of their information after he broke down and named names.

Emboldened by their killings, the vigilantes set their sites on Sheriff Plummer. A group of four delegates from the main Vigilance Committee were sent to Bannack to discuss matters with twenty-four of the town elders. The delegates arrived on January 9 and talked late into the evening. By dusk they’d reached a decision and rounded up Plummer and his two deputies, Ned Ray and Buck Stinson.

Thomas J. Dimsdale (date unknown)

The men were hanged the next day, January 10, 1864, although reports conflict as to whether Plummer admitted his crimes or maintained his innocence. Newspaperman Thomas Dimsdale, newly-hired editor of Montana’s first newspaper The Montana Post, wrote a book on it in 1866 called The Vigilantes of Montana and maintained the men were guilty.

But then he’d been hired by the vigilantes to write a favorable account of them, which they needed considering they were under congressional review at the time. Recent accounts, most notably by Frederick Allen in his 2004 book A Decent, Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes, cast doubt upon those assertions and put forth credible arguments that Plummer was innocent.

Whatever the case, the vigilantes had deemed Plummer guilty and hanged him dead. He’d been their sheriff, a position which carries a great deal of trust. If he was guilty, then he betrayed that trust to its fullest. If he was innocent, then the people betrayed his. Henry Plummer, the man that had come west from Maine with high hopes was swinging dead from a makeshift gallows on a freezing January morning in what would soon be Montana. He was just 31 years old.

The Terror Ends

Gallows upon which Henry Plummer was hanged

The vigilantes tracked down any men that escaped them during those first weeks of January, 1864. On January 27 a group of twenty-one vigilantes stormed into Hell Gate just outside of Missoula and rounded up a group of outlaws that included Cyrus Skinner, a member of the Innocents Gang.

Skinner had been fond of sitting atop the safe in the store built by Higgins and Worden, which contained $65,000 in gold dust. Many suspected him of being a gang member, and he and four other were arrested by the vigilantes. A quick trial was held in the store and all four were found guilty and quickly hanged.

The vigilante justice would continue until February when it died out. The roads were once again secure, which led many to believe that Plummer had been the culprit all along.

The road agents that’d been terrorizing the mining shipments suddenly disappeared. Whether Plummer was their leader is uncertain. But there were somewhere between fifteen and thirty-five other men hanged. Either the gold robbers were among them or they high-tailed it on our of the area as fast as they could.

No one can be certain how many vigilantes there really were, either. Estimates range from the dozens to the more than two thousand. As historian Michael P. Malone states in Montana: A History of Two Centuries, this suggested that “the movement was broadly popular and not the work of a small clique.” (p 8)

They did set a fair amount of order in place in the mining camps where before there’d been relatively none. Instances of vigilante justice would spring up again after Montana became a territory later that year and further into the future. Nothing, however, would compare to the killing spree that took place from December 1863 to February 1864, and which claimed their most famous victim, Sheriff Henry Plummer.

Notes

Allen, Frederick. A Decent, Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes. University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 2004. p 23-43.

Callaway, Lew L. Montana’s Righteous Hangmen: The Vigilantes in Action. University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1997. p 60-3.

Dimsdale, Thomas J. The Vigilantes of Montana. University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1953. p 24-30.

Malone, Michael Peter; Roeder, Richard B.; Lang, William L. Montana: A History of Two Centuries. The University of Washington Press, 1976. p 78-82.

Mather, R.E. & Boswell, D.E. Hanging the Sherriff: A Biography of Henry Plummer. University of Utah Press: Salt Lake, 1987. p 102-194.

Milner II, Clyde A. & O’Connor, Carol A. As Big as the West: The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart. Oxford University Press: New York, 2009. p 89-92.

Purple, Edwin Ruthven. Perilous Passage: A Narrative of the Montana Gold Rush, 1862-1863. Owens, Kenneth N. (ed.). Montana Historical Society Press: Helena, 1995. p 139.

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Montana’s Indian Tribes in the 1850s and 1860s

8/9/2013

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This is an excerpt from the book Priests and Prospectors: A History of Montana, Volume II

Indian reservations created by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851

The Indian tribes of Montana were left largely untouched until the 1850s.

In 1851 government officials decided that it was time to negotiate treaties with the Indian tribes as the West opened up.

They called tribal representatives from all of the territories of the West to Fort Laramie in Wyoming.

