Missoulian 150th

SINCE 1870

150 Celebrating 150 years of serving western Montana

A journey through history and beyond

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tOmmy martInO/missoulian

we juxtapose an “average” home today in the rest of us are babes in the woods. t’s a brave and scary new world out Missoula Valley that costs $338,000? And that The telephone had yet to be invented when there. But then, when wasn’t it? within a five-minute drive in any direction are That history has chosen a year called the first Missoulian newspapers rolled off the other dwellings that reflect living standards of a press. In recent springs, first-graders at Bonner 2020 to render the future so unclear School have been invited on guided walks to the century and more ago? seems like the cruelest of ironies; that We would love to zap into the future that Bonner-Milltown History Center, where they is, if you don’t recall the past. is now those early Missoulian newspapermen, get a chance to make a call on a working rotary In this special section we mark the 150th guys like Frank Woody and Washington phone. Dialing is a foreign concept to them, anniversary of what became the Missoulian, McCormick in the 1870s and Arthur Stone and requiring a finger motion like no other they’ve Montana’s oldest continuous newspaper.

Martin Hutchens later on. Could they come to experienced and may never again. Frankly, we In just the past century and a half we can, grips with news delivery methods of the 21st should be more amazed than we are when our and should, reflect on pandemics every bit century, the unceasing search for models that 2-year-olds get their pudgy hands on our smart as overwhelming as COVID-19, on political attract readers in a competitive digital world phones and deftly swipe up Super Why or ABC and social unrest that match the current scene and still make money enough to pay the hired rancor for rancor, on wildfires too destructive to Mouse apps. hands? One that offers hope to those who would Consider the shack on West Front Street believe, and on wars that put everything else to open a paper made of paper on their breakfast that produced the first newspaper in Missoula. shame. tables each morning to scan, devour, cuss Is it with pride or consternation, or both, that We’ve also seen incredible advances in and nod at what local journalists technology and medicine, lifedeemed worthy to spend their time changing works of art and music, producing the day or the week the fruits of all that unrest that before? challenge our biases and ignorance, So where do we go from here? and an appreciation of the fragility When we dispense of Hindsight of the natural world that generations 2020, what can we say about have sweated to instill.

Foresight 2021? What can we learn Now consider the indigenous that helps us keep our wits about among us, including local tribes that us, even as we strap masks over our have generously contributed to this mouths and noses? look-back on a history otherwise Maybe it’ll help to remember we constrained by the sideboards of don’t live in a time bubble. Things Euro-American mores. will get better, things will get Disease? Social change? Natural worse, things will get better again. disasters? War? Reverence for Guaranteed. Because when since nature? As the Séliš-Ql̓ ispé Culture 1870, when since time immemorial, Committee gently suggests in a Staff posed in front of the Daily Missoulian building. 1912. Archives did they not? series of beautiful essays herein, the & Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana

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Missoulian 150

Sunday, September 27, 2020

Happy 150th, the first time

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bottom of page 2, in tiny print above business pretty much daily, it was founded in 1873. he Missoulian you read today hours, mailing address, etc., the date of our In post-World War II we got more specific. had two birth dates: the 15th of founding is reflected as Sept. 15, 1870.

“Founded May 1, 1873” appeared in some September, 1870, and May 1, There’s no good reason to go with either 20,000 editions of the Missoulian, usually on 1873. date, or not to go with it. But the connections page 2. That was changed in recent months.

The first one, 150 years ago are direct between Magee’s and Morrison’s Our front-page “Missoulian” flag now includes this month, was when the initial “Missoula and Cedar Creek Press of 1870” and “Since 1870” and “Celebrating 150 years of edition of Joseph Magee’s and I.H. Morrison’s Woody’s and Chisholm’s Weekly Missoulian of serving western Montana.” In the box at the Missoula and Cedar Creek Pioneer rolled off 1873. By either name it is the oldest the press. Like so many things in continuously operating newspaper Montana, it was born of a gold rush, in Montana. in this case to Cedar Creek 50 miles With all that in mind, we to the west, where a rich strike had celebrate our first 150th birthday been made the autumn before. with a series of vignettes throughout There is some debate whether the decades that help tell some of that paper was printed in Missoula the stories of Missoula and western or in a mining camp near today’s Montana that this newspaper, by town of Superior. It became a whatever name, has chronicled. permanent Missoula fixture when The Selis Qlispe (Salish-Pend d’ the gold rush dwindled and Frank Oreille) Culture Committee has Woody, Missoula pioneer, future generously lent its voice with essays first mayor and renowned judge, and timelines that help us more bought the Pioneer with partner T.H. accurately reflect the history of Chisholm in 1873. They renamed these mountains and valleys. It’s a it the Weekly Missoulian, and the presence that dates back to centuries Missoulian it has been ever since. before there was ever such thing as It’s probably a matter of a Missoulian and one that remains semantics but for most of the past Three women at desks and a man standing in back of stacks of paper at the Daily Missoulian in 1923. archives & Special alive and vibrant today.

100 years the daily paper stated, Collections, mansfield Library, university of montana

1870s

Charles Schafft, circa 1881

Sept. 15, 1870: the first edition KIM BRIGGEMAN kbriggeman@missoulian.com

Nothing beats the original.

When the Missoula and Cedar Creek Pioneer published its first edition it presented this story under the header: A Notable Event.

“The citizens of Missoula and those on the road between here and Helena were agreeably surprised a few days since by the sight of a printing press on wheels.

“The motive power for the locomotion of the welcome freight was 12 mules, gaily caparisoned with miniature national flags, etc.

The wagons containing the outfit were also embellished with banners, and other devices, and bore the name of the paper in letters two feet long, upon every part where the legend could find a place.

“The approach to town of the material, with which the Tree of Knowledge has ever been constructed in all communities, was heralded some days in advance, and, when the event occurred, the enthusiasm manifested by our citizens baffled adequate description. A score of brass bands would have been a ‘Quakers’ meeting’ by contrast with the surging and tumultuous uproar of welcome which greeted 1870 Sept. 15: First edition of Missoula and Cedar Creek Press published on Sept. 15.

the advent of the wagons containing the appliances of ‘the art preservative of all arts.’

“At first, the drivers in charge of the teams imagined that our people had made a mistake in their time-reckoning, and were only then celebrating the Fourth of July. Becoming assured of the true state of affairs by the repeated and vociferous ‘Hurrah! For the Missoula Pioneer!’ they cracked their whips, helped to swell the general din, and trod along with conscious pride in the share they had stake in the pleasing event. Even the animals that had hauled the heavily-laden wagons over the main range of the Rockies from Helena seemed to be elated by the infectious hilarity which surrounded them. A general holiday was taken for the rest of the day.”

And so it began 150 years ago. Where it began has long been a source of confusion.

The bulk of the population in western Montana was in the gulches of Cedar Creek, not in the county seat of Missoula 50 miles to the east. But did the press ever reach Cedar Creek?

Probably not, based on the research of one of this town’s and this newspaper’s preeminent researchers, the late Audra Browman. She 1873 A few Séliš families move to Jocko with sub-chief Arlee, who is treated by U.S. as head chief.

looked at other newspapers like the Rocky Mountain Gzaette of Aug. 24, 1870, which reported that Joseph Magee and I.H. Morrison had bought materials “for purpose of starting a newspaper at Missoula.” Two days later the Helena Herald reported it was sending “newspaper materials” to Missoula for Magee and Morrison.

Browman looked at legal filings that said on Aug. 29, 1870, Morrison and brothers I.H. and M.H. Magee took out a mortgage on a lot and building on the south side of Front Street.

The following January Morrison sold to one William Collier his one-third interest “in a lot now occupied by the Missoula and Cedar Creek Pioneer office on the south side of Front Street,” as well as “press, materials, etc.”

“It can be concluded,” Browman wrote for the national bicentennial edition of the Missoulian on July 2, 1976, “that while the paper was printed in Missoula it may have had an office at Cedar Creek to sell ads.”

“For a time Cedar Creek boasted 3,000 residents while Missoula had only 300,” Browman wrote. “But in the winter the population of Cedar Creek dropped and Missoula’s bulged.”

1876 First district court in Missoula County convenes.

1877 Fort Missoula established.

1870 1871 President Grant signs Executive Order falsely asserting that Bitterroot Valley had been surveyed according to stipulations in 1855 Hellgate Treaty and determined less suitable to needs of Séliš; orders tribe to move to Jocko (Flathead) Reservation.

1873 First edition of the Weekly Missoulian published.

1877 Army pursues Chief Joseph and Nez Perce across Idaho and Montana; Séliš decide not to join them in war, but help ensure their safe passage through the Bitterroot Valley.

Missoulian 150

Sunday, September 27, 2020

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Missoulian 150

Sunday, September 27, 2020

1880s-1890s

May 27, 1883: Marent Trestle, coming of the railroad that bears his name in 1860.

Frank Woody’s there, of course. He first came to this valley in 1856 and became Missoula’s first mayor just last month after the town was incorporated. And Washington McCormick, Capt.

Higgins’ law partner who became his brotherin-law when he married Kate Higgins. He was

KIM BRIGGEMAN kbriggeman@missoulian.com

of former president Ulysses S. Grant, on Sept. 8.

For now, all eyes are on you. If you’re indeed Eli, you have allegedly made a name for yourself back east as a trapeze artist for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. You’ll go down in history as one of two prospectors who’ll discover the Silvery Slocan, a vast deposit of silver and lead ore in eastern British

Put yourself in Frenchy’s shoes.

We don’t know what those shoes look like all these years later, but Eli “Frenchy” Carpenter was about to place first one, then the other, on a rope stretched across a gulch northwest of Missoula on the last Sunday of May 1883.

When he looked down, if he looked down, Carpenter saw a worksite and a cluster of buildings, including Joe Marent’s public house, far below. Drinks were being poured down there. Buggies pulling up. Picnics unpacked.

Wagers made.

The incomplete Marent Trestle, a key piece in and the highest bridge on the Northern Pacific’s transcontinental railroad line, loomed beside the daredevil Frenchman or, by extension, you.

“The distance from the water to the roadbed on top of the bridge is 226 feet, and the dizzy height will make many a tourist’s head swim as he looks down from the window of a Pullman palace car,” a Butte correspondent reported a couple of months ago.

One more thing: Today the wind is blowing hard.

Hundreds of spectators gawk up as you begin your walk. It requires “no little nerve to venture out upon a slender tightrope at such a height in Built 1882 and 1883 the Marent Trestle west of Missoula was replaced by iron bridge in 1884-1885. a gale,” the Missoulian will point out.

Image by F. Jay Haynes.

The railroad is coming. It’s difficult all these jaded years later to recapture the excitement of that spring and summer of 1883, when the world was instrumental in luring the Northern Pacific to run Columbia in 1891. opening up to this frontier town as NP construction through Missoula in the first place.

But first, you step out over Marent Gulch. Some crews approached from east and west. The circus The real anticipation is for the first train to cross say you’re blindfolded. Some say you’ll turn a atmosphere helps explain why so many have found Marent Trestle. That will happen on June 15, to somersault. Some below are betting you’ll fall. You their way out to Evaro Canyon for your high-stakes the cheers of an even greater throng below, with disappoint them. high-wire act.

Miss Minnie Freeman, “one of our most popular, “After walking the rope,” the newspaper will Who’s down there watching? accomplished and fascinating village belles” report, “Frenchy went through the usual gymnastic Well, there’s Julia Higgins. She’s the wife of crossing on the engine. It’ll be a prelude to the first formula of rope-walkers, completing his task in a Missoula co-founder Christopher Higgins and train into Missoula on June 23; to the east-west safe and satisfactory manner.” daughter of Richard Grant, the old Hudson Bay Co. connection of rails near Gold Creek in August, and A collection of $53 is taken up. Jovial Joe Marent factor who moved his family to the Missoula creek to the grand last-spike ceremony, featuring the likes throws in another $50.

June 14, 1897: 25th infantry bicycle corps

Members of the U.S. Army 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps stationed at Fort Missoula, 1897. Lt. James A. Moss is riding on the left beside the two rows of soldiers. Archives & Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana KIM BRIGGEMAN kbriggeman@missoulian.com

Let’s assume Private Elwood Forman straightened up in the pouring rain to work the kinks from his back.

Maybe he looked up the road and back, at the other 19 privates of the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps and the white lieutenant and doctor who led them. Perhaps Forman smiled. They, like he, were scraping in exasperation at their gummed-up spokes with meat knives and wood chunks.

