Ellen Baumler's Blog, page 26

Friday Photo: Snowplow

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, H-1800The Northern Pacific Railroad rotary snowplow clears track during the winter of 1887-1888. Photo by F. Jay Haynes.

Mathilda Dalton

Epidemics were a terrible danger in all mining camps. Not only were diseases and their causes not well understood, but miners were careless with their water sources and the streams needed for placer mining quickly became polluted. Typhoid, spread through contaminated water, was particularly common. The Dalton family learned about this danger firsthand. The Daltons were natives of Maine and came west from Wisconsin traveling with the first Fisk expedition in 1862. The family of six settled at...

Friday Photo: Skiing

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, H-3285Children ski in Yellowstone National Park in 1894. F. Jay Haynes took the photo.

Jack Beauchamp

Artist Jack Beauchamp was born in Indiana in 1906. His family relocated to Fort Benton and later came to Helena where Beauchamp graduated from Helena High School. He studied art and painting, and during the Great Depression, Beauchamp won several competitions to paint murals in U.S. post offices. In 1941, he became the Helena Art Center director at Carroll College. While he was in Helena, Beauchamp’s art was often exhibited and locally coveted and collected. In the mid-1940s, he left Helena f...

Lombard

The town of Lombard once sat along the Milwaukee Road, between Toston and Logan, at the crossroads of the Northern Pacific. Originally known as Castle Junction, the town was founded in 1895 and renamed for the Northern Pacific’s chief engineer A. G. Lombard. Until 1930, no roads led to Lombard and it was accessible only by train and horseback. Chinese immigrant Billy Kee was mayor of Lombard and built a two-story hotel in 1897 called the High Point Inn.

The High Point Inn. Photo via Following...

Friday Photo: Butte's Salvation Army

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 74-37Men enjoy a meal at the Salvation Army in Butte during the Great Depression. The calendar appears to show April 1935.

Ralph DeCamp

Charlie Russell, Edgar S. Paxson, and Ralph DeCamp make up the great triumvirate of Montana’s best-loved frontier artists. All three contributed to the art in the Montana State Capitol and were great friends. Although DeCamp was also a fine photographer and portrait painter, he is best known for his landscapes. DeCamp spent his teen years in Moorehead, Minnesota, the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad. He studied at the Pennsylvania School of Art and then, back at Moorehead, got a big...

African Americans in Montana

Several instances of the presence of African Americans in the territory before the major gold rushes are known. William Clark’s slave, York, traveled with the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805–1806, Henry “Negro Henry” Mills worked for the American Fur Company in Fort Benton from the late 1850s, James Beckwourth was a well-known trapper of the 1820s and 1830s whose life has been the subject of some interest, and Isaiah Dorman served as a Sioux interpreter for the army who fell with Custer at...

Friday Photo: Glacier Park Hotel

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 956-665Visitors gather around the fireplace in the lobby of the Glacier Park Hotel in East Glacier, circa 1914.

Hydraulicking

Placer gold is that which is loose in the soil and closest to the surface. Placer mining requires water to wash the dirt, perseverance, and a strong back. Gold is the heaviest material in the soil, and so in the process of washing, the heavy gold is the residue remaining in the pan or the sluice box. The rich goldfields that drew miners to Montana in the mid-1860s only held so much placer gold. Miners wanted to be sure to extract all of it, and so when that closest to the surface was depleted...