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 | 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 | November 19, 2009
Thought I’d trot this one out again. We ran it in the paper in the lead-up to the 2001 “Brawl of the Wild.” Not everyone in Montana gives a damn about the Grizzly-Bobcat football game. But folks from all walks of life do, and don’t our peculiar walks define us? I’ve long thought the home [...]
admin | June 23, 2009
If you’re into early western Montana history and have access to microfilm at the UM, Missoula or state historic libraries every once in awhile, check out the Dec. 15, 1912, edition of the Missoulian. One of the gems is a discussion by Judge Frank Woody of steamboats in Western Montana. Referring to an article he [...]
admin | May 26, 2009
There aren’t many dates more important to Montana history than May 26. Let’s start with 1863… “I found a scad!” “If you have one, I have a hundred!” The evening exchange between Bill Fairweather and Henry Edgar in Alder Gulch, as described by Dorothy Johnson in “The Bloody Bozeman,” launched the richest placer mining strike [...]
admin | May 23, 2009
Before there was the state of Montana, before Montana Territory, there was Montana City. Gold miners from Lawrence set up the camp in the summer of 1858, on the east bank of the South Platte River in Kansas Territory. Six miles away another camp, Auraria or Aurania, popped up. First reference to a place called [...]
admin | April 30, 2009
(Click on title to comment) One of the items I just finished working on for this Sunday’s Montana History Almanac for the Territory section of the Missoulian talks about Montana’s first organized sluice mining on Gold Creek in May 1862. The Stuart brothers, Granville and James, were involved. So were Jim Minesinger and one Thomas [...]
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