What resulted was the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and the beginning of the reservation system for Montana’s Indians.

Tribes ceded sections of their lands to the government for the building of both roads and forts. Each tribe was allotted a certain portion of land that was defined as its domain, and all tribes were expected to respect the land rights of their neighboring tribes. The Indians received assurances that they wouldn’t be bothered, and they also received many gifts of food and gifts, or what really amounted to trinkets.

Montana’s Indian Lands

Photo taken of Fort Laramie in 1858

The Fort Laramie Treaty made it clear which tribes had authority over which areas of what would become Montana. The north-central portion east of the Continental Divide went to the Blackfeet and Gros Ventre tribes; the upper and milled Yellowstone valley went to the Crow; and the northeastern part of the territory went to the Assiniboine. The Blackfeet had no representation at all during the meeting at Fort Laramie.

Two tribes that called Montana home were left out of the proceedings entirely.

The Flathead, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreille were given their own treaty four years later when Washington Territory’s Governor Isaac Stevens made a deal with the Indians that created the 1.2 million acre Jocko Indian Reservation just south of Flathead Lake.

The tribes agreed to their new home and the government also promised to pay for $120,000 in improvements to the reservation over the next twenty years.

Stevens further cemented ties with the Blackfeet, the tribe that had been left out of the Fort Laramie negotiations entirely. He went to them in October 1855, shortly after the Walla Walla Council in Washington, and convinced them to accept reservation lands from the Continental Divide east to the Milk River and from Canada to the Musselshell River.

In return the Indians agreed to keep southwestern Montana as a general hunting ground for all tribes and would even let whites use their lands to a limited extent. One of the most feared tribes in Montana’s history was suddenly made peaceful.

The Gold Rush and Montana Indians

Montana forts created after Montana gold rush

It was the Blackfeet that were hurt the most when the miners began arriving in droves following the gold rushes of 1862-3. The reservations lands they’d agreed to in 1855 were the prime prospecting spots, and the whites rushing in had little regard for any kind of territorial right the Indians might have enjoyed.

So of course the Blackfeet began to retaliate, often stealing horses but occasionally killing as well.

This caused fears in the people coming into the area, and later territory. By the time the Civil War wrapped up in 1865 the federal government was free to focus its efforts more fully upon the West.

Forts began to be constructed with increasing regularity in the areas where settlers and Indians were coming into conflict the most.

Fort C.F. Smith was established in 1866 along the Big Horn River. Another fort, Camp Cook, was established the same year but didn’t last too long, and by 1869 the garrison relocated to Fort Benton.

The US army came true on its 1854 promise and established forts on the Blackfeet’s reservation lands. Fort Shaw came first in 1867 and was located along the Mullan Road at Sun River Crossing.

It primarily protected those journeying on the Mullan Road and the mining settlements from any Blackfeet threats. Fort Shaw was built later that year, following the death of John Bozeman and Indian scare that had developed around the growing city of Bozeman. The fort primarily protected against Sioux Indian threats coming from the Yellowstone valley to the east.

Montana Indian Reservations

The Death of John Bozeman, by Edgar Samuel Paxson, 1898

It was obvious to many that the Indian lands couldn’t remain as they were. Too many white settlers were coming into the territory, and with dreams of statehood not far off, the flood would only continue.

The Department of the Interior recognized this in 1868 and began dividing the tribes up into various smaller entities. The Assiniboine, Blackfeet, and Gros Ventre tribes all received different subagencies, which were separate areas of land, a policy that would continue well into the next decades.

Each area of land would become smaller and smaller and those original treaties signed at Fort Laramie in 1851 and again with Governor Stevens in 1855 would prove meaningless.

In 1868 the government also signed new treaties with the Crow Indians. The crows had originally been granted lands by the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the mining stampede pretty much made those impossible to adhere to. The Bozeman Trail also wound its way through their lands, and clashes became frequent.

The government acted, and called forth the tribe to Fort Laramie again. A treaty was even drafted, but most of the Crow Indians refused to sign it. The government pushed it through anyway, and the Crows were given a reservation that took up a good portion of the southeastern part of the territory.

Unfortunately, new gold discoveries were made on these new Crow lands that same year, ensuring that the whole process would only have to repeat itself once again.

Notes

Brown, Dee. The Fetterman Massacre. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1962. p.157-60.

