The railroads are here (1880)
Posted By admin on March 9, 2010
Just a note: Today marks the 130th anniversary of the entrance of the first railroad into Montana (Territory).
On March 9, 1880, the Utah and Northern laid tracks over Monida Pass.
In their book “The Battle for Butte,” Michael Malone and William Lang wrote of the occasion:
“Butte folks sipped champagne and listened joyously to a telegrapher describing their (the tracks’) arrival. The camp had further cause to cheer because it became increasingly likely that the Utah and Northern would choose Butte rather than Helena, the established hub of Montana commerce, as its terminus.
“As the (Butte) Miner put it: ‘The trouble is that Helena thinks she is New York or Boston, whereas she is an unimportant village separated from the natural terminus of the road, which is Butte, by a distance of seventy miles and a range of mountains.’ The Miner generously allowed that, at some future date, a branch line might extend on to Helena and even to ‘San Francisco and other insignificant villages on the Pacific coast.’ ”
We can imagine what hit the fan in 1883, when the Northern Pacific chose a route through Helena rather than Butte for its transcontinental railroad.
I found this blog post about the Utah and Northern written by the Leglise family (I can’t tell where they’re from, but Cindy Leglise’s great-grandfather, Orange James Salisbury, owned and ran a stagecoach line between Monida, Montana and Yellowstone Park, starting in 1881):
“The narrow gauge into the Montana mining region proved successful beyond anyone’s expectations, but freight and passengers had to be transshipped to standard gauge at Pocatello, Idaho. Plans were made to convert the Utah & Northern line to standard gauge, and a third rail was laid on the entire length of the line. Upon completion of a new bridge across the Snake River, the entire 264 miles from Pocatello to Butte were converted between 2:00 AM and early afternoon on July 25, 1887.
“This line is still in operation today as part of the Union Pacific system.”
