admin | August 29, 2010
Disaster struck on the Great Northern Railway line on the southern edge of what would become Glacier National Park. The air brakes leaked on an eastbound freight train near Essex, and 28 cars detached from the engine. They rolled backward through the night — 17 miles down a steep grade, reaching an estimated 75-100 mph, [...]
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 | 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 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 | 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 [...]
admin | January 29, 2010
When you think about it, Butte and Helena were started by miners, Billings as a transportation hub for steamboats and railroads, Great Falls for its water power, coal mining and agriculture. Kalispell was a railroad and agriculture town. Missoula was attractive for its lumber and agricultural possibilities, and eventually the railroads. But its roots are [...]
admin | January 29, 2010
Thanks to Minie Smith for pointing this out. She’s been researching the Fires of 1910 for the Fort Missoula museum and came across a large ad in the Aug. 20, 1910, Missoulian (the day the fires took off). There’s a photo of the Merc in the middle top with “1885″ on one side and “1910″ [...]
admin | January 27, 2010
Why, for instance, is the Burnt Fork of the Bitterroot called that? Here’s the answer, thanks to a new Internet offering, mtplacenames.org, from the Montana Historical Society and the Montana State Library. “Burnt Fork of the Bitterroot River The name Burnt Fork dates from as early as the 1850s, when Major John Owen filed the [...]
admin | November 27, 2009
Annick Drosdal-Levillain got back to me early Thanksgiving Day, too late for her thank you to the people of Missoula to get in the paper yesterday. The story, headlined “Missoula Cemetery mystery unraveled,” was a follow-up on a Nov. 7 feature on her quest to chase down the ghost of her great-grandfather, Haakon Hauge, who [...]
admin | November 24, 2009
Warren Davis, editor and publisher of the Daily Missoulian, weighed in on a difficult subject this week in 1932: Thanksgiving. “There have been last Thursdays in Novembe of other years that maybe better exemplified the nationwide thought of Thanksgiving than does this day of 1932,” he wrote on the editorial page on Nov. 24. They [...]
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