Ellen Baumler's Blog, page 22

Sidney Edgerton

Helena City Commissioners have proclaimed the week of May 17, 2014, Sidney Edgerton Week in tribute to the man who helped create Montana Territory and for whom Lewis and Clark County was originally named. Sidney Edgerton’s contributions to Montana’s earliest history have been largely forgotten. Appointed chief justice of the supreme court of Idaho Territory, he arrived at Bannack in September, too late to cross the Continental Divide. He soon learned that Idaho’s governor had snubbed him by a...

Heikkila-Mattila Homestead

Finnish immigrant Gust Heikkila homesteaded along the Little Belt Creek coulee in 1902. Soon other Finnish settlers homesteaded the area, calling it Korpivaara, meaning “dangerous wilderness,” for its remote wooded surroundings. Here the Heikkilas raised eleven children, expanded their holdings, and were among the first to shift from farming to ranching. The skills of Gust and local Finnish builders Victor Mattila and Matt Maki reveal an outstanding folk vernacular building style that transfe...

Growing up in Butte

Butte, the mining camp that became an industrial hub, was as unique for its children as it was an anomaly. Copper king W. A. Clark’s Columbia Gardens, which boasted one of the nation’s first Ferris wheels and a spectacular roller coaster, was his gift to the community, and children especially loved it. Mining camp ruffians and children of prominent mine officials rubbed elbows on the streetcar that took them all to the gardens each week for Children’s Day. Children by the hundreds enjoyed the...

Friday Photo: Barn Raising

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 2008-23.9Edith and Edelbert Morrissette built this barn on their homestead on Whittman Coulee northwest of Hardin circa 1912. On the back is written, "Mr. Gibbs, Edelbert and Mr. Curtis putting up the roof." Edith herself took the photo.

Montana’s Death Penalty, Part 2

The cruel and unusual punishment argument again surfaced in 2006 with the impending execution of David Thomas Dawson. Dawson kidnapped and killed Monica and David Rodstein along with their eleven-year-old son Andrew in a Billings motel room in 1986; police rescued their fifteen-year-old daughter Amy who survived. Dawson fought his conviction for years, but gave up the fight in 2004 to become a willing participant in carrying out his death sentence. A month before Dawson’s scheduled execution,...

Montana’s Death Penalty, Part 1

It seems that with the botched Oklahoma execution in the news, people might be interested in Montana's execution laws and procedures. This is adapted in two parts from my Montana chapter in Gordon Bakken's book Invitation to an Execution.

Montana’s last hanging was in 1943. In 1983, the legislature amended the law to allow the condemned to choose hanging or lethal injection. Changes also made county executions obsolete and specified the Montana State Prison as the place of execution. Thes...

Friday Photo: Columbia Gardens Roller Coaster

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archvies, ST 001.135Columbia Gardens in Butte boasted one of the nation’s first Ferris wheels as well as this spectacular roller coaster, built in 1906. Photo by N. A. Forsythe, circa 1906-1911.

Aldridge

Coal veins discovered in 1892 in Park County fueled the life of Aldridge, a mining town about seven miles northwest of present day Gardiner. Mostly Austrian immigrants, and a fair share of Italians, populated what briefly became one of the greatest coal producers in the country. By 1895, the mine’s main entry had been driven 1,800 feet into the mountain. By 1897, the mines produced between three and five hundred tons of coal daily for transport to the coke ovens eight thousand feet away. When...

Music and Pines

When Fred Kuphal was a little boy in Germany, he told his mother that his teacher took a goose down from the wall, stroked it with a stick, and made it sing. That began Kuphal’s love affair wih the violin. The Kuphals immigrated to Helena in 1883 where Fred became a promising violinist. He went back to study in Germany, returned to Helena to give music lessons and conduct his own orchestra and went on to join the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1919, newly organized under William A. Clark Jr. The...

Wendigo

Does anyone remember that very scary 1961 episode of Great Ghost Stories retelling novelist Algernon Blackwood’s powerful 1910 short story "The Wendigo?"  The final scene shows the mythical creature, in the body of a starving human, doomed to roam the cold, snow scattered forests of the north, picking at the bark of a tree for nourishment. Others, including Theodore Roosevelt in his book The Wilderness Hunter and Stephen King in Pet Sematary, have written stories of wendigos.

Illustration...