The air brakes leaked on an eastbound freight train near Essex, and 28 cars detached from the engine. They rolled backward through the night — 17 miles down a steep grade, reaching an estimated 75-100 mph, before smashing into the rear of a passenger train, which was just pulling out of the Nyack station, 10 miles southeast of Belton.

The collision and resulting fire killed 41. Most of the victims were Scandinavian railroad laborers en route from Minnesota to Jennings, near Libby.

P.I. Downs, who had just been named assistant general superintendent of the GN’s Spokane Falls and Northern line, was riding in the last car with his son, Kirk, and a cook. They were killed instantly.

The freight cars were carrying shingles which burst into flame in the wreckage, incinerating many of the trapped railroad workers and lighting up the night. Heroic rescuers dragged 13 men from the burning day coach, but 30 others were cremated. Only five of the injured survived.

“Several men called aloud for help, asking that if they could not be got out they might be shot rather than suffer the agony of death from flames, which were getting nearer to them every second,” a press report said. “People were compelled by the intense heat to stand aside and see them burned alive.”

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 man, of about twenty-five years, he being the youngest of the three.”

He was one of three suspicious-looking men to appear in the mining camp 12 days earlier with six good horses but little in the way of travel gear. They quickly found their way to the gambling tables and proceeded to clean out the other card sharks. But their luck ran out the following evening.

Two men from Elk City, Idaho, slipped into town looking for three horse thieves. They found Spillman at Worden and Co.’s store, where he was quickly apprehended. William Arnett and B.J. Jermagin were playing cards at the saloon. Arnett resisted and was shot dead. Jermagin surrendered and a miner’s court gave him six hours to get out of town the following day.

Spillman testified in Jermagin’s defense but made no attempt to defend himself, and the court sentenced him to die within 30 minutes. He asked to write a letter, in which he told his father of his fate, begged forgiveness and said “keeping bad company” was his undoing.

Wrote miner Henry Smith Pond: Charlie was hung at 2 o’clock today. It was a horrid sight. The last few days have been filled with sad sights, such sights as I hope never to witness again. Charlie was very cool. He did not even tremble when the rope was put around his neck. Manning is with me tonight. I have been getting out some more flooring today. Trade pretty good. Pleasant day.

Spillman was buried near the river below town next to Arnett, who “died with a death clutch of his cards in one hand and his revolver in the other, and was so buried,” according to Nathaniel Langford.

- 2 deaths when a tree fell on two miners in Mineral county on June 10, 1923 (see previous post for another two-fatality tornado in 1935)

Tornado resulting in most damage

- an F2 tornado at Lewistown on August 14, 1999

Earliest tornados

- March 2, 1991 near Arlee in Lake County (F0)

- March 23, 1988 near Bridger in Carbon County (F0)

- April 22, 2003 near Stanford in Judith Basin County (F0)

Latest tornados

- September 21, 1969 in Roosevelt County (F0)

- October 16, 1988 at Hamilton in Ravalli County (F0)

Another web site said the first reported tornado in Montana was in 1883.

Some reports said it was the deadliest tornado to hit the state since June 10, 1923, when two men were killed by a falling tree as a tornado hit a copper mine near Rivulet in, of all supposedly tornado-proof places, Mineral County. But newspapers of the time said two also died when a tornado hit the Fort Peck area on July 8, 1935. The fatalities were in Wheeler, one of 18 “mushroom” towns that sprung up during construction of the Fort Peck Dam (1933-1940). Here’s how the New York Times cast the aftermath:

“GLASGOW, Mont., July 9, 1935 — Two thousand homeless sought refuge tonight from the desolation wrought in the Fort Peck Dam area last night by tornadoes which lashed little “pasteboard towns,” killed two persons, injured thirteen seriously and put the mushroom villages in shambles.”

Wheeler, which was leveled when the tornado followed a night of torrential rain, was built outside official government jurisdiction. Another newspaper report at the time said Wheeler was constructed on a high knoll on the banks of the Missouri, some six or seven miles from the dam itself. A story on Fort Peck in a 2004 edition of Montana Magazine quoted Ernie Pyle, the famed war correspondent:

“You have to see the town of Wheeler to believe it. When you drive through, you think somebody must have set up hand-painted store fronts on both sides of the road, as background for a western movie thriller. But it’s real. At night the streets are a melee of drunken men and painted women, as they are called in books. Gambling and liquor by the drink are illegal in Montana. But Wheeler pays no attention. You can sit in a stud game, or keep ordering forty-rod all night.”

The Mullan Road tended to hug the base of the mountain tighter than the today’s highway does because the river channel used to do the same before the railroads came. Just past the fire station in Piltzville, the highway drops down into what used to be the channel. At several points in the next 30 miles or so,  the Road took to the side of the mountain to avoid river crossings, and you can see remnants of the side cuts east of Turah.

Just past Donovan Creek Road (on your left) there’s a turnoff to the right on E. Mullan Road. It crosses the tracks, passes under the interstate and continues into and through Clinton before dead-ending. You can save a few miles by hopping on the interstate at the Clinton interchange (Exit 121). Frontage roads between here and the Bearmouth exit always dead end. The Mullan Road was generally to the north (left) or right under your wheels, past Rock Creek and on.

