“Hello, Missoula!” began Lee’s greeting on the top of Page 1 in the Daily Missoulian and the afternoon Missoula Sentinel. In the introductory message, the new owners attempted to allay concerns that the newspapers would be operated with the same heavy hand the Anaconda Co. had exhibited.

“As Montana comes to know us better you will realize that each newspaper has a policy of independence and individuality just as our newspapers have shown in (the Midwest),” they wrote. “Publishers and editors call the turns as they see them; there is no such thing as dictated editorial policy.”

Thus ended more than six decades of “copper dailies.” The Anaconda Co. hadn’t even acknowledged ownership to its readers until 1947. Lee Enterprises, began in 1890 by A.W. Lee and family, still owns the Missoulian, the Billings Gazette, the Helena Independent Record,  the Montana Standard of Butte, and has since added the Ravalli Republic. Of the other four papers purchased in ’59, the Livingston Enterprise and Anaconda Standard were sold, and the Butte Daily Post and Missoula Sentinel were discontinued.

“Never thought of it,” said Dowd when Missoulian photographer Michael Gallacher and I sat down with him Tuesday at his home in Anaconda.

Dowd, a Pearl Harbor survivor, comes to Missoula on Wednesday to talk at the Rocky Mountain Museum of Military History at Fort Missoula at 2 p.m. (see story in Wednesday’s Missoulian).  He told us he and others felt “pretty secure” until the devastating Dec. 7 morning when Japanese planes launched an all-out attack on the ships and military installations near of Honolulu.

To those in Hawaii, the war in Europe must have seemed like an abstraction, even for military personnel like Dowd. They knew Japan was trying to expand its empire, he said. It had overrun Manchuria 10 years earlier, and in late 1937 captured the former Chinese capital of Nanking, a victory that was followed by six weeks of mass murder, genocide and atrocities that are remembered as the Rape of Nanking.

“That was pretty horrific,” Dowd said, “so to punish them we cut off their oil, their scrap metal. We cut off a lot of things to them, and I think that’s what helped bring them against us.”

But Japan’s direct attack on the U.S. territory of Hawaii at Pearl Harbor wasn’t even on the radar screen. Literally.

In a narrative Dowd wrote in 1991 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the attack,  he remembered the early 1940s as a “slow, lovely, easy time to live.” He waxed nostalgic about an era in which kids hung out at soda fountains with jukeboxes, and people danced to the sounds of the Big Band Era. Dowd loved that music and loved to sing along. Just last year he donned his Navy uniform and sang a tribute to the 1940s at the Elks Club in Anaconda. Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Bennie Goodman – they were all favorites, he said.

It’s easier, then, to understand the shock, rage and fury that Americans felt when planes of a nation that wasn’t widely viewed as an enemy threat suddenly appeared and bombed that world away.

On Oct. 14, 1992, a story written by Donna Syvertson appeared in the Missoulian. It was about a memorial at Rattlesnake School dedicated to the dead who were buried where the school was later built. The memorial, described below, still stands with a dedication plaque that says the cemetery was used from 1888-1930.

Here are the first few paragraphs:

“Rattlesnake School dedicated a memorial Tuesday to the hundreds of dead who are buried in its schoolyard.

The memorial consists of a 6-foot concrete arch with 10 faces on it; the faces represent different ages and races of the people in the cemetery. A smaller arch signifies a bridge from one kind of existence to another. Much of the work was volunteered.

Pieces of human skeletons were discovered in 1989, when Chlo Murdock and her daughter were walking through the school grounds, where a new addition to the school was being built. After finding a skull bone, Murdock reported the findings to the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office.

Murdock and Susan Liles began to research the graveyard, which was a potter’s field on the grounds of the old Missoula County Poor Farm, Detention House and Hospital. It was used through the early 1930s. The cemetery’s register could not be found. But old funeral home records, which started in 1901, turned up 454 people buried in the cemetery. There is a possibility 750 bodies actually were buried there, Murdock said.

Not all of them are poor people. Many died without family or friends to care for them. Railroad accidents claimed 56 men. The bodies of children filled 37 graves and women, 19. Chinese people accounted for 14 graves while Indians and four blacks were buried in the field.”

On its website, the Missoula Cemetery offers an intriguing synopsis of local historical cemetery sites. It says there was also a graveyard beneath what’s now Prescott School in the lower Rattlesnake that was used as early as 1883, when the railroad first came through.

“The site was chosen by the local Chinese immigrants due to its clear and prestigious view of the valley,” it says.

There is also evidence of an Indian burial ground where the former Safeway Store on West Broadway was built. The city-founding Higgins family had its own private cemetery at the base of Whitaker Hill (the bodies were ultimately removed to the Missoula City Cemetery).

Go to: http://www.ci.missoula.mt.us/DocumentView.aspx?DID=406

Local roads sleuth Jim Habeck dug up this from the Missoula-Sentinel archives. It’s dated Oct. 28, 1930, and it begs the question how exactly one did travel from the generally unpopulated area around the fairgrounds to the Fort.

Headlined “Fort Missoula Road Finished by County,” the two-paragraph story noted, “One of the most valuable improvements of the roads in the vicinity of Missoula has been the recent completion of the South avenue project by the county commissioners. This road extends from the fairgrounds west to the Fort Missoula entrance.

