Helena fire January 9, 1874, Historic losses.

At 7:00 am, January 9, 1874 fire erupted in the Chinatown district of downtown Helena, Montana. Getting the fire started for the day, the Chinese cook used too much coal oil, causing an explosion and igniting one site of the room. He grabbed a bucket of what he thought was water to dose the flames but it was more of the oil.  Fueled with the additional oil the building was quickly engulfed in flames. Before the fire was stopped it had destroyed most of the city's businesses and 150 homes.

While the destruction of the homes and businesses was devastating, buildings can be rebuilt, after all this was the third time Helena had suffered a great fire and yet she always managed to rise from the ashes.  What could not be replaced were records of the Montana Historical Society which were kept in the law office of Wilbur Fisk Sanders.  Also destroyed were all of the books and record of the Montana Masonic Grand Lodge.  For someone researching early Montana history, the thought of all those early documents going up in flames is heart wrenching.

There was only one casualty of the fire, Konrad Knipper, was trapped in the International Hotel where he was employed.  

Helena's Guardian of the Gulch behind another Helena landmark, the Bluestone House.
The tower was built to after Helena's devastating series of fires to alert the citizens.

Check it out - Lost and Found Montana

I recently encountered a brief mention of the Lost and Found Montana project in a newspaper insert.  While this project is news to me, it is not new news.  Way back in August, the story of Jeremy Lurgio,’s project appeared in the Missoulian.  Lost and Found Montana is a multimedia presentation and website documenting 18 towns that the Department of Transportation planned to eliminate from the state road map. Lurgio is an associate professor of photojournalism and multimedia at the University of Montana. His Lost and Found Montana Exhibit was unveiled at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography in Missoula and at the same time he launched his website lostandfoundMontana.com. The exhibit ran through October and netted Lurgio second place at Atlanta Photojournalism contest for Multimedia Interactive Presentation.  I have visited the website and I encourage everyone else to do so too.  It is a reminder that even though towns can seem to vanish, their people and their stories do not.  The wide expanse that is Montana is full of remnants of towns that have all but disappeared.

www.lostandfoundmontana.com

County Name Quiz Answers

I hope you enjoyed the County Name Quiz.  Here are the answers:

1.  Judith Basin County was named for the Judith River.  The river was named by Meriwether Lewis for his cousin, Judith Hancock of Faircastle, Virginia.

2.  Garfield County was named for President James Garfield who was assassinated in 1881 after serving less than six months in office.

3.   Ravalli County was named for the Jesuit Missionary, Father Anthony Ravalli,  who arrived in the Bitterroot Valley in 1845. You can learn more about Father Ravilli at:
                      http://www.saintmarysmission.org/PhotoTourRavalli.html

4.  The name for Mineral County was suggested by George Willett, a railroad employee who was elected to serve in the state legislature.  Willett had served in the Philippines during the Spanish American War where he contracted leprosy.  It took years before the symptoms of the disease developed and Willet had just been elected for a second term when he became ill. At that time there was no known cure for the malady.  After living in quarantine near Alberton,  he and his wife were forced to move to a leprosarium.

5.  Lincoln County was named for President Abraham Lincoln.

6.  Sanders County was named for Wilbur Fisk Sanders, nephew of the first territorial governor, Sidney Edgerton.

7.  The counties that were named specifically to attract homesteaders were Richland, Golden Valley and Treasure.  (I guess with the Bakken (check the spelling) oil boom, Richland County  has really lived up to its name.)

8.  Toole County was named for J.K. Toole, Montana’s first Governor.

9.  The obvious answer for this question is Lewis and Clark County.  The not so obvious one is Chouteau County which was named for Augustus and Pierre Chouteau,  fur traders, American Pioneers and founders of the city of St. Louis.

I hope you enjoyed this quiz. On a final note here is some food for thought.  If part of the county you live in were to break off to form a new county what would you suggest for the new county’s name?

Montana County Name Quiz

As a diversion from all the holiday hustle and bustle, I thought you might enjoy a short quiz to test your knowledge of Montana County history.

1.  There are twenty six counties in Montana that were named for men, either directly or indirectly. (By indirectly, I mean that a county was named for a river or other feature that was named for a person.  An example would be Madison County which was named for the Madison River which was by the Lewis and Clark Expedition for then Secretary of State James Madison).  Only one Montana County was indirectly named for a woman. Can you name that county?

2.  Of the counties named for U.S. Presidents, which one bears the name of an assassinated president that did not play an important role in Montana history?

3.  Which county was named for an important religious figure who figured prominently  in Western Montana history?

4.  This is a hard one, don’t feel bad if you don’t get the answer.  Which county, formed in 1914, was named by a man who served in the state legislature from that county and later was quarantined there because he suffered from leprosy?  (I warned you it was a hard one.)

5.  Which county was named for the U.S. President who signed the bill making Montana a territory?

6.  Which county was named for a man who was a vigilante, a lawyer, first president of the Montana Historical Society, and  represented the state of Montana in the U.S. Senate?

7.  There were three counties whose names were chosen to attract homesteaders. Can you name at least two of them?

8.  Which county was named for a Montana Governor?

9.   This is another tricky one.  Which two counties were named for two men?

I will post the answers in a couple of days so that you can see how you did.