Hebard, Grace Raymond and Brininstool, E.A. The Bozeman Trail: Historical Accounts of the Blazing of the Overland Routes into the Northwest, and the Fights with Red Cloud’s Warriors, Vol II. The Arthur H. Clark Company: Cleveland, 1922. p 103-11.

Malone, Michael Peter; Roeder, Richard B.; Lang, William L. Montana: A History of Two Centuries. The University of Washington Press, 1976. p 116-27.

McDermott, John D. A Guide to Indians Wars of the West. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1998. p 156.

Olson, James C. Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem.University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1963. p 60-63.

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Prospectors and the Montana Gold Rush

7/23/2013

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This is an excerpt from the book Priests and Prospectors: A History of Montana, Volume II

Ever since gold had been discovered in California in 1848 Americans had been moving west in droves. When that state filled up they simply moved to other territories over the next two decades, eventually reaching into Montana. Still, the state was largely overlooked as unpromising and not worth the effort.

Gold Creek

James Stuart in 1868

Not overlooked by all, however. It’s now widely accepted that gold was first discovered in Montana in 1852. Francois Finlay, known as Benetsee, had come up from California and made his discovery west of the Continental Divide in a small creek that would become known as Gold Creek.

Some stopped, and Gold Creek managed to build up a steady population and town called American Fork by the late 1850s. Granville Stuart, his brother James Stuart, and Reece Anderson all found gold there in 1858. Still, the area never really took off.

It wasn’t until the early 1860s that more prospectors put their pans to work. By that time the Mullan Road had opened allowing more of the miners from the overworked claims of California, Nevada, and Colorado to come into the territory easily.

Steamboats were also plying the waters up to Fort Benton, allowing more people to come from the east.

On July 28, 1862, one of those miners from moving up from Colorado, John White, found gold on a grasshopper-infested creek. The name stuck and Grasshopper Creek, originally called Willard’s Creek by Lewis and Clark, experienced a classic gold rush.

By that fall there were more than 300 people living twelve miles upstream in a settlement they named Bannack after the Bannack Indians of the area. Winter cut off the steady flow of prospectors but by the following summer Bannack had 1,000 people or more.

Alder Gulch

Bannack in 1881

If it weren’t for the Crow Indians gold may never have been discovered in Alder Gulch. In early 1863, Granville Stuart put up notices around Bannack calling for a large group of men to join him in an attempt to find gold on the Yellowstone River.

He’d have to defy government orders to prospect the area; it lay on Crow Indian lands which were forbidden to whites. Stuart didn’t care much about what the government said, but he did care about the Crows, or at least the risk they posed. A large group might be just the thing to dissuade attacks.

Stuart arrived in Bannack on April 7, 1863, and began moving his party out. He had fifteen men with him with the expectation that six more would join. Where they were, however, was a mystery to him and by April 12 the men weren’t to be found at the predetermined meeting point, the Stinking Water River, today’s Ruby River. He was forced to move on without them.

The six men, Thomas Cover, Henry Edgar, William Fairweather, Barney Hughes, Henry Rodgers, and Bill Sweeney, were on their way back from Deer Lodge with fresh horses for the trip.

They got held up and missed Stuart, but were determined to catch up with him. They nearly did just that until they ran into a group of Crows on May 1. The men were taken captive and led to the Indian village.

Escaping the Indians

Attack by Crow Indians, Arthur Jacob Miller, c 1858-60

It became obvious to the six that the Indians were none too happy with the encroachment upon their land. Sweeney, however, had been among Indians before and had an idea.

While sitting in the Crow’s medicine lodge he picked up two rattlesnakes and put them down his shirt. The Indians became agitated and Simmons pulled them out. The stunt bought the men some time.

Later that night the men were taken to a pow-wow. The Indians would take turns giving short speeches haranguing the men and leading them around a bush.

After however many times of that Edgar got angry and told his companions he’d rip that bush right out of the ground the next time he was paraded around it.

He did just that when his turn came, and even hit it over the head of the Indian that was leading him. What would almost certainly have gotten a man killed didn’t this time; the Indians were more worried about releasing the evil spirit of the crazy man than any humiliation they might have felt.

The men were given back their equipment and told to go back where they’d come from. The men took off and made camp that night. They weren’t far enough, however, for a young Indian woman came to them warning of an attack coming the next morning.