“A great deal of work was done on this section of highway, which is about a mile long. Previously the road followed the rolling contour of the country, but now has been graded level. Curves have also been eliminated and the road is now a mile-long straightaway. All the fort traffic follows this highway.”

“These four states will therefore come into the Union during the centennial year of our national government,” noted the New York Times. “But for the narrow strip of Idaho which stretches to the northern border between Montana and Washington, they would carry the union of states continuously across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.”

Cleveland’s signature came after years of political maneuvering in Congress, where Republicans were reluctant to admit a territory that leaned Democratic. Likewise, Democrat lawmakers were opposed to a package deal that would make states of Republican territories.

When Republicans gained control of Congress in 1888, lame duck Democrats dropped their objections to the admission of the Dakotas and Washington, which were all Republican.

It was the farthest Montana Territory had proceeded in four attempts to gain statehood – and it ultimately succeeded. A constitutional convention met in Helena in the summer to hammer out a constitution. Statehood followed on Nov. 8.

The event came exactly four years after the first genuine experiment with telephones in Helena. There were 14 subscribers to the Butte system, most of them businesses.

Service was not immediately available, since arrival of the transmitters was delayed by a snow blockade on the Utah and Northern rail line 150 miles south of town. The U and N, Montana’s first railroad, had made its appearance in Butte in late 1881. One week earlier, a Butte newspaper reported that subscribers were being enlisted for an electric light system in town.

Missoula’s first skating carnival was a success.
Any doubt in the matter will be settled affirmatively by the crowd of nearly one thousand that lined the circumference of the rink last night and stayed until the finish of the last event. True, the weather was a little cold, but by dancing and prancing the spectators kept their blood circulating rapidly enough for them to enjoy the contests.”

The rink was built at the city park, home of a baseball field in the summer time, on the block south of the NP depot at the top of Higgins Avenue. Pattee Street was lined with autos, “and each machine was filled to the guards with rooters,” the unidentified reporter said. (All reporters went unidentified back in those days.)

James Phelan was proclaimed the outstanding performer of the meet. He “displayed an excellent knowledge of racing in the 10-tap, free-for-all race,” whatever that was. Rosalind Reynolds, a local university student, received a basket of roses as “the pretties girl to take part in the contests.” She also took first prize in the women’s single fancy skating contest, presumably the precursor of figure skating.

See if you recognize the family names of some of the other winners, kids by the names of Lloyd Yerkes, Warren Sumner, David Evans, Mary Gibson, Tad Meeker, Arthur Simerson, Pat Thibodeau, Roberta Tait; and men and women named Esmond Dahlberg, Bill Walsh, Olive Gibson and Alice Marion.

CALGARY, Alberta, Jan. 21 – The last act of a spectacular deal is now being enacted on the plains of the Flathead Reservation in Montana, where Michel Pablo … who sold to the Canadian Government 500 head of Buffalo, the last existing herd in the United States, is now, in face of warnings and threats from the authorities of Montana, killing off some twenty bulls which he was unable to corral and ship to Canada.
The last big buffalo hunt in the history of the world, which was proposed by Pablo, was called off by the Montana authorities on the ground that it would be a violation of the game laws of the State, but for three weeks Pablo has been hunting and shooting down these bulls, and has already killed half a dozen or more.”

According to a story the Missoulian’s Vince Devlin wrote in 2008, on the occasion of the National Bison Range’s 100th anniversary, Pablo and Charles Allard bought 13 bison in 1884, even as the last ones disappeared from the plains. They grew the herd to 300 by the mid-1890s. Allard died in 1896, and some of his portion of the buffalo were sold in 1901 to Charles Conrad of Kalispell. When the Flathead Reservation was opened to non-Indian settlement in 1910, Pablo was told he couldn’t raise buffalo. He eventually sold the herd to the Canadian government, which was establishing a herd of its own near Edmonton, Alberta. Apparently, he couldn’t catch 20 of them.

This one room school was built in 1867 in Twin Bridges. It's now in Nevada City. Photo by Kathy Weiser on www.legendsofamerica.com/mt-nevadacity.html.

Carpenter, appointed in March, complains that only one county superintendent has even submitted a report to him, and the November Legislative session is fast approaching. He plans to submit a bill to establish a complete system of public schools.

“We all believe and know that there is hidden in the rock-ribbed hills of our Territory such countless treasures as shall draw thousands upon thousands of settlers within our borders to build up our future State,” Carpenter wrote. “What every lover of Montana wants today is that a class of emigrants who desire above all things that their children shall be educated may be induced to settle among us.

“Those men who never inquire, ‘Can my children have there the advantages of good schools?’ when determining where they shall find a home, are not the men who build up great States.”

F. Augustus Heinze in 1904

The “Great Shutdown” was the response by Amalgamated, a holding company for Standard Oil, to unfavorable mining claims rulings in Butte district court. The rulings were made by judges allied with Heinze, Amalgamated’s chief antagonist.

“They will cut your wages and raise the tariff in the company stores on every bite you eat and every rag you wear,” Heinze told the miners. “They will force you to dwell in Standard Oil houses while you live, and they will bury you in Standard Oil coffins when you die.”

The shutdown would last until Nov. 11, the day after Gov. Joseph Toole agrees to call a special legislative session for Dec. 1 to consider the Amalgamated-backed Fair Trials Bill. The law allowed either party in a lawsuit a change of venue if it thought the judge was prejudiced against its case. The law passed quickly and remains in effect today.