Mud, Forman might have surmised, was the great racial equalizer.

The road they traveled lifted out of the Potomac Valley in the Blackfoot.

The sun had been rising over Mount Jumbo that Monday morning when

the chosen few of the 25th had left Fort Missoula on a 1,900-mile bike ride to St. Louis. They’d spun grandly through the streets of Missoula four miles from the fort.

Led by Lt. James Moss they had crossed the Higgins Bridge and into the city of Missoula, their white packs and glistening bikes making a grand view for early risers who’d come to cheer them on.

The brainchild and mission of Moss was to prove that bicycles had a place in modern military movements. At Bonner they had veered off the course of the Northern Pacific railroad and turned up the Blackfoot.

Their progress was first stemmed at McNamara crossing, where the county bridge was flooded out. It

1880 Jeannette 1883 Northern Rankin born at Pacific Railroad Grant Creek arrives. ranch.

1883 Town of Missoula incorporates.

1886 Missoula’s first high-school graduation exercises.

took 45 minutes for a pair of “log men” to ferry them across, seven and eight at a time. The weather held until they stopped past Potomac for lunch.

Then the skies opened and here they were, alternately pedaling, walking, carrying and scraping their rigged-out Spaulding military bikes that weighed 55 pounds fully loaded.

“No one but a person who has had the actual experience can appreciate the sensation of being caught with a bicycle in a rain in gumbo mud,” Moss would write later for the national media. “All those indefinable feelings of ‘let-me-alone-and-I’lllet-you-alone,’ ‘I-was-born-unluckyanyway,” and so on … manifest themselves in all their glory.”

Looming ahead were 1,870 miles

1891 Troops march Chief Charlo and Salish out of Bitterroot homeland on Montana’s “Trail of Tears.”

1883-84 Samwel Walking Coyote, stepfather of Latat (Little Peregrine Falcon Robe), sells bison to Michel Pablo & Charles Allard, who expand the Flathead Reservation herd to nearly 1,000 animals by 1890s.

1889 Montana becomes a state.

1893 Legislature establishes state university in Missoula.

1892 Downtown Missoula fire burns 20 buildings.

and well over a month to St. Louis.

The 30-year-old Forman knew that. He couldn’t have known was what lay beyond that for him. The Maryland-born soldier had arrived at Fort Missoula with the 25th Infantry in 1892 and would reenlist in the Army twice. He left with the troops for Cuba when the Spanish-American War broke out and spent time in military hospitals after sustaining a wounded arm.

When the war and the 25th moved to the Philippines, Forman was stricken with tuberculosis. He died in Manila on April 21, 1901 — the only member of the bicycle corps of 1897 to lose his life in the SpanishAmerican conflict.

1898 1897 Soldiers from all-Black Cornerstone 25th Infantry at of UM’s Main Fort Missoula ride Hall laid. bicycles to St. Louis.

1897 UM’s first football season

1898 Tribes hold first Arlee July Celebration, in spite of protests from priests and Indian Agents.

Missoulian 150

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1900s-1910s

June 17, 1904: The Great Bearmouth Train Robbery GWEN FLORIO gwen.florio@missoulian.com

It was full dark, 11:30 at night, when the eastbound North Coast Limited stopped at Bearmouth for water.

Engineer Thomas Wade had walked a little way from the train when he found himself looking down the barrel of a gun.

Wade knew immediately what was happening. After all, only two years earlier on Oct. 4, 1902, the Northern Pacific had been robbed at Bearmouth by a man with pistols strapped to his wrists. That engineer, Dan O’Neal, had tried to subdue the man, only to be shot through the abdomen during the struggle. He died a few hours later. Wade would not make the same mistake.

The bandits — there were two, one tall, one short, one silent, one “talkative to the point of garrulity”— ordered Wade back onto the train and directed him to take it into the canyon two miles to the east.

“The little man was especially cool about his work,” the Missoulian reported. “He was not excited at any time and did not hurry, joshing with the trainmen during all the time the holdup was in process.”

The train stopped in the canyon. There — just as had been done with O’Neal — the bandits handed Wade a cigar, ordered him to smoke it, and then to touch the lighted end to the fuse of a bundle of dynamite that blasted open the door to the express car. As terrified passengers sought hiding places throughout the train, the men turned their attention to a safe, succeeding in dramatic fashion, blowing it clear through the wall of the train. It sailed 40 feet before landing, whereupon the bandits scooped up its contents, shot out the train’s lights, and vanished into the night.

Two hastily assembled posses, one from Missoula and one from Deer Lodge, failed to find them, turning up only a rubber band-bound gunnysack containing masks — “the stitching showed that it was done by a man” — and two empty cartridge boxes. Speculation as to their whereabouts ran rampant, including one plausible theory that they had merely remained in the area, holing up in one of its many caves.

But suspicion soon fastened on one George Hammond, a cowboy-turned-desperado also suspected in the earlier robbery and the killing of O’Neal.

Meanwhile, “relic hunters” descended upon the site, picking among the ruined crates of fruit and cut flowers, with mangled coins highly sought-after souvenirs.

On July 13, Hammond was tracked down in Spokane.

Upon his arrest, he led law enforcement to two caches.

At one, they dug up a jar containing $1,500 in cash and 357 diamonds; the second contained gold and silver coins.

Law enforcement trailed his accomplice, John

Woodsmen survey the remnants of the 1910 fire, or “Big Burn,” on the North Fork of the St. Joe National Forest in Idaho in this photo by J.B. Halm. The 3-million acre fire complex blew up on Aug. 20 and for two terrifying days and nights ran rampant in northern Idaho, western Montana and part of eastern Washington. Flames destroyed the town of Wallace, Idaho, and the fire killed some 86 people, most of them firefighters. The 5-year-old Forest Service estimated eight billion board feet of merchantable timber was destroyed, enough wood to build 800,000 houses. Photo courtesy of USDA Forest Service

Christie, along a roundabout route through Wallace, Idaho, then Spokane and finally to Hope, North Dakota, where he was arrested. He had between $700 and $800, and some diamonds. Each man served lengthy prison terms but both were eventually paroled. Christie ended up working as a waiter in Spokane; Hammond reportedly left the country, vanishing from the pages of the Missoulian except for occasional stories like this one.

A year later, on May 27, 1905, yet another armed masked man — later identified as Clarence Young — accosted the train at Bearmouth. But this time, the express car manager clobbered Young on the back of the head “and he woke up in jail.”

There were other train robberies in Montana after that, but none in Bearmouth.

And, as the Missoulian’s Deane Jones noted in 1971, “now there are no North Coast Limiteds.”

Nov. 7, 1916: Jeannette Rankin elected to Congress KIM BRIGGEMAN kbriggeman@missoulian.com

This is excerpted from a story that ran in 2016, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Jeannette Rankin’s historic first election to the U.S. House of Representatives.

As the story goes, a harried newsman at the Daily Missoulian took a phone call on election night 1916.

The woman at the other end was wondering how the presidential race between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Hughes was going.

How about the U.S. Senate race in Montana? At length she got around to the real reason she called. What, she asked, were the prospects for Miss Rankin in her race for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives?

“Oh, she lost,” came the reply, from a man who really had no idea.

Thus Jeannette Rankin went to bed that Tuesday night at the family home on Madison Street — today the site of a hotel parking lot and a Jiffy Lube — thinking she’d failed in her bid to become the first woman in the world to be elected to a national legislative body.

She and the newsman were wrong, of course. As results trickled in over the next two days it became probable, then certain that the 36-year-old Rankin, born, raised and primarily schooled in Missoula, was on her way to Washington.

She read a prepared statement on Friday, promising to represent “not

only the women of Montana but all American women and children.”

A leader in the fight that culminated in 1914 and gave the women of Montana the right to vote, Rankin said she planned to introduce legislation seeking a federal suffrage amendment, an eight-hour work day and equal wages for women.

Her statement didn’t address the war in Europe and the very real possibility of the U.S. getting involved, an issue that she’d face her first days on the job the following April. Rankin’s “no” vote then was one of 49. When she returned to Congress a quarter of a century later, she cast the lone dissenting vote to join World War II on the day following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The wildly unpopular vote sealed her political doom, as well as her legacy as one of the 20th century’s foremost peacemongers.

Rankin’s history-making campaign had been blessedly short — just four months from the July day she declared her candidacy at a meeting of the Missoula County Good Government League in the Florence Hotel.

No scathing TV ads, no social media battles, no political debates.

What “outside money” there was came primarily from the pockets of little brother Wellington Rankin, a well-placed Helena attorney who went on to become attorney general, a state Supreme Court justice and

1901 Missoula’s 1908 Milltown 1909 First train first automobile Dam begins on the Chicago, arrives by train. operation.

Milwaukee and St. Paul RR.

1908 U.S. expropriates more than 16,000 acres from the Tribes for a National Bison Range.

1908 Missoula’s biggest flood on record.

the leader of the Republican Party in Montana.

If the newspapers from across Montana are to be believed, the crowds for Rankin grew larger as Nov. 7 approached.

In Great Falls “the opera house was packed to the highest balcony and when Miss Rankin arose to speak, the demonstration was so prolonged and so deafening that it was several minutes before she was allowed to talk,” one widely distributed report said.

Several hundred people were turned away from a Rankin appearance in Anaconda, and in Butte two halls were packed. “When Miss Rankin finished speaking in one, she was hurried to the next one.”

A marginal Republican at best — “I was never a Republican. I ran on the Republican ticket,” she later said — she nonetheless urged her supporters to vote straight Republican.

The unnamed but confident opinion editor of her hometown paper put the Rankin phenomenon in perspective on the eve of Election Day. “Her appearance in the national house of representatives,” the Missoulian editor wrote, “will serve notice on the eastern conservatives that a new day has dawned in American democracy.”

1909 Flathead Indian reservation opened to nonIndian settlement.

1909 IWW free speech fight on Missoula street corners.

1910 Big Burn kills 87 and chars 3 million acres.

1910 Missoula’s electric street car system begins operation.

A.B. Kimball, ticket agent for the Northern Pacific Railway in Missoula, wears a medical mask during the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic.

The flu first peaked in Missoula in October, but cases and deaths spiked again shortly after victory was declared on Nov. 11 to conclude World War I. Higgins Avenue “was swept in a blaze of 100 per cent Americanism,” the Daily Missoulian reported.

An estimated 130 people died in Missoula from the flu or flu-related causes in the last 2½ months of that year. Montana Historical Society Research Center Photograph Archives

1914 Western Montana Fair opens at current fairgrounds.

1911 Eugene Ely makes first airplane flight into Missoula.

1916 1917 Jeannette Rankin U.S. enters elected to U.S. World Congress.

War I.

1915 U.S. sells to non-Indians 889 “Villa Sites” around south half of Flathead Lake.

1918 Spanish influenza pandemic closes down Missoula.

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Sunday, September 27, 2020

Missoulian 150

The Missoulian’s greatest resource has always been its people. For more than 150 years, hundreds of people have contributed their talents and hard work to produce our daily newspaper.

Jessica Abell Tanya Andrusevich Chris Arvish John Auwen Carolyn Bartlett Tom Bauer Bryon Bertollt Mazana Boerboom Heide Borgonovo Kim Briggeman Jerry Bush Rick Bush Joshua Carroll Tonya Champa Rob Chaney

Tyler Christensen Anne Cruikshank Bill Dallman Sara Diggins Mary Anne Duganz David Erickson Cameron Evans Roxann Fifield Gwen Florio Barb Garrison Frank Gogola Robert Guiffre Ty Hagan Jordan Hansen

Missoulian 150

Sonam Karchungtsang Raymond Kauffman Lula Koester Alex Kopacka Seaborn Larson Toni LeBlanc Todd Matthews Annie Mead Bob Meseroll Shaun Morin Becca Mosson Jackie Maunder Hanna Nagy Tandy Neighbor

Kim Reifer Mariah Richtmyer Jack Ryan Laura Scheer Ben Smith Larry Sorenson Bill Speltz Alex St Flynn Jim Strauss Donovan Swanner Keila Szpaller Jacque Walawander Cory Walsh Joe Weston Tyler Wilson

Sunday, September 27, 2020

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Missoulian 150

Sunday, September 27, 2020

1920s-1930s

July 29, 1923: Missoula’s Black church and the KKK SEABORN LARSON seaborn.larson@missoulian.com

Rev. Chester Reid patiently waited for the seven hooded figures wearing the insignia of the Ku Klux Klan to finish their surprise visit and speech to his congregation at Missoula’s St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal church. He likely had no idea he would die less than a year later, even if he could already feel his kidneys throbbing.

