Montana Yesterday

Are you thinking it’s Little Bighorn time?

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 [...]

Traveling the Mullan Road in 2010, Part I

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. [...]

Creation of Glacier was “the start of American domestic tourism”

admin | May 9, 2010

The Anaconda Standard, for one, came close to “breaking” the story of the new Glacier National Park. In a story datelined “Washington, May 11 (1910),” the day President William Taft put his John Hancock to a bill that had been wrangled over in Congress for two years, a special dispatch to the Standard said the [...]

Gateways to Glacier. It’s all in the promotion …

admin | May 9, 2010

There was not a lot of fanfare surrounding the official creation of Glacier National Park on May 11, 1910, as Michael Jamison’s intriguing story in today’s Missoulian, “Glacier: A national park locals learned to love” related. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some local pride involved. Here’s an item from the Kalispell Inter Lake that [...]

Here’s what the Mullan gang was doing 150 years ago

admin | May 9, 2010

As the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Mullan Road  approaches (May 20-22, see previous post and the conference website) we should check in with the road-building crew’s progress in May of 1860. Remember, they’d wintered at Cantonment Jordan near DeBorgia, after topping the Bitterroots in late 1859, working their way eastward from Walla [...]

Late-breaking developments from Fort Benton & Mullan Road conference

admin | May 9, 2010

The Mullan Road conference, marking the 150th anniversary of the road’s construction, is May 20-22 in Fort Benton and there’s still time to register.  They want the registration forms by May 17 for those who want to take part in the whole shooting match, which includes what should be a great bus trip to the [...]

A flying machine in Missoula

admin | May 8, 2010

This was a week in 1910 that saw, among other things,  the creation of a national park and the first electric street car run in Missoula (see previous post and, I’m told, a column in the Sunday, May 9, Missoulian.). It was also the week that John Schaffer tried out his biplane outside of Missoula. [...]

One May week in 1910

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 [...]