Cattle Dog

An undated clipping from the 1940s in a Bozeman newspaper tells a poignant story of man’s best friend. Oldtime cattleman Ott McEwen was devastated when the cattle dog who had been at his side through blizzards and summer winds, long days and lonely nights, suddenly disappeared. The dog had been his constant companion, sharing hardships and joys. McEwen grieved for the loss of the best friend he ever had.

Four years later at a Stockgrowers meeting, cattlemen had gathered in the Bozeman Hotel’s lobby. Someone noticed a shaggy old dog, limping badly, whining outside the door. The man let him in and watched curiously as the dog wandered from man to man sniffing. Finally the dog dove into the crowd and leapt upon an old geezer. Old Ott McEwen couldn’t believe it. He went down on his knees and on the floor of the lobby, threw his arms around the dog as tears ran down his cheeks. Someone said he had seen the dog weeks before way over in eastern Montana. How did the dog make his way across the mountains, and how did he know his master would be there? Many a gruff cattleman wiped away a tear, and the talk grew gentle among the men, for they understood well the special bond between a cattleman and his dog.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. Remember this faithful dog?

Custer's Heart

So much has been written about the Battle of the Little Bighorn that it is nearly impossible to present new information. But here is a curious tidbit from the Helena Herald of 1890 noting a legend told by the Sioux Indians. As the only human survivors of the deadly encounter, the Herald noted, the Sioux alone can tell the true history of the infamous event. The Sioux claim that on the hill where Custer fell, a peculiar plant now grows. This plant had never been seen there before the battle and it is not known to grow anywhere else. It is a very odd plant with broad, flat leaves that curve like a sword. Its edges are sharp as a saber and will slice through the skin like a razor blade. Those who unknowingly pick this plant drop it right away as its leaves are strangely cold and clammy. The plant bears a beautiful golden blossom that is shaped exactly like a heart. In the center of the flower there is one small spot of brilliant red, like a drop of blood. The Indians regard this plant with awe. They call it Custer’s Heart and refuse to touch it. They claim that the blossom crushed in the hand leaves a blood red stain that is impossible to remove.


John H. Fouch snapped this first known photograph of the battlefield in 1877. He titled it "The place where Custer fell."
Image from Traveler's Guide to the Great Sioux War, courtesy James Brust

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Friday Photo: Woodward Flyer

Happy Friday!


Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

This Woodward Flyer carried a precious load of children and their dolls. Click on the image for a bigger version.
P.S. Remember this cutie?
P.P.S. Growing up in Montana wasn't all fun and games.

Mary Gleim

Every western town had its houses of ill repute. In Montana, a few significant remnants of these colorful businesses survive. There’s the Dumas in Butte, Big Dorothy’s in Helena, and two of Mary Gleim’s West Front Street brothels in Missoula. Gleim was a flamboyant character who operated eight “female boarding houses” in Missoula’s red light district where railroad men patronized its honky tonks and saloons. Gleim’s splashy career included conviction in 1894 for the attempted murder of a rival. Her prison record notes that she arrived at Deer Lodge to serve her sentence dressed to the nines in a “complete outfit.” During her prison term, another female prisoner viciously stabbed her, and Gleim never quite recovered from the attack. Reputedly a smuggler of laces, diamonds, opium, and Chinese railroad workers, the mountainous madam weighed three hundred pounds. She was a formidable opponent and a match for any man. “Mother Gleim,” as she was also known, operated brothels until her death in 1914. She left an estate of one hundred thousand dollars. Her former brothels, both nicely renovated and adaptively reused as businesses, add to the interesting history of the 200 block of West Front Street. According to her wishes, Gleim’s tombstone—unlike all the others in the Missoula city cemetery—faces the railroad tracks. This way, Gleim could bid farewell to the many railroad men who were her customers.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. Remember this flamboyant madam?

Evelyn Cameron Scandalizes Miles City

Photographer Evelyn Cameron is a recent inductee into the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans in the state’s Capitol. Evelyn was born in England and raised to be a proper English lady. But once she created a real scandal. Evelyn’s husband was a noted ornithologist and naturalist, but he didn’t care much for their ranch. That was all right with Evelyn who enjoyed the physical work. Chores and most everything from making bread to milking cows and working the horses fell to her. She took to wearing a divided riding skirt that allowed her to ride astride rather than sidesaddle. The long skirt was much like modern culottes. Victorian women, however, did not wear pants. And when Evelyn first rode into Miles City in the dark blue divided skirt she had ordered from California, oh, the scandal it caused. Although the skirt was so full it looked like an ordinary dress when she was on foot, on horseback the division was obvious. Law enforcement warned her not to ride on the streets in town or she might be arrested. But town was forty-eight miles from her ranch, and riding sidesaddle could only be done on a very slow and gentle horse. Evelyn would not ride what she called old “dead heads.” She became convinced that riding in a man’s saddle stride-legged was the only safe way for a woman to ride. Before long, other women took to the divided skirt and it became an accepted way of dressing not only for women on the streets of Miles City, but also on homesteads, farms, and ranches across Montana.


Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 90-87.80-2

One of the Buckley sisters of eastern Montana dismounting, wearing an Evelyn Cameron–designed split skirt, 1914. Click the photo for a bigger version.

P.S. Remember Dillon's fashion scandal?

Friday Photo: 1908 Clark Fork Flood

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


Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 949-408

 Missoulians improvised a walking bridge after the Higgins Avenue Bridge over the Clark Fork washed out on June 5, 1908. Click the photo for a bigger version.