Faint trail on Beavertail Hill

I don’t know its exact route over Beavertail Hill (before Exit 130), but there’s a faint trace of a road visible from the interstate as you go down the hill, past Beavertail Pond.

Hugo’s Bridge, where the Road crossed to the south side, was in the Nimrod area at what was long known as Medicine Tree Hill –  just before the warm springs pond and rocks that attract summer revelers along the north side of the interstate. Exit  I-90 at the Bearmouth exit (I’m not sure of the exit number; maybe 137), and you’re done with interstate travel on the Pacific slope.

Note that the town of Bearmouth was several miles east of the Bearmouth interchange. From the Bearmouth on, there’s the old highway on the north side of the interstate and a gravel road on the south. The latter mirrors most closely the Mullan Road.  It was a stage stop on the Road and later the scene of daring train robberies in 1902 and 1904.  North of the river is Bear Gulch, which is the Clark Fork River access road to Garnet, the cool ghost town (note: access to Garnet from the Blackfoot River side is not as steep).

Here’s where the Mullan Road left the river valley to avoid the canyon. You’re 50 interstate miles from Missoula now. The going gets rough on the next post.

While it’s true that yesterday’s Mullan Road is, in general, today’s major byways, you can go most of the eastern third of the route from Missoula to Fort Benton and log very few asphalt miles.

Keep in mind the Road stayed north of the Clark Fork River until the Nimrod/Bearmouth area, 35 miles or so east of Missoula, where a bridge was built by a local man, Samuel Hugo. From there it stayed on the south (or left, in navigational terms, which assume you’re pointed downstream) side of the Clark Fork until the north end of Deer Lodge Valley, where the crossing was negligible. Then over the hills to the Little Blackfoot near Avon, past Elliston and over the continental divide on the graveled Mullan Pass.

Here’s the general path, as I understand it — and I’m no expert:

Start  in downtown Missoula, on what’s now Front Street. Follow old Highway 10 east to East Missoula, where the Mullan Road probably stayed closer to the river than any modern streets. But take Speedway through town, follow it past the bridge to Bandmann Flats/Deer Creek Road/Canyon River Golf and rejoin Highway 10 at the bottom of Brickyard Hill.

View from Marshall Grade

The Mullan Road had to climb over Marshall Grade.

You can’t drive all the way over now, though there is a good gravel road to homes on top that lends a great view of the river and the basin. Back on the old highway, go through Pine Grove to the Blackfoot River. Mullan built a bridge just above the mouth of the Blackfoot in the winter of 1861-62, about where the westbound lane of I-90 is today. Stay on the secondary highway that’s now both Highway 10 and 200 to cross at the modern bridge into Milltown. Here you can pull off at Two River Market to gas up/stock up/take stock before you continue up the Clark Fork Valley. You’re seven miles from Missoula. More of the Road on the next post.

Maj. Marcus Reno headstone at the Little Bighorn battlefield.

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 in Sunday’s History Almanac (page 3 of the Territory section in the Missoulian). This way I can expound a little more…

May 31, 1967
An off-hand mention in a New York bar last fall leads today an honorable discharge of Maj. Marcus Reno, 87 years after his death.
A retired Army colonel with a long-standing interest in the Battle of the Little Bighorn of 1876 and with Maj. Reno’s ignominious court martial and discharge from the Army four years later struck up a conversation with the bartender, 52-year-old Charles Reno, Maj. Reno’s great grand nephew.
The younger Reno teamed with the American Legion to rectify the major’s record. In a one-paragraph statement, the Army says it’s changing all of its records to show Reno was honorably discharged in the rank of major on April 1, 1880.
“I think it’s just unbelievable,” says Leora Skates of Billings, Charles Reno’s sister. “Speaking for the whole family, I just don’t think we ever believed it could happen.”
Another sister, Laverna Bachmann, also lives in Billings, where a church ceremony will precede Maj. Reno’s internment at the Custer National Cemetery at the battlefield site in September. Reno, who has lain in a pauper’s grave in Washington D.C. since his death in 1889, will receive an 11-gun salute and be buried with honors – the only participant of the battle to receive such honors at the cemetery named for his former commander.

That’s what will be in the newspaper Sunday. Here’s some more, taken from the Billings Gazette in 1967.  (The Gazette added its local angle to a UPI account.)

“After his dismissal in 1880, Reno spent his time in New York and Washington, seeking in vain to be reinstated by the Army. He died in Washington in 1889 and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery. His grave is identified only by a number and a reference in a burial book.

“His remains will be moved from a pauper’s grave at Washington, D.C. to the Custer Battlefield National Monument Cemetery, a piece of ground he once was accused of failing to defend.

“The Army acted after Reno’s famiy and other pro-Reno forces, including Chester K. Shore, then adjutant of the American Legion Department of Montana, reopened the case last fall. The Reno partisans, who also include Billings Mayor Willard Fraser, want Reno’s body brought to the Custer Cemetery for military burial in a marked grave.”