The congregation was silent that Sunday night in late July as the four figures who entered the church sought to assure the audience of their “friendship.”

No one stood up to thank them for their selfproclaimed harmony, according to a report in the Missoulian the next day. The Klansman had just donated $20 to the fundraising efforts for the church after silently stalking inside and moving to the front during the sermon. Their leader told the Black congregation that they were indeed not there to oppress, and they had the church’s best interests in heart. Greg Martin, a Missoula resident roughly 100 years later, would surmise after his own thorough reporting on the incident that the pledge came with a condition that the Black church keep its place in the social and racial hierarchy.

Rev. Reid told a Missoulian reporter that night that

the speaker emphasized three points of the Klan’s platform.

“He said they were for protecting the schools. That was their first point,” Reid reported. “They were for standing by the flag, that was their third point — and I don’t just recollect what he said their second point was but I believe it was to stand by the city.”

After five months in Missoula, Rev. Reid had found the city to be friendly enough for himself, his wife and 3-month-old daughter. In 1923, the pastor of the A.M.E. church on Phillips Street on Missoula’s Westside, the only one of its kind in the city’s history, motored through increasing adversity.

Reid was “an energetic little man” who had a gravity about him when he spoke, according to a profile in a March 18, 1923, Missoulian article titled, “White people aid church of Negroes.” The writer brought Reid to the readers on a personal level as he promoted his church’s fundraiser for its operational budget. The Missoulian noted his home behind the church was neat, “but the rough walls and floors and the scanty furniture do not lend a very comfortable effect.” Reid’s salary was $49, but his actual pay ran as low as $11 some months, according to the report.

Reid had graduated in 1918 from Morris Brown College in Atlanta, a historically Black Methodist

liberal arts college. He arrived in western Montana in late 1922 with a pregnant wife. The Klan, while on the rise in Montana, was having a public relations fiasco. The group, recognized for its terrorizing and murderous disposition, was distancing itself from claims a group of hooded men had kidnapped a young man from the University of Montana a few months earlier, gave him a “talking to” and turned him loose.

The Klansmen decried the act as an outrage. Much of town likely saw the burning cross on Waterworks Hill in May. But the Klan apparently took pride in being law-abiding, an officer told the Missoulian in January 1923.

Reid told the Missoulian he and he alone stood, smiled and thanked the visitors for their contribution.

Then they left.

The Spokane District of the A.M.E. church saw Reid’s efforts in fundraising and posture against the Klan’s masquerade and in September assigned him to lead the A.M.E. in Butte, which had a population four times the size of Missoula. His tenure wouldn’t last long, as he went back to Georgia due to failing health.

In May 1924, the Missoulian reported on Reid’s death, caused by Bright’s disease, today is known as nephritis, or liver disease.

1937: Macleans’ last fishing trip together KIM BRIGGEMAN kbriggeman@missoulian.com

It must’ve been the summer of 1937 when Norman Maclean pulled to a stop on a high bank of the Blackfoot River with his father John and brother Paul in the car.

In 1971, Annick Smith wrote about climbing down to the same bank with her husband Dave and their boys on a lazy fishing trip.

Jerry O’Connell, founder and executive director of the Big Blackfoot Riverkeeper, took a Missoulian photographer and reporter down to it in 2013. He was showing them what he believed to be the site of the last of three fishing scenes Maclean described in his seminal story “A River Runs Through It.” “At about 10 o’clock, when the sun’s coming up to the east, it shines down through this curve,” O’Connell told Michael Gallacher and I. “The sun moves around with the curve and it lights up those rocks on the other side.

The shade and the trees and the textures … they’re just gorgeous.”

In her memoir “Homestead,”

published in 1995, Smith remembered the family fishing trip 24 years earlier as “an idyllic morning I carry around with me like a lucky rubbing stone.”

She and her boys “hop through willows, serviceberry and chokecherry brush” to snatch salmon flies. Her husband catches a pair of 20-inch rainbows. Her two older sons, Eric and Steve, catch smaller ones. The twins, Alex and Andrew, were too young to fish but would follow in their mom’s footsteps as filmmakers.

After lunch, “with the sun high and the water cool, I am happy to lie on damp sand,” Smith wrote, “the older guys gone downriver in search of elusive big ones, the four-year-old twins making dams out of colored river stones — aquamarine, rose, jade green.”

The place fits Maclean’s description — above the mouth of Belmont Creek, down a rough road to the end of a flat that was almost certainly Ninemile Prairie.

Across the river are indeed the “red and green Precambrian rocks beside the blue water (that) were almost from the basement of the world and time.”

He taught in the English department at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1973, and he wrote “A River Runs Through It” as a novella, freeing him up to condense place and time into poetry.

“The voices of the subterranean river in the shadows were different from the voices of the sunlit river ahead,” he wrote. “In the shadows against the cliff the river was deep and engaged in profundities, circling back on itself now and then to say things over to be sure it had understood itself.

“But the river ahead came out into the sunny world like a chatterbox, doing its best to be friendly. It bowed to one shore and then to the other so nothing would feel neglected.”

Maclean’s famous opening of the novella was: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”

So it is that the last and longest scene in the story at this stretch of river conjured up the biblical Three: Three men fish three fishing holes, Norman calling it a day after he caught his three finest fish ever — not

because they were the biggest or “most spectacular” but because “my brother waded across the river to give me the fly that would catch them and because they were the last fish I ever caught fishing with him.”

Paul died the following May, victim of a brutal beating in Chicago where he and Norman both worked. He was 32.

It was 35 more years before Norman retired and began writing “A River Runs Through It.” But it’s Annick Smith who has the last lines in this story.

“On that faraway summer morning (in 1971) I had no idea that my humanities professor from the University of Chicago lived just up the road at Seeley Lake,” she wrote in “Homestead.” “I would never have guessed that twenty miles upriver, at the age of seventythree, Norman Maclean was beginning to write a great book about family and fishing and love. Or that the book’s culminating scene would take place exactly where I sat, daydreaming in the midday Blackfoot breeze.”

A crowd looks on from snowy Higgins Avenue as fire fighters spray water on Missoula’s first Florence Hotel in the Friday morning of Jan. 10, 1913. It was started by hot ashes dumped in an elevator shaft. The hotel was gutted, but all three guests in their rooms at the time escaped uninjured. Smoke and water ruined three shops on the ground floor — Owen Kelley’s cigar stand and pool room, Archie Price’s news stand and Herman Kohn’s jewelry store — after all had removed their stock. Built in 1888 and 1889 and named after the wife of its founder, A.B. Hammond, the Florence was a Missoula showcase and one of the most popular hotels in the West. Its successor also burned down in 1936, to be replaced by the current Florence Building five years later. Photo courtesy Stan Cohen, Pictorial Histories Publishing 1924 Congress grants citizenship to American Indians.

1927 Charles Lindbergh flies over western Montana on cross-country tour promoting commercial aviation.

1932 Missoula electric streetcars make final runs.

1932 Fire destroys Hammond Block on Higgins and Front.

1935 Hale Field, Missoula’s first airport, dedicated.

1934-35 Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes become first tribal government in nation to incorporate under Indian Reorganization Act.

1936-38 Montana Power Company builds dam at falls of the lower Flathead River.

1936 Second Florence Hotel burns.

Missoulian 150

Sunday, September 27, 2020

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Missoulian 150

Sunday, September 27, 2020

1940s

Aug. 21, 1941: Grandstands fire at fair

LAURA SCHEER laura.scheer@missoulian.com

It was a hot Missoula summer Thursday afternoon when rodeo-goers at the Western Montana Fair noticed smoke billowing from the northeast section of the grandstands, packed with some 3,000 people. As the smoking section began filtering out, many remained, thinking the fire could be easily put out. Luckily their hesitation broke, the stands emptied and within 10 minutes the entire structure was a “blazing inferno.”

The Missoulian reported the next morning that within 15 minutes the fire had spread to the main livestock building, where volunteers and cowboys were rushing to chase and carry out cattle, hogs and sheep, flames burning around them. The only livestock casualty was a calf, which suffered a fractured leg after being dropped during the flustered and chaotic rescue. Race horses in an adjacent barn were moved safely to a nearby pasture.

The mass exodus caused a human, bovine, equine and porcine traffic jam that was remarkably cooperative, “with all showing high consideration for others,” according to volunteer traffic officers who jumped into action.

Soon after the city and Orchard Homes fire departments arrived to battle the blaze, the grandstands collapsed. It caused a chain-reaction explosion of gas tanks through a row of cars parked nearby “like a 21-gun salute.”

Firefighters and volunteers battled the blaze and rounded up cattle scattered across the fairgrounds late into the night. Although four fighting the fire were injured, no one was killed.

The same is not true for the poultry exhibits, which were housed beneath the grandstands and were almost a total loss. Some 450 birds perished, with one lucky pullet pulled out at the last second

1940 Missoula County impanels Montana’s first woman jurors.

1941 Missoula’s Greg Rice sets world indoor records in the 2- and 3-mile runs.

by show official George Brown.

The loss of structures was estimated at $150,000, nearly half of the fairgrounds’ total estimated value of $350,000. Volunteers spent all day Friday clearing debris and building new bleachers. The Missoulian reported the scene looked like a “boom” town, as hundreds of carpenters and workers hammered and sawed to make sure the show could go on Friday night and into the weekend.

And it did. The Missoulian on Saturday, Aug. 23, 1941, reported a large crowd enjoyed a thrilling championship rodeo Friday night, although the atmosphere was somber and a downpour drenched

1941 Fire burns grandstands and other buildings at Western Montana Fair.

1941 U.S. enter World War II.

1945 First Germany, then Japan surrender to end World War II.

the fairgrounds (too bad the rain didn’t come the night before). But Montanans are tough and the Missoulian reported on Sunday, Aug. 24, that officials were expecting the biggest crowd yet for closing night at a Western Montana Fair, “which will go into the records as a ‘never-say-die’ event.”

Alas, the world was changing. Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor that December, igniting the nation’s involvement in World War II. Reconstruction plans at the fairgrounds hit the skids, and interest in even holding a county fair dissipated. There wasn’t another one in Missoula until 1954.

1947 Juliet Gregory elected Missoula’s first and only female mayor.

1944 Northern Pacific siren announces D-Day invasion at Normandy.

1949 Mann Gulch fire kills 13 firefighters, 12 of them Missoula smokejumpers.

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Missoulian 150

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Make no mistake, the alien detention camp at Fort Missoula before and during World War II was a prison for some 1,200 Italians, 1,000 Japanese resident aliens and a handful of Germans — all non-military. Ten-foot fence topped with barbed wire, 40-foot tall guard towers and ground level guardhouses at each entrance were built on the former Army post. One of the Italian detainees who fell in love with Missoula and never left was Umberto Benedetti (1911-2009). “The crews of the passenger boat Il Count Biancamano and 28 other boarts were disciplined themselves,” Benedetti once wrote. “Without troubling anyone inside or outside the campus, they went to work on the farms, the railroad tracks, hospitalas and many other places where labor was needed. These (Italian) sailors gave to this country manpower no other ethnic group did regardless of what others will say. They were industrious and disciplined.” photo courtesy the Historical museum at Fort missoula

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13

Place of Small Bull Trout: tribal History from the beginning to 1870 By the Séliš-Ql̓ ispe Culture Committee, Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribe

oral literature that conveys how the tribal connection to this place reaches back at least to the end of the last ice age, over twelve thousand years ago. Those stories, told only in the wintertime, tell of the transformation of the world and its preparation for the tl̓ sqélixʷ, the human-beings-yetto-come. The stories tell of how the plants and animals made themselves into food for us—a gift that informs every aspect, physical and spiritual, of the traditional tribal way of life. It is why all living things must be treated with respect. It is why we have an obligation to ensure their well-being and abundance for the generations to come.

