admin | May 31, 2012
The Anaconda Company announced it had quit the newspaper business in Montana on the first day of June in 1959. The company, one of the largest producers of non-ferrous metals in the world, sold its eight dailies in six cities to Lee Newspapers of Iowa for a reported $6 million. “Hello, Missoula!” began Lee’s greeting [...]
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 | October 19, 2010
Oct. 19, 1911 President William Taft steps off a special train on a cold morning in Butte wearing a broad smile, and hustles into an automobile bound for the Silver Bowl Club and breakfast. There, in the heart of Montana’s industrial center, the Republican talks agriculture. “The last census brings forth the fact that the [...]
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 | 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 [...]
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 [...]
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