I’ve got some stuff about the September re-interment ceremony in 1867 that I’ll try to post.

It was laughable – or at least chuckleable – too because I’d been on this back road over the John Long Mountains before and had always narrowly avoided getting mired in mud or lost in deep, deep ruts as the road wound and climbed and its way up and down ravines from Antelope Creek near Bearmouth over to  the Flint Creek Valley. Not today. Despite recent rains in Missoula and an ominous forecast last Thursday, to my delight and surprise  there was nary a mudhole and the largest ruts were at least manageable in four-wheel drive.

I was on this stretch of famous road south of Drummond en route to Fort Benton for last weekend’s celebration of the  150^th anniversary of the Mullan Road. My thought was to spend a couple of days following as much of the original road as I knew/could, on what is normally a 210-mile highway voyage from home near Missoula. Other matters took precedence, so now the travel time was reduced to  one day, and I  would make it only to Great Falls before night set in.

I did get a head start on Wednesday. Tom Yule ushered me to a still-visible and walkable cut of the road on the mountainside between Turah and Clinton, what the locals call Three-Mile  Hill. Mullan spent the winter of 1861-62 on the banks of the Blackfoot River at present-day Milltown, in Cantonment Wright. While the main crew built a 4-span bridge across the river, in one of the coldest winters the natives could remember, four satellite camps were set up upstream – dubbed on Mullan’s map as Williamson’s, Campbell’s, Clark’s, and Lannon’s winter camps. I was hoping to find out at the Mullan conference where those camps rose and who those guys were. According to Mullan’s 1863 report, they made five side cuts totaling seven miles in the mountainside in the first 30 miles above the Blackfoot crossing. That allowed travelers to avoid 10 of the 11 Clark Fork River crossings the road followed in Mullan’s first swing through in 1860.

Now the valley hummed with activity below. A steady stream of vehicles rushed by on Interstate 90, and a Burlington Northern SF train had the good graces to pass. A few years ago Yule, whose home is in a ravine midway through the first and longest cut, found a turn-of-the 19^th century postcard on e-Bay that shows a scene presumably from the road. The camera looks down on the NP railroad, built in 1883, winding along the very base of the mountain with a narrow Clark Fork (Hellgate) River crowding it to the slope. It’s at least 400 yards north of the current railroad tracks. Tom suggests, and I believe him, that when the river channel was that close to the hill, Mullan and Williamson went upslope to get around it.

Earlier this year I walked the road with Dennis Sain, a local history buff and former mountain road builder himself, for the Anaconda, Champion and Stimson lumber companies. He pointed out points where the road has sloughed over a century and a half, and evidences of cross-cut saw action, of the kind that would have been necessary in 1862.

As we rounded a corner on the eastern end of the cut, before it dips down to Kendall Creek, I had a eureka moment. The creek bottom widens into what must have been a grassy valley – a perfect location for a protected, well-watered winter construction camp, with plenty of forage for the horses used in construction, if any were so used. Here, I thought, had to be Williamson’s camp. Comparing the large-scale Mullan map I have to a modern map, I speculate the other three camps were on Starvation Creek past Clinton, near the mouth of Rock Creek, and in the area of Ryan Creek, where Toby Hansen opened the hay fields to outdoor concerts last summer. I wish there was some way to know for sure.

The report went on to say the interior department was already making plans for carrying the law into effect.

Sen. Thomas Carter, D-Montana, planned to introduce an appropriation of $10,000 for preliminary surveys and building of roads and trails as an amendment to the sundry civil bill.

It will take all this summer to finish the surveys, the report went on. A road from Belton to Lake MacDonald is contemplated. The Montana legislature will be requested to cede to the federal government jurisdiction over the park, as has been done in the case of other similar reservations in order to avoid a conflict of authority.

It is expected that Canada and British Columbia will make a larger park of the region adjoining Glacier park on the north.

The Great Northern Railroad, a major push for Glacier, was already providing rail access along the southern edge of Glacier. The first motoring tourist wouldn’t come along until the following year, when Frank Stoop of Kalispell drove the first vehicle to Lake Five, then along the railroad tracks to Belton, where the park’s first chalet had been opened the month after Glacier was created. Construction on roads on the east side of the park also began in 1911,  to Many Glacier, St. Mary, and Two Medicine from East Glacier.

Americasbesthistory.com casts the creation of Glacier as “the start of American domestic tourism.” The website explains: “Spurred by the development of the Great Northern Railroad, this park helped begin the ‘See America First’ campaign to encourage United States tourists before and during World War I to visit the western states and territories.”

But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some local pride involved. Here’s an item from the Kalispell Inter Lake that appeared a few days before President Taft signed the park into being:

The Great Falls Leader makes the astonishing statement that Great Falls will be the gateway to the Glacier National park. What’s the matter with Belton being the gateway, or Columbia Falls, or Kalispell? The Leader should understand we are some gateway ourselves and don’t need one 200 miles from the scene of operations.