All of the tribal people of this region—the Séliš, the Ql̓ ispé, the Kootenai, and neighboring tribes such as the Nez Perce—lived solely by hunting, gathering plants, and fishing.

each year. Many animal populations also fluctuated dramatically over time. Nevertheless, our traditional way of life was neither a desperate struggle for survival nor a passive dependence on nature, as many early non-Indian observers assumed. The ancestors’ profound knowledge of the region’s ecology enabled them to move efficiently with the seasons in a finely-tuned cycle of life. And as a kind of safety net supplementing the other traditional foods, bountiful populations of fish in almost every corner of our aboriginal territories — including here at the Place of Small Bull Trout — meant that we almost always had a readily available source of high-quality fresh protein, even in the depths of winter. At the same time, tribal people also managed vast areas with fire, drawing upon thousands of years of experience to

camas, and forage for deer and elk.

For thousands of years, the Horses, guns and disease area now occupied by the city of The past century and a half Missoula has been a central part encompass the entire history of the of the homelands of the Séliš city of Missoula, but as tribal elders (Salish or ‘Flathead’) and Ql̓ ispé have made clear to us, it is scarcely (upper Kalispel or Pend d’Oreille) one percent of Séliš-Ql̓ ispé tenure nations, whose aboriginal territories in this place. Even if we begin this encompass most of western Montana history in 1700, we are addressing on both sides of the Continental only the most recent fraction of tribal Divide. In the Salish language, history. From this perspective, farthe Missoula area is known as reaching transformation came to our Nɫʔay(cčstm), meaning Place of homelands and our people over a very Small Bull Trout, a fish of central short period of time. importance in tribal culture and In the century preceding the subsistence. This ancient place-name passage of Lewis and Clark in 1805originally referred to the confluence 06, the inter-tribal world of the of Rattlesnake Creek and the Clark Northern Rockies and northern Plains Fork River, the very place where was affected by the arrival of three Frank Worden and Christopher powerful agents of change: horses, Higgins set up shop in 1865, when non-native infectious diseases, and they moved their Hellgate Trading guns, all of them spread by interPost from the western part of the tribal exchange and the earliest Missoula Valley. establishment of the Worden and fur trade in western Higgins called their Canada. These three new establishment forces dramatically Missoula Mills, shortly altered tribal thereafter shortening populations, tribal it to Missoula. The ways of life, and internew name had its tribal relations. The origins in another smallpox epidemic Salish place-name. of the early 1780s Higgins’ wife, Julia alone killed perhaps Grant, was Ql̓ ispé. She three-quarters of the took the short form indigenous population of the place-name of the region, a for the middle Clark catastrophe that we Fork River, Nmesulé, can scarcely imagine. meaning Shimmering Our tribes responded Cold Waters, dropped by contracting into the ‘N,’ and then far fewer bands, anglicized Mesulé as while using horses Edgar Paxson, The Salish, led by Chief Charlot, leaving their Bitterroot Home Missoula. to continue to access Few Missoulians for the Flathead Reservation, oil on linen, 1914, 68 x 122 inches, Missoula County the full reach of our today have ever heard Collection. Acclaimed western artist Edgar Paxson was in his early 60s and living of the Salish origins of in Missoula when he was commissioned to paint eight murals that still hang near traditional territories. the name of their town. the entrance of the county courthouse. This one depicts the band of Salish under In the decades immediately preceding Today, in this special Chief Charlo entering what is now the head of Stephens Avenue in Missoula on the city’s establishment, publication and in Oct. 16, 1891, on their way to the Jocko (Flathead Reservation) near Arlee. Mount the fur trade violently the many educational Lolo is seen in the background. In the foreground, from left, are Antoine Moiese introduced a new set materials we are producing, tribal elders (Cal-Up-Squell-She), Louis LaCoot (Shem-Heh), Chief Charlo (Tem-Lo-Kay), John of relationships with indigenous lands and and scholars are sharing Hill (Te Hatch), Pierre Francois (La Moose). Courtesy of missoula art museum resources. Traders what has, until now, been and trappers treated a largely untold history.

The Missoula Valley was perhaps burn at the times and places where beaver, bison, and other animals as the most important of all the digging fire would ensure the health of the commodities, killed not for direct grounds for our sacred first food, forests and prairies. We used fire for Traditional Way of Life subsistence or cultural needs, but to the bitterroot. But like many other many purposes, including nurturing Indeed, the place-name make money by shipping hides and plant foods, bitterroot are available the productivity of many foods and Nmesulé(tkʷ) itself has its roots in See TRIBAL HISTORY on Page 20 tribal Creation stories, the sacred for harvest for only a few weeks medicines, including huckleberries, Séliš-Ql̓ispé Culture Committee

Séliš-Ql̓ispé

TIMELINE | since the last ice age YEARS BEFORE PRESENT (B.P.)

15,000 to 13,000 years ago:

draining, refilling, and final draining of Glacial Lake Missoula.

Sq͏ʷlllum̓t — Stories of Coyote & Creation: Time Immemorial

15,000

14,000

13,000 to 9,000 years ago:

9,000 to 4,000 years ago:

The Salish Nation thrives, growing in population across the region, including most of what is now the state of Montana.

Ancestors live in the lands made safe and abundant by Coyote in the beginning.

13,000

12,000

Over 12,500 years ago:

oldest known archaeological site in Séliš-Ql̓ispé territories, along Flathead Creek / Shields River.

11,000

PRESENT 4,000 to 250 years ago:

10,000

9,000

8,000

About 9,000 years ago: region’s climate warms, becoming similar to the seasons of recent centuries.

7,000

6,000

5,000

From the northern Plains to the Pacific coast, the tribes of the Salish language family flourish, with three branches, and at least 23 languages, 33 dialects, and 9 sub-dialects.

4,000

3,000

About 4,000 years ago:

Salish population increase leads people to disperse; they begin developing into the distinct tribes, languages, and dialects of the Salish language family.

c. 1700: c. 1775: 1781-82: 1805: 1830s: 1855: 1883: 1891: 1904: 1910: 1934-35: 1975:

2,000

1,000

1491:

Last year before the European invasion of the Americas.

Salish acquire horse.

X̣allqs (Shining Shirt) has vision of Blackrobes.

One of most devastating smallpox epidemics.

Lewis and Clark arrive, help spur fur trade.

Séliš seek Blackrobes, send 4 delegations east.

Hellgate Treaty.

NP Railroad enables industrialization of region.

Séliš trail of tears—forced to leave Bitterroot.

Flathead Allotment Act. Congress opens Reservation to homesteaders.

Indian Reorganization Act, CSKT Constitution.

CSKT establish Culture Committees.

© Séliš-Ql̓ispé Culture Committee, Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, 2019. All rights reserved. design = www.my-design.net

Posters of this timeline can be obtained from the SQCC by calling 406-745-4572 or emailing nalani.linsebigler@cskt.org.

MOVING MONTANA FORWARD

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Sunday, September 27, 2020

1950s-1060s

Feb. 4, 1955: Timberjack’s world premiere

HEIDE BORGOVO of the Missoulian

Excitement was high as a glamorously dressed woman stood on her chair to wave to the cheering, boisterous crowd all the way in the back of the room at the Hotel Florence.

The woman was actress Vera Ralston, who was in Missoula for the premiere and promotion of the feature motion picture “Timberjack,” which was filmed in western Montana the previous year.

Some 600 people gathered, including actors Chill Wills and Ralston, for the 61st annual banquet of the Missoula Chamber of Commerce.

Western Montana was in the midst of celebrating Timberjack Days and that very afternoon was the world premiere of Republic Picture’s “Timberjack,” starring Ralston, Wills, Sterling Hayden, David Brian, Adolphe Menjou and Hoagy Carmichael, not to mention Williamette steam locomotive No. 7. The engine had been brought out of retirement from its log-hauling days for the Anaconda Co. to perform in the movie. These days it sits in static display at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula.

On that winter day in 1955, the city and county buzzed with anticipation as movie stars paraded around town.

Locals participated in whisker-growing contests, the Timberjacks Day parade and, of course, showings of the movie at the Roxy and Fox theaters.

The logging movie was significant because it was the golden anniversary of the U.S. Forest Service.

“We feel it a great honor to join the citizens of Montana and America in a salute to this valiant organization, particularly to the men of the U.S. Forest Service who have honored us with their presence here tonight,” Herbert J. Yates, the president of Republic Pictures, said at the banquet.

Gov. J. Hugo Aronson presented a citation to Yates and Republic Pictures, which gave recognition for honoring Montana with a motion picture filmed in the state in conjunction with the Forest Service’s 50th anniversary.

Yates hinted at a possible companion film

Smokejumpers Fred Brauer, middle, and Wayne Webb, right, encourage President Eisenhower to don a helmet after presenting him with a scroll making him an honorary smoke jumper. The citation read: “Honorary Member Smoke Jumpers: Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States; for leadership in the conservation of our national resources. Presented at the Smoke Jumper Base, Missoula, Montana, Sept.

22, 1954.” Eisenhower also received smoke jumper and Smokey Bear T-shirts for his grandchildren during his brief visit to dedicate the Forest Service’s aerial fire depot at the new Missoula airport west of town. Missoulian-Sentinel photo called “Smoke Jumpers” and boldly predicted “Timberjack” would gross $6 million worldwide and boost Montana tourism, like his other movie “Quiet Man” had done for Ireland. “Smoke Jumpers” never came to be.

Stars were cut short of their speeches at the luncheon, but Chill Wills wrapped things up with the movie’s theme song, “Hurry Back, Timberjack.” The catchy tune played during the opening credits of the film, with a bright yellow font and wide shots of Glacier National Park.

“When you’re all done choppin’ down the poplar and pine, hurry back, hurry back, Timberjack.

There’s a black-haired gal whose lips are sweeter

than wine, hurry back, hurry back, Timberjack.

She’s got the ring, she’s got the gown, she owns an acre.

It will break her little heart should you forsake her …

Drop that crosscut saw and put your axe in the rack.

Hurry back, hurry back, Timberjack.”

Finally, the stars arrived at the Fox Theater as fireworks ignited and the brilliant blue light of a Hollywood-like searchlight traced the night sky.

The Polson High School band played enthusiastically in greeting before hurrying off to the Roxy to perform again for the second premiere.

Nov. 22, 1963: Assassination of President Kennedy KIM BRIGGEMAN kbriggeman@missoulian.com

Mrs. Elms had just begun reading to her second graders at Bonner School after lunch when the classroom door cracked open.

If Mr. Musburger said anything to her as he leaned in the doorway, it was too quiet for our 7-year-old ears to hear. He might have just nodded and turned away.

When our teacher turned back to us, she must have said something along the lines of: “Boys and girls, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas, this morning.

He has just died.”

We must’ve known who President Kennedy was. That day was the first time I heard the word “assassination,” a word that popped up too often in the 1960s.

It seemed like a sad, bad thing, and I remember thinking Mrs. Elms’ eyes were red behind her glasses. Do teachers cry?

I also remember afternoon recess because of one fourth-grade boy. He ran across the blacktop, head back, shouting at the top of his lungs: “Yippee!

President Kennedy is dead!”

It was confusing. How could anyone be happy about something like that? As the school years went on, it turned out the kid was the first to fit my notion of “bully.”

I was raised Catholic, and at home that night the death of JFK, America’s first Catholic president, cast a gloomy mood. Walter Cronkite’s report on the 7:30 news on KMSO-TV only served to deepen the family funk.

All these years later I read in the Missoulian of Nov. 23 how others in Missoula reacted that black Friday. It strikes me that the unnamed reporter or reporters were especially tuned in to what we kids were thinking.

“A first grader heard the news in his

Some 500 people marched from the University of Montana campus to the Post Office in downtown Missoula on April 15, 1970, to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The demonstrators, organized by the Missoula Peace Coalition and the Women’s Strike for Peace, passed out 30,000 bogus million-dollar “war dollar” bills on Tax Day to represent U.S. investment in the Southeast Asia conflict. The peaceful protest was the latest in a years-long series of marches and demonstrations in the 1960s in Missoula, most related to Vietnam, nuclear arms and the environment. Archives & Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana classroom and looked up to a picture of the President on the wall. ‘And there he is!’ the child said, and burst into tears.”

“On the way back from lunch I could hardly keep from crying,” a first-grader told his teacher.

“He was a great man. If they had his funeral in Missoula I would go,” another one said.

An eighth-grade girl exclaimed between sobs: “Oh, the whole world will suffer for this!”

When students at Missoula County High’s South Avenue building (now Sentinel High) heard the president had been shot, “We thought it must be some horrible, morbid joke that the student

1951-53 1954 President U.S. in Eisenhower dedicates Forest Korean War. Service Aerial Fire Depot outside of Missoula.

