Montana Yesterday

One May week in 1910

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 [...]

The railroads are here (1880)

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 [...]

Lindy 1927, Part III

admin | September 12, 2009

We’ve been talking about Charles Lindbergh’s “vacation” to what would become Lindbergh Lake in the Upper Swan Valley from Sept. 8-11,1927 (see my two previous posts below). He was escorted there from Butte by Anaconda Co. officials, in the midst of a cross-country tour that included public stops in Butte and Helena. The location of [...]

September 1927: Lindbergh visits the Swan

admin | September 9, 2009

Charles Lindbergh was the kind of guy around whom tales grew with the telling. So you have to be careful about those stories surrounding his visit to Montana in September 1927, which I touched on in Sunday’s Montana History Almanac. He was arguably the most famous man in the world when he flew the “Spirit [...]

Butte mining memories

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 [...]