Remnants and Relics

Montana is full of remnants and relics of its colorful past.  I am not referring to the obvious ones like the well preserved ghost towns or the highly recognized landmark’s like the head frames that  loom over the city of Butte, or Helena’s old fire tower, The Guardian of the Gulch; nor am I referring to out of the way places where no one ever goes.  The remnants and relics that we often overlook are clearly visible from the streets of our towns or the highways connect our towns.

To give you an example, in Carbon County, just off of Highway 212 between Joliet and Rockvale, there are the remnants of a restaurant and hotel.  The restaurant and hotel were part of a Hot Spring Resort called Montaqua .  The resort came into being when a local prospector  named Major Keown, drilling for oil in 1904, instead tapped into a  natural hot springs.  Seeing it as a way to cash in on his discovery he built a spa.  In time a hotel and restaurant were added on.  While that in itself makes the remnants an interesting spot, the event that destroyed the business is equally compelling.  In August of 1959, the devastating earthquake near the Montana - Idaho border  caused a  major landslide, burying the campers who were trapped there.  Highways and buildings in the area were destroyed and a new  lake, Earthquake Lake, was formed.  More than a hundred miles away, the hot waster supply was cut off to Montaqua when the ground beneath it shifted.   As devastating as that was, the final blow came as a natural gas fissure opened up after the quake.  The gas was accidentally ignited and the explosion destroyed the spa.

There are many other examples of remnants and relics with interesting stories behind their demise and I will be sharing these stories from time to time.

Part of the information for this entry came from the brochure :Driving Tour of Historic Carbon County, published by the Carbon County Historical Society and Museum

Montana's First Vigilante Hanging, and no it wasn't George Ives

It is that time of year again when the cold winds and the short days cause me to ponder the events of  the winter of 1863-64 when Montana’s famous vigilantes dispensed with twenty-one of the territory’s allegedly most despicable road agents.  For a long time I thought that those hangings were the first vigilante activity in what is now Montana, but I recently discovered that there was an incident that predated those hangings by  sixteen months.

Admittedly this first vigilante justice differed from the latter hangings. It was a single event, spontaneously carried out, rather than a group of hangings carefully orchestrated by a large organized committee.  I came across this historical information while reading the book Shallow Diggin’s, Tales from Montana’s Ghost Towns, compiled by Jean Davis and published in 1962 by Caxton Printers Ltd., Caldwell Idaho.  I read this book back when I was in high school, (a historical fact in itself, considering how long it has been since I was in high school) but for some reason I had forgotten about the event in question.

In the first chapter, "Gold Creek", James Stuart’s diary contained an account of  two men coming into Gold Creek seeking some men that had stolen horses.  The men approached Stuart and asked for help from the citizens in apprehending the men in question. Stuart assured the two that they would have all the help they needed.  The three alleged horse thieves were apprehended,  but not without  incident.  One of the men pulled out his gun and was shot dead.  The other two men were kept under guard until the following morning when their fate was decided.  During the proceedings, one of the men testified that he had  no knowledge of the theft, he had only been traveling with the other two for a short time.  Evidently his story rang true and he was given six hours to leave the territory (which would have been Idaho Territory at that time.)  A man named Spillman, who had come to Gold Creek to run a gambling game, was found guilty of horse theft and was hanged at 2:22 p.m. on August 26, 1862.

The book, Shallow Diggin’s  is a wonderful book full of first hand accounts of events that took place in the gold camps during Montana’s early years.  It may not be readily available for purchase,  but  it should be available at most  Montana  public libraries.

The very first "Cats-Griz" game

The very first Cats-Griz football game took place on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1897. Off field, the attitude of the teams was much more cordial than it is today.  The game was played on a makeshift field in Missoula. There was no stadium, no tailgate parties, not even bleachers. The day before the game the Bozeman team traveled by train to Missoula where they were greeted by some women students and taken to Judge Knowles home for a reception. The next day their hosts provided a tour of Fort Missoula before the game. It wasn’t even a Cats-Griz game at that point because the Bozeman team was referred to as the
"Aggies" and the Missoula team was called “Varsity”. (It wasn’t until 1912 that the Missoula team was nicknamed the Bruins, which evolved into the Grizzlies. Shortly after that the Bozeman team became the Mountain Lions, a name that never caught on. The name Bobcats was chosen by a student body vote.)

The off-field demeanor of the two teams is not the only thing that was vastly different from contemporary games. Instead of having four quarters in a game, the early games were played in two twenty-five minute halves. Touchdowns were worth only five points and there were three downs instead of four. The biggest difference in the actual game is that forward passes were illegal. The ball could be passed laterally but the only way to advance the ball was to carry. Needless to say, this produced more injuries, since the players did not have the type of safety gear that they use today.

There was no coaching staff, the coaches were teachers who volunteered to work with the teams. The “Varsity” players probably had the advantage because their coach, Fred Smith, had played football at Cornell University. They also had the advantage of having fans on the sideline since it is unlikely that many Aggie fans made the trip.

In spite of all of the differances, the game was undoubtably very exciting, and it was the beginning of one of the most intense rivalries in the country.  The final Score Varsity-18, Aggies-6