The men took off at once and eventually continued after Stuart. They ran into some Indians in today’s Bozeman and had to fend them off, however. After that they decided it would be best to get off the main trails. They left the Gallatin valley and headed up the Madison River.

By May 26, 1863, they made camp on the East Slope of the Tobacco Root Mountains, choosing a spot for the night in a gulch near Wigwam Creek.

Panning for Gold

Panning the River

The group settled down for the night and Sweeney headed over the creek to find a spot for the horses. According to Edgar’s diary, when Sweeney came back he informed the men that there was a “piece of rimrock sticking out of the bar” that looked favorable.

The men gathered their shovel and pick and headed on over. They dug a hole, filled up a pan with dirt, and Sweeney instructed the others to “wash that pan and see if you can get enough to buy some tobacco when we get to town.”

They found more than enough. Their first pan produced $2.40, the next $4.80, and the third $12.30. All told the men found $19.50 in gold that night, enough in fact that Sweeney thought they had ‘salted’ the pan, or put in their own gold to fool him.

The next day the men set to work with purpose. Cover and Hughes found $18 while Rogers and Sweeney found $4.50. It was Edgar and Fairweather who really lucked out though, finding $150 from the same place they’d panned the night before.

The men knew they had hit something big and by the morning of May 28 the ground was staked 100 feet along the creek. To make the claim permanent the secured water rights by digging a ditch and naming the site. Alder Gulch was chosen, since alder bushes dotted the area.

It was agreed by all that they’d keep the find a secret. The men knew full-well what news of gold could do, having seen first-hand how crowded Bannack had become. The men returned to Bannack to acquire more supplies, but somehow word of their find spread. As they were leaving town miners began following after them, sure that these men with gold-digging supplies had found something.

Seeing that they weren’t going to shake the miners, the six men stopped halfway between Bannack and Alder Gulch at the Point of Rocks. Terms were laid out and it was agreed that the six initial discoverers would be allowed two claims and the first choice of digging spots.

The Montana Gold Rush

Virginia City in 1866

The men had another week of relative quiet before the influx began. Beginning on June 6, 1863, miners from the area and much further afield began to arrive.

By June 9 another meeting took place and rules for governing the new district were established, which was named Fairweather. Within three months the population of Alder Gulch soared to 10,000 along the gulch and what became known as the ‘Fourteen Mile City.’

The miners of the area needed to settle on a name for new city, and they settled on Varina, the name of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ wife. A federal judge in Idaho Territory didn’t like that and refused their request by judicial fiat, naming the site Virginia City instead.

The towns of Adobe Town, Bear Town, Central City, Highland, Hungry Hollow, Junction City, Nevada City, Pine Grove French Town, Summit, and Virginia City all got pulled into one large mining camp area. And that mining area was anything but planned, laid out, or permanent.

The prospectors set up wikiups, a more primitive version of the teepee. Others created dugouts from overhanging rocks. There were no permanent structures at first, certainly not enough to house the men, so they did the best they could. As things continued to grow the first permanent building was constructed, the Mechanical Bakery.

Other structures soon followed, as did more prospectors. The gold placer deposits discovered by the six men that day in May, 1863, were just the tip of the iceberg. That first year saw $10 million worth of gold placer deposits taken from the gulch, and within just three years the total had reached $30 million.

Notes

Howard, Joseph Kinsey. Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1943. p 38-9.

Pace, Dick. Golden Gulch: The Story of Montana’s Fabulous Alder Gulch. No Publisher: 1962. p 3-13.

Hamilton, James McClellan. History of Montana: From Wilderness to Statehood. Binford & Mort: Hillsboro, 1957. p 230-4.

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The Early History of Yellowstone

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Hayden Geological Survey of 1871

Montanans Were Not Happy About Yellowstone

The Lacey Act in 1900

A Horse Deal Gone Bad

Montana and the Blackfeet Indians in the Mid-19th Century

The Piegan Blackfeet Village of Owl Child

The Aftermath of the Massacre

A Promising Young Man

On the Wrong Side of the Law

Moving On to Montana

Henry Plummer in Bannack

The Innocents Gang

The Vigilance Committee Forms

The Terror Ends

Montana’s Indian Lands

The Gold Rush and Montana Indians

Montana Indian Reservations

Gold Creek

Alder Gulch

Escaping the Indians

Panning for Gold

The Montana Gold Rush

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