1952 World premiere of “Red Skies of Montana” at the Fox and Roxy theaters.

1955 World premiere of “Timberjack” at Fox and Roxy theaters.

1956 Missoula Timberjacks bring pro baseball to Missoula.

1959 Anaconda Co. subsidiary sells Missoulian and seven other dailies to Lee Newspapers of Iowa.

radio station was playing,” one said.

When a second announcement confirmed Kennedy’s death, “all the girls started crying and kept crying,” she said. “A lot of us just sat on the floor in the halls and cried. Some of the boys cried, too, and all afternoon the classes and the whole building were quiet.”

The news came to students at what was then Montana State University in Missoula during the noon meal at the Lodge.

“After the announcement the National Anthem was played over the loudspeaker system and the hundreds of students rose from their tables to stand in silent tribute. Men and women alike

1961 Last Milwaukee passenger train through Missoula.

1962 New Higgins Avenue Bridge dedicated; north river channel eliminated.

1963-75 U.S. in Vietnam War.

wept openly.”

Missoula schools didn’t close that afternoon — “it would serve no national purpose,” District I superintendent Karl Bell said, adding that by students gathering around television sets and radios it would make “a more indelible impression.”

But it was left to another frightened first-grader to sum up the emotion of the town and the nation, aside from that of a fourth-grade bully and others of his ilk.

“They killed our President,” cried the boy a year younger than I was.

“Now what will we do?”

1967 Fire destroys one horse barn and part of another during Western Montana Fair, killing 26 horses.

1964 Congress passes and President Lyndon Johnson signs Wilderness Act; five wildernesses in Montana among those designated.

1966 Missoula section of Interstate 90 completed.

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15

1970s

May 17, 1978: The Aber Day Kegger TYLER CHRISTENSEN tyler.christensen@lee.net

“The sound truck has been found!

It was at the corner of South and Higgins, and it’s getting a police escort here! Have some more beer!”

It was sometime around 2:30 p.m. on a rainy Wednesday that the KYLT radio loudspeaker truck blared the welcome message. The sound equipment had gone missing somewhere between Calgary and Missoula, and it was holding up the seventh annual Aber Day Kegger at the K-O Rodeo Grounds in Miller Creek.

Music from the Elvin Bishop Band, the Dirt Band, Live Wire Choir, and Free-flowing Olympia beer and music by the Mission Mountain the Mission Mountain Wood Band was Wood Band were staples of Aber Day keggers. Archives & supposed to begin at 1 p.m.

The delay set things back more than Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana Missoula as a freewheeling, fun-loving at Bonner Flats. In its third year, the three hours. As some 10,000 cajolers kegger relocated to a field in Linda frontier of the wild, wild West. slipped, slid and sloshed in the mud, Vista. The year after that, it found its It started relatively quietly in the organizers struggled to slow the flow final home at the K-O Rodeo Grounds, spring of 1972, when a class of UM of a thousand 16-gallon kegs of beer. where Olympia Brewing Company sociology students, looking for a way It takes one hell of a party to land to replenish a gutted budget, organized would supply 1,000 kegs to a crowd of in the Guinness Book of Records, let more than 10,000. a benefit event — with live music and alone inspire a documentary some Over its eight seasons the keggers’ unlimited beer included in the ticket three decades later. The Aber Day fame also exploded, drawing bigger price. The first Aber Day Benefit keggers were legendary. and bigger crowds as well as famous Kegger took place that May in the Attended by thousands, even as acts from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band lower Deer Creek area out by East they were frowned upon by the local and Jimmy Buffett to Bonnie Raitt Missoula, and successfully raised a sheriff and sermonized against by local and Heart, but perhaps none quite good chunk of money for the school’s ministers, the outdoor concert that so beloved by locals as the Mission library. began as a humble fundraiser for the Mountain Wood Band.

The next year, a reported 200 kegs University of Montana quickly grew As its size grew, so did the concerns. of beer were consumed by the crowd to claim an enduring reputation for

1970 — For second consecutive season UM football goes 10-0, falls to North Dakota State in Camellia Bowl.

1971 U.S. Court of Claims deems Flathead Allotment Act to have been “breach” of 1855 Treaty of Hellgate.

1972 New Montana constitution adopted.

1975 Jud Heathcote’s basketball Grizzlies nearly upset UCLA in NCAA tournament.

1977 Pattee Canyon fire destroys five homes.

The legal drinking age through much of the decade was 18, and city and county officials were alarmed by stories of unrestrained drinking, drunken driving and drug use.

University leaders began working to distance the staid school from the raucous party, and the student group that had formed the University Liquid Asset Corp. to promote the keggers renamed itself the Missoula Liquid Assets Corp.

Finally, city and county leaders pressured health officials to draw a hard line in 1979 and organizers promised it would be the last kegger.

Various attempts to revive the party were made in subsequent years, but none lived up to the original legend.

There were reunion concerts in 2016 and 2017 featuring the Mission Mountain Wood Band. They were held in Philipsburg and Polson.

However, the keggers live on in more than just the hazy memories of those who were a part of it all those years ago. A 30th annual documentary about the keggers premiered in October 2009, featuring music from the Mission Mountain Wood Band and interviews with the likes of renowned artist Monte Dolack, who designed some of the posters for the Aber Day keggers. It included film footage from the final three keggers, worth watching closely to see if you can spot any familiar faces.

1977 Salish Kootenai College founded.

1978 Southgate Mall opens.

1979 Last of eight Aber Day benefit keggers.

1979 Last commercial passenger train through Missoula; Amtrak’s North Coast Hiawatha.

Butterfly Herbs Coffees, T Teas & the Unusual Since 1972

(1980)

1972

(1979)

Missoula’s treasure for 25 years!

(1979)

Thank you, Missoula, for keeping the Carousel and Dragon Hollow in your hearts.

1988

Chuck Kaparich visits the carousel in Spokane and is inspired to build a carousel horse of his own

1991

Kaparich has completed four horses; he approaches the City Council about building A Carousel for Missoula. Volunteers are eager to help

1994

Groundbreaking for the Carousel's building and a groundbreaking auction to help fund the project

May 27, Thousands of Missoulians and visitors help celebrate the Grand Opening 1995 of the first fully hand-carved carousel to be built in America since the Great Depression.

232 North Higgins Avenue Downtown, Missoula

2001

Dragon Hollow Playarea is built

2016

The Carousel building is expanded to allow for a carvers' shop and a museum

2019

Dragon Hollow is refurbished and expanded, making it more welcoming to children of all abilities

2020

Celebrating 25 years of going in circles.

We are currently closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Stay safe, Montana!

carouselformissoula.com • Caras Park on the Clark Fork River • 406.549.8382

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1980s

May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens puts Missoula in lockdown ROB CHANEY rchaney@missoulian.com

The roar of the explosion when Mount St. Helens volcano exploded on the morning of May 18, 1980, didn’t reach Missoula. But what Missoulians did hear that Sunday evening was almost as ominous.

The sounds of birds and bugs and barking dogs faded away as a wall of dark cloud loomed over the western side of the Missoula Valley. In the days before smartphones and digital news alerts, most Americans hadn’t seen the evening news and were unaware a blast 500 times bigger than that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb had gone off 400 miles upwind.

In Washington, the volcano’s pyroclastic flow killed 57 people, and destroyed 250 homes, 47 bridges and 185 miles of highway with landslides, diverted rivers and blast damage. Wherever the hot ash cloud encountered cold air, the fine particles settled like igneous snow. One of those places was the Missoula Valley.

City environmental officials had been on a campaign to reduce air pollution from congested traffic flows, so they were used to monitoring particulate matter. A reading above 875 micrograms per cubic meter was considered an emergency.

By Monday morning, the monitors read 19,000 micrograms per cubic meter.

“It was almost too much for the monitoring machines to handle, and it was definitely too much for citizens to comprehend,” Missoulian reporter Kevin Miller wrote in a special section titled “The Week the Sky Fell.” “You mean 1,900, people said.

No, came the answer — 19,000. Three zeros. Sort of like sticking your head into a pile of sand and taking a deep breath.”

The dust got everywhere. It breezed through air conditioners into living rooms. It clouded the drinking water drawn from Rattlesnake Creek.

Its static charge frazzled computers. Scrambling

A Missoula County sheriff’s deputy stops a motorist on Interstate 90 outside outside of Missoula after the eruption of Mount St. Helens left a dusting of volcanic ash over the Missoula Valley. CARL DAVAZ/Missoulian experts first advised people to wash off their cars, then ordered a halt because water might make the ash acidic, then suggested sweeping the debris off, then warned it was essentially glass fragments that would scratch off all the paint.

Finally, they asked everyone to leave the stuff alone for a few days. Unlike today’s forest fire smoke health crises, people’s attempts to remove the volcanic ash actually aggravated the problem by stirring it up. Driving cars blew clouds into the air.

Pantyhose vanished from store shelves after a study showed they were the best make-do screen to keep the grit out of car engines.

The ash triggered closures of all westbound highways, stranding bus travelers from Australia and Africa at the Missoula Greyhound Bus station.

Wind-borne ash clouds were bringing visibility

1980 Last Milwaukee freight train through Missoula.

1980 Mount St. Helen sends clouds of ash over western Montana.

down to zero around Superior. The American Red Cross housed many of the stuck passengers in the Palace Hotel.

Safety officials ordered the city shut down on Monday, and people spent the next two days cooped up or cleaning up. Then on Wednesday, another wind blast brought a renewed supply of ash to the valley. Domestic dispute calls rose with the tempers, and businesses argued about how long they could be closed down. A Missoulian photo cutline observed “To be without your particle mask during the crisis seemed almost unpatriotic.”

But a sense of perspective helped. Residents of Yakima, Washington, needed snowplows to move their ash deposits. The layer of ash became a defining feature of I-90 drives across Washington for the rest of the decade.

1985 Hellgate Canyon fire

1982 CSKT establish Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness, first tribal wilderness in U.S.

1986 WashingtonGrizzly Stadium opens.

Making Memories It was 1967, the so-called “summer of love,” when Frank and Vi Bretz turned their love of camping into a small business in Missoula.

That first year business was conducted out of a leased service station and focused on renting small travel trailers.

In the first 20 years, Bretz outgrew several locations and in 1987 purchased 4.5 acres of land and a 10,000 square foot building. Over the course of the next 12 years expanded with an additional shop & more parking.

As the business continued to outgrow locations, the decision was made to purchase 30 acres on Grant Creek Road and in 1998 ground was broken on the current location.

Camping, Well Done.

The current Missoula store sits on almost 45 acres, has 26 fully equipped service-bays with a complete collision repair center, nearly twenty thousand square feet of indoor showroom, and one of the largest accessory stores in the northwest. Due to the hard work of the entire Bretz RV & Marine team, they’ve become the largest dealer in a five-state region.

1-833-BRETZRV

|

www.BretzRV.com

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Battered but victorious, Montana Grizzly quarterback Dave Dickenson exults after a dramatic 22-20 win over Marshall University in the Division I-AA national championship game on Dec. 16, 1995. UM’s first national football title was especially sweet, coming on the Thundering Herd’s home turf in Huntington, West Virginia.

Andy Larson, a senior from Helena, won it on a field goal with 39 seconds left. Dickenson, from Great Falls Russell and now head coach of the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL, was sacked 10 times in his final collegiate game.

Two days later he received the Walter Payton Award as Divison I-AA’s outstanding player. The game turned out to be legendary coach Don Read’s last one as head coach of the Grizzlies. tOm bauer/missoulian

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1990s-2000s

April 3, 1996: The capture of the Unabomber KEILA SZPALLER keila.szpaller@missoulian.com

“Busted.”

That headline ran in giant type across the top of the Thursday, April 4, 1996, issue of the Missoulian. That day, the newspaper dedicated ink to the way FBI agents descended on the town of Lincoln to take into custody Theodore J. Kaczynski.

“Lincoln ‘hermit’ jailed as Unabomber suspect,” read the subheading. Investigators suspected Kaczynski of killing three people and injuring 23 in 16 separate bomb attacks.

With the federal law enforcement officers (estimated from 20 to 50 in one story) came national media attention, journalists toting notebooks, cameras and the wrong footwear. “They came here in business suits. It was funny,” said Teresa Brown, a sales clerk at Garlands Town and Country, to the Independent Record. The shop sold a lot of socks and hats. From Missoulian reporters Sherry Devlin and Michael Moore: “The no-vacancy sign was swinging at all four motels in town.” The taverns were full, although selling more burgers than beer.

