admin | August 26, 2010
At 2:22 p.m. on Aug. 26, 1862, C.W. Spillman, horse thief, became the first man executed in what’s now Montana. Spillman was strung up from a tree near Gold Creek, which appeared on maps as Hangtown for years after. James Stuart, one of the town’s founders, described Spillman as “a rather quiet reserved pleasant young [...]
admin | June 8, 2010
We were in Milltown at the end of our last post. In just a few hundred yards, before you get to the churches and school at Bonner, turn right off Highway 200 onto Highway 210 through Piltzville. The Mullan Road tended to hug the base of the mountain tighter than the today’s highway does because [...]
admin | June 8, 2010
It’s safe to say that if you’re going to follow the footprint of the original Mullan Road this summer, you’ll probably have one of those moo-ving Montana experiences. You know, the kind that occurs when your backroad is blocked by languorous broods of red or black bovines. Admit it: you’ve leaned out the window and [...]
admin | May 25, 2010
The yellow sign in the rearview mirror said “No Regular Maintenance: Travel At Your Own Risk” and I had to laugh. From the stories I’ve heard, Lt. John Mullan probably should have been required to post such signs every few miles or so when he came through here with his road-builders in 1860 and 1862. [...]
admin | May 9, 2010
The Anaconda Standard, for one, came close to “breaking” the story of the new Glacier National Park. In a story datelined “Washington, May 11 (1910),” the day President William Taft put his John Hancock to a bill that had been wrangled over in Congress for two years, a special dispatch to the Standard said the [...]
admin | May 9, 2010
As the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Mullan Road approaches (May 20-22, see previous post and the conference website) we should check in with the road-building crew’s progress in May of 1860. Remember, they’d wintered at Cantonment Jordan near DeBorgia, after topping the Bitterroots in late 1859, working their way eastward from Walla [...]
admin | May 9, 2010
The Mullan Road conference, marking the 150th anniversary of the road’s construction, is May 20-22 in Fort Benton and there’s still time to register. They want the registration forms by May 17 for those who want to take part in the whole shooting match, which includes what should be a great bus trip to the [...]
admin | May 8, 2010
This was a week in 1910 that saw, among other things, the creation of a national park and the first electric street car run in Missoula (see previous post and, I’m told, a column in the Sunday, May 9, Missoulian.). It was also the week that John Schaffer tried out his biplane outside of Missoula. [...]
admin | May 6, 2010
There may have been a week of more impact in Montana history than the one that began on Sunday, May 8, 1910. I’m not aware of it. President Taft signed Glacier National Park into being on May 12, and what stories that act has wrought. In Missoula, the electric streetcars, powered by the new hydroelectric [...]
admin | April 15, 2010
A post of a couple of days ago got into the early history of the Marshall Ski Area east of Missoula, courtesy of a writeup by Anna Sain in 1988-89. Here are more nuggets from Sain’s report: The original log lodge at Marshall, built in the 1940s, became a part of Si and Velma Green’s [...]
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