Traveling the Mullan Road in 2010, Part I
Posted By admin on 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.
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 150th 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 19th 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.
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