The night the law apprehended the scraggly and skinny loner who lived in a plywood shack on Stemple Pass Road south of town, the phone lines jammed in Lincoln. A patron picked up the phone at the Wheel In Bar: “It’s the Washington Post,” he shouted. “Who wants to talk?” Devlin’s and Moore’s story said the phone made its rounds among the bar stools.

The next day, Kaczynski limped into a Helena courtroom in orange coveralls. “... More than 100 reporters and spectators jammed into the five rows of Courtroom No. 1,” wrote Missoulian reporter Mick Holien.

That week, the paper also reported the latest on the Freemen holed up outside of Jordan. In

fact, Blackfoot Valley Dispatch publisher Rollie Fisher told Missoulian state bureau reporter Charles S. Johnson he thought all the FBI jackets he was seeing in Lincoln were connected to the antigovernment standoff across the state.

Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski walks into the federal courthouse in Helena to be arraigned after being captured outside Lincoln in April 1996. He was sentenced to eight life sentences, and is held in a maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado, where he turned 78 in May. MICHAEL GALLACHER/Missoulian

It wasn’t the kind of fanfare some Montanans wanted, and tourism promoters began handwringing. “State officials worry that extremists will give Montana a bad rap,” read one headline.

U.S. Sen. Max Baucus said he was getting calls from people who were concerned about the view the nation was getting of Montana: “The state has to emphasize its good qualities and point out that a ‘very tiny minority does not represent our state.’”

Others had a field day with the notoriety. The Breakfast Club radio show on KLCY held a contest for new slogans for Montana. The winner?

“Welcome to Montana: It’s where you’re wanted.”

Another? “Montana, Naturally Indicting.” From Bob Zimorino? “At Least Our Cows are Sane.”

The Staggering Ox in Helena served up a UnaSandwich Manifesto with Freeman Sauce. (“The sandwich is ham and pastrami with black olives, bean sprouts and lettuce with a mixture of mustard and ranch dressing.”) Sally Thompson, of the Glacier Raft Company in West Glacier, said her glass was half full: “It’s probably a good geography lesson for people around the country about where Montana is.”

In May and June that year, tourism was down 2.4 percent in Glacier National Park from the previous year, but a travel spokesperson attributed the slight drop to the late opening of Logan Pass, not the Unabomber. In those months in 1996, Glacier counted 351,424 visitors. (In 2019, recreational visitors to the park numbered 711,491 in the same two months.)

Of course, not all tourists were impressed with the Treasure State, either. In June 1996, Bob Stephens, an executive from California, lamented: “We had to drive 75 miles (to Harpers Lake) to fish, and I only caught two small trout. I could do that in California.”

July 29, 2000: Hells Angels visit CAMERON EVANS cameron.evans@missoulian.com

It wasn’t until after the Hells Angels left downtown Missoula following bar close early on a Saturday morning that all hell broke loose.

The motorcycle club’s fleet had hardly left town when locals took to the streets to protest what they saw as police harassment of the bikers during their five-day visit to Missoula.

No Angels were arrested during the week despite police following their every move, by land with 170 out-of-town cops called in to bolster local ranks, and by air with helicopter patrol. Throughout the week, law enforcement tailed Angels when they rode around town and stopped them for traffic violations. In one incident, 21 officers responded to a noise complaint involving three bikers at a local hotel.

“They were sort of making the noise,” one biker said, adding that he thought the police put up a more intimidating presence than the Angels.

The overreaction by law enforcement was part of the patrolling strategy.

“It really needs to be overkill,” Sgt. Gregg Willoughby of the Missoula Police Department said. “We want to stop something before it gets going.”

There wasn’t anything for police to stop at the Angels’ camp at the Marshall Mountain Ski Area, which “Smilin’ Rick” Fable, the president of the Spokane Angels, said he picked because “it’s beautiful.” According to one Missoulian reporter, the scene at Marshall was akin to a “Sunday afternoon at a family reunion,” which the Angels said was more or less the point.

Though the bikers did little to cause a commotion in Missoula other than

1994 Roxy Theater destroyed by fire.

rev their engines and spook a few horses, the heavy police presence led to tension among locals. On Friday, as the visit came to an end, locals swilled beer at bars and on sidewalks, then “cheered bikers, taunted police, drummed, danced and mooned the helicopters and generally suspended all the rules” as they protested law enforcement, the Missoulian’s Michael Jamison reported.

Members of the Rainbow Family, who’d had a gathering of their own in the Big Hole earlier that month, pounded out a feverish protest beat on drums as police arrested dozens of locals and blasted more with pepper spray in what was described as a “near-riot situation” on West Front Street between Ryman Street and Higgins Avenue.

One woman, a 36-year-old mother and Girl Scout leader, claimed the police “snatched her from the sidewalk, slapped the cuffs on her, tossed her in jail and left her to sit until 6 a.m.”

Police struggled to contain the crowd for 15 minutes before simply walking away. Missoula Police Capt.

Steve Ross said the idea was that “if they don’t have anyone to yell at, they’ll all go home.”

He was right. “As soon as there were no cops to protest, the protesters went home,” the Missoulian reported.

“The few who remained went back to dancing.”

A year later, a Citizen Review Committee released a report on the Hells Angels gathering. It criticized the way officers treated citizens upset with police tactics. It led the department to review and update its “Use of Force” policy and rules for using pepper spray.

1995 Grizzlies under Don Read win first national football championship.

1994 Big Sky defeats Hellgate in the only all Missoula Class AA state football championship game.

1995 A Carousel for Missoula opens.

1996 “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski arrested near Lincoln.

Flames in Blodgett Canyon crackle above a Bitterroot Valley home. Dubbed simply “The Fires of 2000,” flames blackened more than 360,000 acres in the upper Bitterroot. Most were the result of dry lightning strikes on July 31 that ignited some 70 fires that merged into complexes and burned well into September. They ringed Darby, choked the valley with smoke for weeks, burned some 70 homes, forced more than 1,500 people to leave their homes and canceled the Ravalli County Fair.

The Blodgett Creek fire was an anomaly. It was humancaused. TOM BAUER/Missoulian

1999 Missoula Osprey win Pioneer League baseball championship in first season.

1998 Eric Bergoust wins gold medal in aerial freestyle at Nagano Winter Olympics.

2000 Bitterroot fires burn 360,000 acres.

2001 Grizzlies under Joe Glenn win second national football title.

2006 Rolling Stones perform in WashingtonGrizzly Stadium.

2007 Missoula registers record 107 degrees on July 6.

2007 First Missoula Marathon

2009 Smurfit-Stone Container Co. at Frenchtown closed.

2008 Milltown Dam breached

2008 Last log cut at Bonner

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2010s

Aug. 5, 2014: Paul McCartney in Missoula CORY WALSH cory.walsh@missoulian.com

A concert by Paul McCartney would be the most notable event anywhere it might occur, yet in a small-population state like Montana it took on an extra layer of enormity.

The Beatles icon typically plays metropolitan sports arenas that can hold 70,000 people or more.

Yet here the knighted legend was, in WashingtonGrizzly Stadium, cheerfully romping through his entire catalog, from Beatles to Wings to solo tunes for what must appear to him like a relative campfire singalong — 25,000 fans in a city of 70,000.

It would be the largest concert in the state’s history up to that point. The very reason he chose Missoula was even news: It was reported that he picked our little college town on the recommendation of Mick Jagger, after The Rolling Stones came here in 2006 and drew a crowd of 23,000.

The announcement ran on front pages outside of Missoula. Almost all tickets disappeared the day they went on sale, which naturally meant that hotel rooms were booked up. Free seats were available to those willing to seek them, though. Fans hiked up Paul McCartney, flanked by his band members Rusty Anderson, left, and Brian Ray, the adjacent Mount Sentinel, which was cheekily plays Washington-Grizzly Stadium in 2014. KURT WILSON/Missoulian renamed “Mount McCartney” for the day by proclamation of the University of Montana and Ament. Chan Romero, a Billings native who wrote the balladeer was on display at the piano, too — Mayor John Engen. he could work in a lot of instrument changes over “Hippy Hippy Shake,” covered by the Beatles in *** three hours, and a lot of moods, too. His Bond their early days, was there.

The Beatle’s stadium set-up was a construction theme, “Live and Let Die,” was accompanied by Even if you were seated in the farthest possible project unto itself, with four semi-trailers’ worth appropriately dramatic fireworks. seat for the singalongs of tunes like “Hey, Jude,” of tiling to install over the field and accommodate The lean and still somehow boyish 72-yearyou’d have no problem seeing Paul — the stage 7,000 fans. McCartney’s equipment would bring 10 old, who gave up meat in the 1970s, put on what was bookended by two 60-foot video screens. buses’ worth more of equipment. was perhaps the most extravagant and convincing After multiple encores and months of McCartney sang loud, and soft. He played a advertisement for a vegan lifestyle ever produced in anticipation, all shows must come to a close, and signature violin-styled bass. He picked up a guitar, Montana.

McCartney picked his showstopper deliberately: Notable celebrities were in the audience, such too, and fired off part of Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” as U.S. Sen. Jon Tester and Pearl Jam bassist Jeff “The End.” and talked about meeting him in the 1960s. Paul

2010 Last horse races at Western Montana Fair.

2011 UM fall semester enrollment peaks at 15,669.

2011 Protesters greet ExxonMobil megaloads on Reserve Street.

2015 Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes take ownership of dam on lower Flathead River.

2014 Paul McCartney performs in WashingtonGrizzly Stadium.

2016 Robin Selvig retires as basketball coach of Montana Lady Griz

2015 CSKT Water Rights Compact is passed by Montana legislature and signed

Celebrating Four Decades of Keeping Missoula Sweet!

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2017 City of Missoula takes over public water company from Mountain Water.

2018 Restored DC-3 “Miss Montana” drops parachutists in Normandy to commemorate 75th anniversary of D-Day.

2018 Fort Missoula Regional Park opens

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Unidentified laborers, rail officials and a man at the door who resembled western artist Edgar S. Paxson pose for a postcard photo with an electric streetcar operated by William A. Clark’s Missoula Street Railway Co. The long-awaited streetcar system significantly changed travel patterns and lifestyles in and outside of Missoula when they went into service on May 11, 1910, powered by electricity from Clark’s dam at Milltown. They made their last runs on Jan. 24, 1932. Spencer Esmay, a motorman, had ridden the first car as a boy in 1910. He turned in his car, walked down the street and paid his token for a short ride on the last run to the barns on 14th Street. Photo courtesy Stan Cohen, Pictorial Histories Publishing

On March 28, 2008, hundreds of people gathered on riverbanks and the bluff above to watch and celebrate as the 100-year-old Milltown Dam was breached. “Let ‘er run,” Gov. Brian Schweitzer shouted, as Sen. Max Baucus, Sen. Jon Tester and other officials looked on.

“The forces of man and nature combined in the form of tons of water seeking the path of least resistance and a heavy equipment operator who dug out the last of a temporary earthen dike to allow the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers to flow freely for the first time in a century,” the Missoulian’s John Cramer reported.

Karen Knudsen, executive director of the Clark Fork Coalition, called the moment “an incredibly important milestone.” KURT WILSON/Missoulian

“The second story of the university hall is approaching completion,” Montana newspapers reported on Aug. 10, 1898. “The present indications are that the buildings will be finished nearly on schedule time. All of the work is being done in a manner that calls forth expressions of approval from all visitors.” The University of Montana was created in 1893, but construction on Science Hall and what’s commonly called Main Hall didn’t start until 1898. When the latter was dedicated on Feb. 18, 1899, Gov. Robert Smith and much of the Legislative assembly in Helena took a day off to travel by train to Missoula for the ceremony. Photo courtesy Stan Cohen, Pictorial Histories Publishing

Tribal History from page 13 meat to national and international markets. A number of fur traders married Séliš and Ql̓ ispé women and became members of our communities.

Many of their descendants are proud members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes today. But the effect of the fur trade on our way of life was nevertheless far-reaching.

Dwindling resources, combined with the displacement of tribes farther east and the effects of horses and firearms, led to an intensification of inter-tribal conflict.

Faced with these challenges, the Séliš envisioned adding to our spiritual power a new way of prayer.

We sent delegations to St. Louis, seeking the help of the Catholic priests, called q̓ ʷaylqs (blackrobes).

