admin | May 27, 2010
I especially get the urge to get back to the battlefield this time of year. My daughter and I drove right by 10 days ago — in a nice electric storm on the plains, not the snowy white palette pictured to the right. We couldn’t stop. Here’s a tidbit that I found and am including [...]
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 | March 25, 2010
If not for Benjamin Rush, there might not be a Travelers’ Rest State Park out by Lolo. Rush was one of our nation’s founding fathers, he signed the Declaration of Independence, and in 1812 he famously soothed the bruised feelings between former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and got them talking — or at [...]
admin | March 23, 2010
Think horse racing was on the minds of Missoulians in 1891? Here are two separate blurbs, posted on the same day (Feb. 16, 1891) in the Missoula Gazette: “Cashier Keith of the First National Bank is the possessor of a new horse which promises to make its mark on the Missoula track next season. He [...]
admin | March 20, 2010
In the post below, I noted that Gary Moulton is working on a narrative of the day-by-day travels of Lewis and Clark. At a conference called “Science & Humanities: Inseparable by Nature” last Sunday in Great Falls, he talked about another research project concerning Sacajawea. How many times, he asked an audience that was clearly [...]
admin | March 7, 2010
Our Sunday history almanac a couple of weeks ago in the Territory section of the Missoulian included an item about a brief strike by the motormen of the Missoula Electric Street Railway Co. in February 1893. It came from a Missoulian article that offered a fascinating and sometimes surprising slice of life in Missoula in [...]
admin | February 22, 2010
Ken Robison, the Mullan Road guru from Great Falls/Fort Benton, sends this update: From May 20-22, 2010 the River & Plains Society will host the 150th Anniversary Mullan Road Conference in Fort Benton. The conference celebrates completion of the Mullan Military Wagon Road in 1860, the first wagon road from Fort Benton to cross the [...]
admin | February 10, 2010
Time for some detective work. Diane Sands at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula got the following e-mail the other day. So far, none of the resources Diane or I turn to have shed light on Willy deMero, a singer/songwriter who supposedly was born in 1903 in Alberton and died in 1998 in a “small [...]
admin | February 2, 2010
Here’s how John Neihardt described his visit to the highest of the Great Falls of the Missouri in late July, 1908: “I caught myself tightly gripping the ledge and shrinking with a shuddering instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle all memory of sound – and left only the silent universe with myself [...]
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″ [...]
Proudly Powered by WordPress | Theme by The Cloisters | Entries RSS Comments RSS
