Ellen Baumler's Blog, page 21
June 11, 2014
Early-day Travel on the Helena to Fort Benton Road
By the mid-1860s, Helena had surpassed Alder Gulch in population. Roads ran in all directions to Gallatin City, Virginia City, Deer Lodge, and Fort Benton. The road between Fort Benton and Helena was an especially well-worn path used by stagecoaches, horsemen, and freighters traveling between these two key settlements. The road saw heavy traffic from the earliest days of Montana Territory until the advent of the railroad in 1883. Bullwhackers performed an essential task, walking alongside the...
June 9, 2014
Mining Camp Architecture
Bannack, Virginia City, and Helena each had a turn as Montana’s territorial capital, but each was destined for a different future. Today Bannack is a state park whose empty buildings mostly date to the 1880s and later. Helena owes its survival beyond the mining phase to the Northern Pacific which linked the town to distant markets in 1883. Few 1860s gold camp remnants survive in Helena. But Virginia City has a remarkable fifty-one 1860s gold rush-era buildings. Virginia City’s buildings retai...
June 6, 2014
Friday Photo: Cow Camp
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 981-576This image by well-known cowboy photographer L. A. Huffman shows a rare view inside of a ranch cabin, where a cowboy named Slim Ridge relaxes. The LO Ranch kept this cabin for use during roundups. According to the photographer, it was located between Pumpkin Creek and Mizpah.
June 4, 2014
Reed and Bowles
The Reed and Bowles Trading Post outside Lewistown is a little-known gem well worth a visit. The oldest standing building in the area, the post originally stood about a mile and a half southeast of its present location. It was part of a short-lived post called Fort Sherman intended to serve a large Crow reservation, but by 1874 the plans for the reservation had fallen through. Construction of the Carroll Trail, a freighting route between Carroll on the Missouri River and Helena, prompted Alon...
June 2, 2014
Gus Thompson’s Nearly Forgotten Legacy
In 1953, baseball fans celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the first World Series. All the living players were invited back as guests of honor—all except one player who history seems to have forgotten. John Gustav “Gus” Thompson was a young pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1903 when he pitched for the Pirates in the first World Series against the Boston Americans (renamed the Red Sox in 1907). Thompson went on to pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals and pitched his last major league game...
May 30, 2014
Friday Photo: Pitamakin Pass
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 956-850A group of riders pauses at the top of Cut Bank Pass (now Pitamakin Pass) in Glacier National Park in 1915. Mount Morgan is in the background.
May 28, 2014
St. Ignatius
St. Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Reservation was founded in 1854. At one time—from 1875 to 1900—the mission had a shop with a printing press which produced "Narratives from the Holy Scripture” in the Kalispell language and a Kalispell dictionary. A lumber mill, an agricultural and industrial school for boys, and a boarding school for girls and the mission church once sprawled across the landscape on the Flathead Reservation. Church officials laid the cornerstone of the present mission chu...
May 26, 2014
Helena’s First Decoration Day
Decoration Day, later called Memorial Day, was a tradition that sprang from the tremendous loses both the north and the south experienced during the Civil War. The tradition of decorating veterans’ graves took root in different states at different times from the 1870s through the early twentieth century. On May 30, 1883, Helena observed Decoration Day for the first time with a mile-long procession that assembled at Harmonia Hall on Broadway. It made its way out of the city to the cemetery on...
May 23, 2014
Friday Photo: Skeleton Teacher
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 74-104.256 GPI'll bet a lot of teachers start to feel this way toward the end of the year. This undated photograph was taken by Edward Reinig, most likely in a Helena classroom. Does anyone recognize the location?
May 21, 2014
The Discovery at Last Chance Gulch
With the first greening of spring in 1864, John S. Cowan of Georgia, D. J. Miller of Alabama, John Crabb of Iowa, and Reginald (Bob) Stanley of Nuneaton, England, set out from Alder Gulch to prospect along the Little Blackfoot River. They had no luck and headed over the mountains. After several miserable days of wandering cold and wet in the mist, the sun emerged and they reached the Continental Divide. Pushing down the eastern slope, they camped in a narrow gulch where a stream trickled thro...