The church established the first permanent non-Indian outposts in the region: missions located among the Séliš at Ɫqeɫml ̣ ̓ š (Wide Cottonwoods—Stevensville) and among the Ql̓ ispé at Snyel̓ mn (Place Where You Surround Something—St.

Ignatius). The missionaries arrived with the objective of conversion, rooted in a sense of cultural and racial superiority that informed many non-Indian newcomers, both religious and secular. Regardless, most tribal people continued to combine both spiritual practices, as we do today.

Our relationship with the Blackrobes has been an important part of tribal life, and also complicated for many reasons, including the recent revelations of abuse that occurred, especially in the boarding schools.

A far-reaching treaty

In July 1855, a year after the establishment of the mission at Snyel̓ mn, tribal leaders and U.S. officials met in the western part of the Missoula Valley to negotiate the Hellgate Treaty, which has defined the political landscape of western Montana ever since. Tribal leaders included Séliš head chief Xʷeɫxƛ̓cin (Many Horses—Chief Victor),

upper Ql̓ ispé head chief Tmɫx ̣ƛ̓cín (No Horses—Chief Alexander), and Kootenai head chief Michelle. We arrived expecting a peace treaty, meaning an agreement to establish peace with our primary enemy, the Blackfeet. But the U.S. delegates, led by Isaac Stevens, had an entirely different objective: they demanded that our nations abandon our separate territories and move onto a single reservation. Given our half-century of friendship with and even defense of non-Indians—including Xʷeɫxƛ̓cin’s pledge to never go to war against non-Indians — our leaders saw this as a shocking betrayal. Stevens erupted in anger, disbanding the meeting for hours and days at a time and even resorting to hurling insults at Xʷeɫxƛ̓cin. Tribal leaders responded with steady, relatively restrained, but implacable opposition. Our resistance surprised Stevens, who like many early Euro-Americans — misconstrued our long commitment to peaceful relations, reaching back

to the time of Lewis and Clark, as acceptance of invasion and the taking of our lands and resources.

Stevens was finally forced to add an article to the treaty establishing a separate reservation for the Séliš in the Bitterroot Valley, in addition to the Flathead or “Jocko” Reservation.

Thus, 15 years after the treaty, the emerging town of Missoula sat between two sovereign indigenous homelands: the Flathead Reservation to the north, and the Bitterroot Reservation to the south. Our ways of life still had a strong presence in the region. The nascent economy and society contained elements of both tribal systems and the very different economic and ecological relationships that had been introduced by the fur trade more than a half century before.

Yet throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Séliš and Ql̓ ispé people continued to seek a path forward of mutual respect — and of cultural and political coexistence. ­

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2010s

March 10, 2010: AJ’s Magic Show BOB MESEROLL bob.meseroll@lee.net

Ten years on, Anthony Johnson’s historic scoring spree that propelled the Montana men’s basketball team into the NCAA tournament — AJ’s Magic Show — can be seen for what it was: the greatest clutch individual performance by a Griz athlete in the history of the school.

For the uninitiated, Johnson scored what was then a school- and Big Sky Conference tournamentrecord 42 points to rally the Griz from a 20-point halftime deficit to a 66-65 win over Weber State, which was playing the league title game on its home floor in the Dee Events Center.

But there were so many ways that magical night in Ogden, Utah, could have been derailed.

That Johnson even suited up for the Griz was something of a fluke. After an unspectacular junior college career, Johnson and his wife, Shaunte Nance-Johnson, were looking for somewhere to continue their basketball careers. It was a package deal — take both of us, or neither of us. Griz coach Wayne Tinkle was on board and Lady Griz coach Robin Selvig agreed to the deal.

AJ was not particularly athletic, nor was he the fastest player on the court and he wore ice packs on sore knees after nearly every game. But the man could score, whether it was with his patented pullup mid-range jumper, a drive to the basket, or at the free throw line where he was deadly accurate.

So as AJ and the Griz — make no mistake, it still took a team effort — began to chip away at Weber’s huge lead, there was some discussion among the coaching staff about how to attack next.

“AJ got us back in the game, now let’s start feeding the post,” one unnamed assistant coach implored Tinkle, referring to Griz big man Brian Qvale, who finished with 14 rebounds and six blocked shots.

Paraphrasing Tinkle: “Screw that, we’re riding AJ!” And so the Griz did. Johnson scored his team’s final 21 points, the last two coming on a 15-foot pull-up jumper with 10.4 seconds to play to give the Griz their one-point lead.

The problem was, Weber State had future NBA lottery pick Damian Lillard on the floor. Would he derail Montana’s epic comeback?

To no one’s surprise, the Wildcats got the ball to Lillard. But there was freshman Will Cherry — Lillard’s buddy from Oakland, California — to force

a tie ball. Game, set and match to the Griz.

The game was televised nationally by ESPN and the exposure set off a wave of attention on Johnson, his wife, and the Griz. USA Today, Yahoo Sports and Andy Katz of ESPN all shined the spotlight on the Griz, who wound up losing a competitive game against New Mexico in the NCAA tournament.

That Cherry made a potential game-saving defensive play to seal the win foreshadowed what was to come.

He was soon joined by fellow Californian Kareem Jamar and the two formed the heart of a Griz team that appeared in the NCAA tournament

an unprecedented three times in four years, jumpstarted by AJ’s Magic Show. But for a questionable call in the 2011 league title game, it might have been four straight berths.

Tinkle capitalized on that run by landing a job at Oregon State of the Pac 12. Travis DeCuire took over for Tinkle and the salad days of Griz basketball have continued. DeCuire took the Griz to back-toback NCAA appearances in 2018-19.

If you’re looking for a catalyst for all that success, it’s not far-fetched to point to one magical performance.

Anthony Johnson, center, and the 2010 Grizzly basketball team celebrate their come-from-behind victory in the Big Sky Conference Championship with a parade throughMissoula. Linda Thompson/Missoulian

Gardner’s aucTion service 60 Years of Business Gardner’s auction service was founded in 1960 in hamilton, Montana. in 1971, the kalispell office and in 1974 the Missoula office opened. over the years we have developed an aggressive and experienced auction team through honest, competent, and knowledgeable service.

We have conducted auctions for Fdic, the small Business administration, the state of Montana, u.s. Marshall service, The university of Montana, the u.s. Bankruptcy courts, insurance companies, municipalities, as well as private entities, businesses, attorneys and others. currently we conduct approximately 100 auctions a year between our Missoula, hamilton and kalispell office.

Thank you 251-2221

River City Grill us located in the Historic W.A Clark building,once the turn of the century headquarters of Western Lumber Company.Established in 1914.

Our Goal remains to provide a historic and family friendly dining establishment, as well as a gathering place for the entire community and a dining oasis for traverlers, truckers and tourists.

Come see us today!

7985 HWY200,Bonner • 258-2758

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Missoulian 150

2010s

March 12, 2020: COVID-19 hits Big Sky tourney BILL SPELTZ Missoulian sports editor

Reports of a pandemic sweeping the United States had made their way into the national news cycle, but the novel coronavirus still seemed so far away on that crisp Thursday morning in Boise, Idaho.

Then shortly after 10 a.m., Montanans came face to face with a scourge that would forever define their 2020. It came, oddly enough, in the form of a sporting event cancellation. The Big Sky Conference announced it was ditching the remainder of its basketball championships due to coronavirus concerns.

Stunned fans, some of whom had just arrived in town to watch the Grizzlies in the men’s quarterfinals, were confused and frustrated.

“I think they should have at least continued to play the tournament, let the teams play,” Missoula native and UM alum/fan Don Miller said. “Even if there were no fans, I think they should have at least let the teams play, let the kids end the season the way it was designed.”

Miller wasn’t the only fan, media type or player who felt that way. Never before had such a drastic step been taken in the middle of a Big Sky tourney.

“Honestly I think it’s an over-reaction to a virus that’s probably been around longer than we know,” said former UM head athletic trainer Dennis Murphy. “As long as one takes adequate precautions, I think we’re in good shape.”

The Big Sky followed in line with larger, more visible leagues. The NBA decided to suspend play a day earlier and the Pac-12 Conference canceled its basketball tourney just hours before the Big Sky. Later that day, the Big Sky announced all spring sports were suspended “until further notice.”

It’s hard to look on the bright side, believe in the safe thing to do, when you’re in your early 20s.

That Thursday morning had to be especially tough on the Montana State women’s basketball team, which earned a trip into the Big Sky tourney final the night before.

Instead of playing Idaho for all the marbles, the

2020 COVID-19 pandemic sparks statewide shutdown.

Bobcats packed up and headed back to Bozeman.

No more basketball.

“For me, I can’t imagine being in the championship game and then finding out from a text message your season is over and as a senior you’ll never play again,” Montana Lady Griz senior player McKenzie Johnston said. “You’re so close to being able to crown a champion.”

Montana athletic director Kent Haslam put the week’s unprecedented circumstances in perspective.

“You know, in the end, it’s only sports and we’ll

certainly get through this,” he offered.

“Things are changing so quickly.”

No one would have imagined back then that Big Sky Conference athletics would still be in the deep freeze midway through the 2020 football season. Or that Big Sky basketball would be in jeopardy for the 2020-21 season. Or that a Big Sky football season in the spring of 2021 would even be considered.

Someday, Montanans will look back on 2020 with unbelievable stories to tell. For now, though, the daily disappointment is taking a toll.

Nicole Bierens, RN, right, retrieves a test swab from a patient with help from Dr. Eugenia Haight, center, and Elly Webster, RN, on April 7, 2020, at the Missoula CityCounty Health Department’s drive-through COVID-19 testing center at the Missoula County fairgrounds. COVID-19 and the nation’s response to it has colored the year 2020. Montana’s first case was diagnosed on March 11 and by the end of that week Gov. Steve Bullock had ordered a general shutdown of state schools and businesses.

Those restrictions were eased later in the spring, but reported cases and COVIDrelated deaths were on the rise in Missoula and statewide as summer turned to fall this week. TOM BAUER/Missoulian

Hide & Sole – Unique Leather Goods and Footwear Since 1972

By Scott Sproull – Owner Since 1975

It would typically take me four hours to make a sandal, but I was only getting paid $12 a pair for all that time and effort. Instead, I figured out that I could sell already made quality footwear brands, and not have to make footwear anymore. Yeah!

This sketch by Russell Smith Jr. is of the “Hippie Block” or “Hippie Strip” (Now the Hip Strip), in 1976. It is the first block south of the Higgins Street Bridge. At the time, our store was called “Mostly Leather” and it is the business at the far left. As a sign of the times, the store to the left of us was a typewriter business! We moved the business to our current Downtown location in 1979 and renamed it “Hide & Sole” I had no idea that what started out as a hobby business for two young men who wanted to make leather goods like belts and purses, would end up as a landmark Downtown Retail Shoe Store that still sells a little bit of leather goods, hides and supplies 48 years later?

In 1972, I was 19 years old and going to school at Western Illinois University, and I very badly wanted to get away from the high heat and humidity there. First I bought a very used car for $100, then saved up $100 in cash, and finally headed west, following the Lewis & Clark Trail and hoping I’d make it to the Pacific Ocean.

But I only made it to Montana and ran out of gas in a town I’d never heard of before… Missoula.

But I really liked that there was a University here, and I appreciated the huge variety of amazing outdoor activities here.

I thought it was pretty cool that I could live in my car at Sacajawea Park and jump off a local bridge into a river named after Captain William Clark. It seemed to me like Missoula and Montana were full of

Lewis and Clark related landmarks that I would need to explore.

Right away I also befriended two guys who had just opened a leather shop.

It was the 70’s, and the first of four names for the store was… The Woven Leather Duck  It began in a small room in the front of the Roxy Theater, but soon moved to the “Hip Strip” a few doors south of today’s Jeannette Rankin Peace Center and renamed “The Cow Haven”. I purchased that shop in 1975 and initially renamed it…

“Mostly Leather”.

Three years later, Southgate Mall opened with over 100 super-competitive stores and the majority of medium and large sized Downtown Retailers soon went out of business. But with the help of the Missoula Downtown Association and thousands of loyal customers, visitors and promoters, the Downtown took on the Mall challenge, and over the next 40 years, blossomed into the Cultural Heart and Center of Missoula and Western Montana that you see today!

In 1979, a year after the Mall opened, I moved our very tiny store from the “Hip Strip” to our current and much larger space north of the river and renamed it “Hide & Sole” (for the leather goods and footwear we sold).

