Ellen Baumler's Blog, page 53

Friday Photo: 1908 Clark Fork Flood

Happy Friday! Over the last part of May in 1908, western Montana endured thirty-three consecutive days of precipitation that led to a disastrous flood...

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 949-408 Missoulians improvised a walking bridge after the Higgins Avenue Bridge over the Clark Fork washed out on June 5, 1908. Click the photo for a bigger version.

P.S. You can find more photos of the flood here.

Great Falls UFOs

Historian Jon Axline has extensively studied and written about a famous incident in 1950. On the morning of August 15, Nick Mariana, the manager of the Great Falls Electrics baseball team, spotted two shiny objects hovering over the Anaconda Company’s Black Eagle smelter across the Missouri River from the Legion Ballpark. Mariana captured the two objects on his hand-held 16mm movie camera before they sped off and disappeared into the clear blue sky.

Image from National Archives via nicap.orgTh...

The Place Where the White Horse Went Down

In the summer of 1837, a smallpox epidemic spread from a steamboat as it lay docked at Fort Union. Although the federal government initiated massive inoculations among the tribes of the Midwest in 1832, the effort did not reach this far north, and Montana’s native people had no immunity. The disease struck the young, vigorous, and most able-bodied family members so quickly that before one person could be properly laid to rest, another family member died. In the end, the epidemic claimed at le...

Women’s Mural

Happy Mother's Day!

The Women’s Commemorative Mural, painted in 1979, has been a longstanding presence in Helena at Last Chance Gulch and Broadway. Funding came from the Montana Arts Council, the Helena Indian Alliance, President Carter’s CETA program, and other sources. Designer Anne Appleby worked with eight teenage girls, teaching them all aspects of research, planning and design. Many Helena women put their brush strokes on the mural. The figures include an old woman and a little girl...

Friday Photo: Fannie Sperry Steele

Happy Friday!


Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 947-603
World champion lady bronco rider Fannie Sperry Steele rides a steer at the Gilman Stampede, September 1919. Click on the photo for a bigger version.

Famed bronc buster Fannie Sperry Steele competed in rodeos until 1925. Then she and her husband bought a dude ranch near Lincoln. After her husband died in 1940, Steele ran the ranch by herself for another twenty-five years. She was one of the first women to receive a packe...

Ladies Rebel

Ladies’ fashions changed during the 1920s, and not everyone approved. Antiquated corsets with garters attached and bloomers gave way to shorter skirts, rolled silk stockings, and step-ins – an open legged panty that replaced the long-legged bloomers. Rolled silk stockings did away with the need for garters. There was quite an art to rolling them, keeping the seam in the back straight, twisting and turning them to end just above the knee, leaving the thighs bare. It took practice to keep the s...

Virginia City Bank Robbery

Well-known Madison County pioneer A. J. Bennett was the cashier in Henry Elling’s bank in 1879 when a pair of desperadoes sauntered in one quiet afternoon.

From Cartoons and Caricatures of Men in Montana (1907) by E.A. Thomson
via Butte-Silver Bow Public Library's Flickr photostreamBennett was behind the counter, and asked what he could do for them. One reached into his vest and the other reached for his hip, and both drew revolvers, which they aimed at Bennett’s head. One man produced a bucksk...

Friday Photo: Glacier Country


Montana Historical Society Photograph ArchivesN. A. Forsyth snapped this photo circa 1908. This landscape is now part of Glacier National Park. One wonders how that young man lugged his camera equipment up onto that pinnacle of rock.

Bill Hynson

Bill Hynson was a bad apple and a rough character who, in a strange manner, scripted his own death at Fort Benton in 1868. When saloon patrons who had overindulged began to report money missing from their pockets, many suspected Hynson. Locals observed Hynson keeping company with inebriated saloon patrons whose funds came up short. The local vigilance committee—that Hynson, ironically, took some credit for organizing—planned a trap to catch the perpetrator. They planted a supposedly drunken p...

Baron O’Keefe

A canyon twelve miles west of Missoula bears the name of a colorful character time has forgotten. He helped build the Mullan Road and planted an orchard in Missoula County. Cornelius O’Keefe introduced the first farming equipment in Montana—thresher, reaper, and mower—and made a small fortune freighting his crops to local mining camps. Perhaps because he came from Ireland, his best crop was potatoes, which he sold by the wagonload to the potato-starved residents of Bannack and Virginia City....