admin | October 29, 2010
Oct. 29, 1867 There are eight school districts in Madison County, but as far as A.M.S. Carpenter can tell, none are open in Beaverhead County and none have even been organized in Chouteau County. In fact, Carpenter knows of only two of Montana’s 10 counties that have schools. So he has noted in a report [...]
admin | October 26, 2010
Oct. 26, 1903 This was the day F. Augustus Heinze stood on the balcony of the Butte courthouse and warned 10,000 laid-off miners: “If they crush me today they will crush you tomorrow.” Four days earlier Heinze’s nemesis, the powerful Amalgamated Copper Company, shut down all its enterprises in Montana, eventually laying off nearly four-fifths [...]
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 | 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 | 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 | December 8, 2009
We’re in the early stages of the 150th anniversary of construction of the Mullan Road (see story in Missoulian, Dec. 5) and if you’re like me you get to wondering what it was like around here in 1859-60. George Weisel’s trusty “Men and Trade on the Northwest Frontier,” a remarkable study based on the ledger [...]
admin | August 6, 2009
Johnny Dwyer left his family and homeland of Ireland in 1910 to come work in the Butte mines – and by 1918 he was dead at the age of 40. He died like so many of silicosis after breathing in tainted air while underground. Johnny’s grandson, 62-year-old Mike Dwyer of Boston, in Butte for the [...]
Proudly Powered by WordPress | Theme by The Cloisters | Entries RSS Comments RSS