At the time, we did not know that a major Downtown shoe store had been in that location for decades (Oggs Shoes)… Very Cool!!! In 1979, there had been five shoe stores in the area, but our shoe store was the only one that survived after the Mall arrived.

It turned out that the “Hip Strip” was a great incubator for five businesses that still exists today…

Hide & Sole, Butterfly Herbs, The Trail Head, The Shirt Shop and Open Road Bicycles (then called The Cyclist).

And because our roots are in the leather business, we still know how to find hiqh quality leather goods and footwear. We currently carry over 50 GREAT Brands of Footwear, Socks, and Leather Goods including: Birkenstock, Blundstone, Chaco, Dansko, Haflinger, Keen, Merrell, Oboz, Pikolinos, Rieker, Taos, and Teva.

I did not become a Birkenstock Footwear Dealer and get into the shoe business because of any special foresight. It was because I did not want to make sandals and shoes at a financial loss anymore.

We love having been an important part of the Downtown’s history for the last 48 years, and plan to be here for another 48 years. Luckily for me, our son Shawn has been running the business since 2014.

DOWNTOWN MISSOULA SINCE 1972

543-1128 www.hideandsole.com | 236 N. Higgins

Missoulian 150

Sunday, September 27, 2020

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Lucy Vanderburg, in a yellow shawl, and Gary Woodcock, carrying a staff, set out from the Jocko Church at the head of a column of walkers at the start of the “Return to the Homeland” journey on Oct. 13, 2016. The three-day walk on the 125th anniversary of the removal of Chief Charlo and his Salish people from the Bitterroot Valley retraced that route in reverse direction to St. Mary Church in Stevensville. Tony Incashola, director of the Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee, called the original journey on Oct. 15-17, 1891, the “Salish Trail of Tears.”

TOM BAUER/Missoulian

Missoula and the Séliš and Ql̓ ispé People, 1870-2020 The Séliš-Ql̓ ispe Culture Committee, Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes

On September 15, 1870, the first issue of the Missoula and Cedar Creek Press was published. For the Séliš, a far more momentous event occurred two months earlier, almost to the day. On July 14, X͏ʷeɫxƛ̓cin (Many Horses— Chief Victor) died on a buffalo hunt east of the mountains. During the 1855 Hellgate Treaty negotiations, X͏ʷeɫxƛ̓cin led the delegation of the Séliš (Salish or ‘Flathead’), Ql̓ ispé (upper Kalispel or ‘Pend d’Oreille’), and Kootenai Nations.

Isaac Stevens and the U.S. delegation demanded that we abandon our separate territories and move onto a single reservation. In the end, the resistance of X͏ʷeɫxƛ̓cin and other tribal leaders forced Stevens to change the treaty to establish both the Flathead or “Jocko” Reservation, and a separate reservation for the Séliš in the Bitterroot Valley.

But Stevens also inserted some murky fine print, doubtless garbled by the translator, who was so inept that a Jesuit observer said “not a tenth” of what was said “was actually understood by either party.” Article 11 specified that the President would decide, based on an examination of the two reservations, if the Bitterroot was, in fact, “better adapted to the wants” of the Séliš.

Such a conclusion seemed impossible from a tribal perspective. It was the Creator who had made the Bitterroot a special part of our vast homelands, full of landmarks and sacred places that served as constant reminders of how the land had been prepared, in the time before human beings, for our people,

the tl̓ sqélix͏ʷ, the human-beings-yet-tocome. Who could possibly say we did not belong there? When the government took no action for the next 15 years, the Séliš felt even more certain that the valley would remain a permanent, guaranteed homeland.

But with X͏ʷeɫxƛ̓cin’s passing, many non-Indians saw an opportunity to achieve their long-sought goal of forcing the Séliš out of the coveted valley.

In many ways, Missoula’s birth-year was the start of a new chapter in the region’s history, in which indigenous peoples faced intensifying pressures that threatened not only our land base, but also our political and cultural survival.

The Garfield treaty For the next two decades, X͏ʷeɫxƛ̓cin’s son and successor, Sɫm̓x ̣e Q͏ʷox ̣qeys (Claw of the Small Grizzly—Chief Charlo), led the Séliš fight to remain in the Bitterroot. In 1872, Congress dispatched a delegation led by future president James Garfield to “negotiate” our removal. Sɫm̓x ̣e Q͏ʷox ̣qeys bluntly rebuffed Garfield: “I will never sign your paper… My heart belongs to this valley. I will never leave it.” Garfield then had Chief Charlo’s “x” mark forged onto the copy of the agreement sent to the Senate for the vote on ratification.

Through the 1870s and 1880s, conditions steadily worsened. Market hunters eliminated the last remnant wild bison herds of the Northern Plains by 1883. That same year, the Northern Pacific Railroad was completed across our territories. The railroad led from Missoula directly through the Flathead

Reservation — even though tribal leaders had expressed unanimous opposition during the 1882 negotiations over the railroad’s right-of-way.

Railroads enabled the exploitation of our homelands on a far larger scale.

Trees, ore from mines, livestock, and grain could now be shipped in virtually unlimited quantities to national and international markets. In a larger sense, railroads tipped Montana’s balance of power. Until then, tribal ways of life had a greater presence in the Missoula region, coexisting in uneasy tension with the burgeoning non-Indian economic system. Railroads pushed our people and cultures to the margins, fueling a vision of the future that sought the obliteration of indigenous nations.

Tribal people encountered growing hostility to our exercise of offreservation treaty rights to continue hunting, fishing, and gathering plants on “open and unclaimed” lands. This sometimes exploded in deadly violence.

In the Swan Massacre of 1908, four members of a Ql̓ ispé family hunting party, including an elder and a boy of 13, were murdered by a state game warden and a deputized civilian. Countless other encounters narrowly avoided escalating into violence, including tense face-offs with game wardens in the area of Ništétk͏ʷ (Deep Creek), on the south side of the Clark Fork near Missoula, in the 1920s. Our elders have related the sense of wariness and vigilance, and sometimes fear, that hung over many hunting and fishing camps.

Yet most tribal people persisted in our subsistence practices, out of need

and also love for our cultural ways. We were helped by the formal designation of public lands close to the Flathead Reservation, which provided areas where we could continue harvesting our traditional foods. In addition, we had non-Indian friends who welcomed us.

Elders have said that we survived in part because there were more good people than bad.

Well into the 1960s, Séliš and Ql̓ ispé families continued to travel to the Missoula Valley every spring, camping for several weeks to harvest a food that stands at the heart of our culture. Then as now, we gathered in ceremony to welcome the return of our visitor, sp̓ eƛ̓m (bitterroot), and to pray for its continued abundance, and for all the other foods that follow it through the course of the year. We dug and dried bitterroot in great quantities, storing it for use during the long winters. Some landowners allowed tribal people to use their wells for drinking water. For a time, our traditional culture mixed in interesting ways with the emerging urban interface; elders recall riding streetcars between camps. On Sundays, people often made their way to the river to wash clothes, sweat, fish, swim, and relax.

Through the decades, however, pavement covered most of the bitterroot prairielands of the Missoula Valley.

Elders have told how the area along Brooks Street was developed, then the area along Russell, and finally the bountiful digging grounds near Reserve Street, especially near its intersection with South Avenue.

raise the first American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. Charlo had been transported to Iwo Jima aboard the USS Missoula.

traveling by motor vehicle. The group set out from the Jocko church, traveled through Missoula, and ended at St. Mary’s Mission at Ɫq̓eɫml̓š (Wide Cottonwoods—Stevensville).

In many ways, the experience was perhaps representative of the history we have recounted in these essays. The group felt the presence of the ancestors and their grief in being forced from their homeland. Many reflected on the destruction of the once-great bitterroot grounds directly along the route down Reserve Street. A few passers-by shouted insults or derision, but the overwhelming majority expressed enthusiastic support. Many of us felt joy and pride in that moment, in the Séliš Nation and its supporters walking together to celebrate our continuance, our way of both reconnecting with our homelands and our history, and also finding a path into the future. As we passed by Fort Missoula, some remarked on the park then under construction, and how the county was working with the CSKT to reestablish a small plot of native prairie, replete with sp̓ eƛ̓m, bitterroot, the sacred first food of the Séliš and Ql̓ ispé people. All of us hoped that something good might be growing for the generations to come.

Dixon’s influence and a return to the homeland

Dixon’s influence The early twentieth century brought great change to the Flathead Reservation itself, and much of it was tied directly to Missoula. In 1904, Joseph Dixon — a newly elected congressman from Missoula’s business community, married to the daughter of Frank Worden, and owner of the Missoulian — gained passage of the Flathead Allotment Act, despite what Dixon knew was nearly unanimous opposition from tribal members. The act was the local application of a national policy that the federal government gradually imposed upon many Indian reservations, with the explicit goal of dismantling tribalism as a functioning socio-economic system.

In violation of the Hellgate Treaty, which had set aside the reservation for the “exclusive use and benefit” of our people, the Allotment Act opened the reservation to non-Indian settlement, beginning in 1910. Many tribal leaders, including Sam Resurrection, worked tirelessly to stop the implementation of the new law. But Dixon and other officials proceeded, strongly supported

by Missoula business figures such as A. B. Hammond and C. H. McLeod of the Missoula Mercantile. Homesteading was further supported by construction of the massive Flathead Indian Irrigation Project, which Congress justified as

helping Indian farmers, but which supplied water almost exclusively to non-Indian lands. By 1929, some 540,000 acres of the 1.2-million acre Flathead Reservation had been transferred to non-Indian ownership.

That included more than a thousand “villa sites” around the south half of Flathead Lake, which the federal government marked out and sold in auctions during the 1910s and 1920s.

Most were purchased by non-Indians from Missoula, Butte, and other cities.

During this time, the federal government permitted timber companies, including Missoula’s Polleys Lumber Company, to log reservation lands on an almost unimaginable scale.

From 1917 to 1928, close to half a billion board feet of largely old-growth trees were stripped from reservation lands.

In 1924, partly because of indigenous service in World War I, Congress finally granted citizenship to all Native Americans. Disproportionate numbers of Séliš, Ql̓ ispé, and Kootenai people served in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Seventeen tribal members gave their lives during World War II, including the great-greatgrandson of Chief Charlo, U.S. Marine Corps Pfc. Louis Charlo, who helped

Return to the homeland Over the course of the twentieth century, buttressed by new federal policies supporting tribal sovereignty and self-determination, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes became one of the most respected and accomplished tribal governments in the nation. In recent years, the relationship between the CSKT and Missoula has been marked by frequent and positive collaboration on many issues, symbolized in early 2020 when county commissioners dedicated a Flathead Nation flag in a ceremony conducted in the courthouse’s public hearing room.

In 2018 Commissioners had renamed the same room in honor of Séliš cultural leader Sophie Moiese (Č̓ ɫx͏ʷm̓x͏ʷm̓šn̓ á), who for many years led the bitterroot ceremony.

In 2016, on the 125th anniversary of the forced removal of the Séliš from the Bitterroot Valley, CSKT members organized a “Return to the Homeland” walk. Dozens of participants retraced the journey in the reverse direction for three days on foot, some on horseback, those unable to walk

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Missoulian 150

For 67 years, Stockman Bank has been serving Montana with the best in banking services, helping Montanans manage their money, achieve their financial goals and realize their dreams. As the largest family owned, privately held, community bank in Montana, we remain committed to traditional, western values and homegrown customer service.

Our Story The history of Stockman Bank began long before our founder, Bill Nefsy, purchased controlling interest in the Miles City Bank in 1953. Bill’s vision to serve the agricultural producers and local business people in his eastern Montana community was seeded in his childhood, working on his uncle’s ranch in northeast Wyoming, and learning the value of working hard from sun-up to sun-down.

Bill purchased a small cattle ranch south of Miles City in the late 1930s. Over time, he was able to add to his ranch holdings by purchasing other ranch operations that had fallen into disrepair during the Great Depression, and nursing them back to productivity. When Bill began looking to get an operating loan for his growing ranch, he was turned away by the banks with the explanation, “We don’t do Ag loans.”

In 1953, when an opportunity to purchase controlling interest in the Miles City Bank presented itself to Bill, he took the chance and began building a banking organization that would serve the needs of the entire community, including local business people, farmers, rancher and families.

Bill never viewed himself as a banker, but as an entrepreneur and consumer of financial services. This unique outlook quickly set him apart from his competitors as he made it his mission to serve honest, hard-working Montanans of every walk of life, throughout Montana.

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