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

Great Falls UFOs

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

Image from National Archives via nicap.org

The grainy film footage is reportedly the first ever shot of unidentified flying objects and is still a mystery. For several weeks, Mariana showed the film to local civic and sports organizations before he submitted it to the air force for further study. At first, the air force offered contradictory explanations when it returned the film to him, but eventually concluded that the objects on the film were probably two fighter jets known to be in the vicinity at the time. Mariana didn’t agree with the air force’s conclusion and enthusiastically promoted his amazing film for the rest of his life. Private and government investigators periodically interviewed Mariana about the film and what he saw that day in August 1950. Even today, researchers have not determined what the film actually shows. The objects were not reflections of birds, weather balloons, or meteors. They might have been military jets, but most believe they moved too fast and seemed to generate their own light. The grainy film footage is legendary in UFO lore and has never been scientifically explained. Axline concludes that the film may actually be what Mariana claimed it to be—the images of two visitors from outer space.

The Place Where the White Horse Went Down

In the summer of 1837, a smallpox epidemic spread from a steamboat as it lay docked at Fort Union. Although the federal government initiated massive inoculations among the tribes of the Midwest in 1832, the effort did not reach this far north, and Montana’s native people had no immunity. The disease struck the young, vigorous, and most able-bodied family members so quickly that before one person could be properly laid to rest, another family member died. In the end, the epidemic claimed at least ten thousand victims. The Crows tell a story about two young warriors who returned from a war expedition to find smallpox decimating their village. One warrior discovered his sweetheart among the dying, and both grieved over the loss of many family members. Realizing that nothing could alter these events, the two young men dressed in their finest clothing. Riding double on a snow white horse and singing their death songs, the two young warriors drove the blindfolded horse over a cliff at what is today the east end of the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds at Billings. Although time has reduced the height of the cliff, the spot where they landed is remembered even today as The Place Where the White Horse Went Down.


A historical marker stands at the site today.
Image from Historical Marker Database



Women’s Mural

Happy Mother's Day!

The Women’s Commemorative Mural, painted in 1979, has been a longstanding presence in Helena at Last Chance Gulch and Broadway. Funding came from the Montana Arts Council, the Helena Indian Alliance, President Carter’s CETA program, and other sources. Designer Anne Appleby worked with eight teenage girls, teaching them all aspects of research, planning and design. Many Helena women put their brush strokes on the mural. The figures include an old woman and a little girl who are the same person, representing the true pioneer as well as time and change in Montana. There’s a school teacher who brought education and culture to the far reaches of the frontier. Fanny Sperry Steele, the famous bronc-buster, on her favorite pinto, stands for independence, grit, courage, determination and the freedom to be what you want to be. The suffragists, ladies of the evening, a modern housewife, and two musicians underscore the diversity of Helena’s women. It is the sleeping mother with her newborn baby, however, that is central to the mural. The model was Helenan Debi Corcran and her son Eli who was born as the mural was being designed. They are wrapped in the quilt of the past, a symbol of things handed down from mother to child and of women coming together in the spirit of community for quilting bees. An eclipse of the sun occurred during the mural’s creation. It was such a profound experience it was included in the design.  Finally, the last panel illustrates the unspoiled wilderness of Montana, the pristine country that all people who have lived here have loved, and the generations of women who have gone before us. This history from a feminine point of view was meant to last no longer than twelve years, but more than thirty years later, it still graces the side of the Livestock Building.

Friday Photo: Fannie Sperry Steele



Fannie Sperry Steele rides a steer at the Gilman Stampede, September 1919.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 947-603

Famed bronc buster Fannie Sperry Steele competed in rodeos until 1925. Then she and her husband bought a dude ranch near Lincoln. After her husband died in 1940, Steele ran the ranch by herself for another twenty-five years. She was one of the first women to receive a packer’s license and well into her sixties spent long days in the saddle guiding hunters into rough country. She stocked Meadow Creek before environmental concerns were fashionable, packing six horses with cans of fish over treacherous terrain, stopping at every stream to keep the water cool. She broke her own horses and at the end of the season trailed her twenty-five pintos seventy miles across the Continental Divide to winter pasture. In 1974 at eighty-seven, Steele could no longer live alone and had to move from the ranch. The worst part for her was leaving her beloved string of pintos behind. In 1975, Steele was honored as was one of the first of three women inducted into the Rodeo Hall of Fame. A few years later at ninety, Steele summed up her life: “To the yesterdays that are gone, to the cowboys I used to know, to the bronc busters that rode beside me, to the horses beneath me (sometimes), I take off my hat. I wouldn’t have missed one minute of it.” Steele died in 1983. She was the quintessential Montana woman: determined, gritty, and independent of spirit.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

P.S. Remember these rodeo-champion sisters?

Ladies Rebel

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



This cover of Life magazine from February 18, 1926, shows a flapper wearing rolled stockings.
Library of Congress

At the Normal School in Dillon, women students rebelled and cast off their corsets and bloomers in favor of short hems, rolled stockings and step-ins. School administrators were scandalized, and issued this statement: “the girls must wear garters, long stockings, and bloomers, or get on the train and go home.” The dean of women had to enforce the dress code. She posted herself at the foot of the stairs in Main Hall, where she could see underneath as girls walked up the stairs. Any girl detected with rolled stockings and step ins was sent back to the dormitory to change into appropriate attire. The Dillon community watched with interest as this drama unfolded. The rumor was that the Golden Rule and Eliel’s—the two stores that sold women’s undergarments—had to bring out their obsolete inventory of corsets and bloomers for the students to comply with the rules. By the end of the 1920s, dress lengths again became longer, the administration relaxed its rules, and the situation righted itself.  But during the Roaring Twenties, those newfangled fashion trends challenged everyone.

Update: Do you suppose Arline Allen would have worn rolled stockings and step-ins?

Virginia City Bank Robbery

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

From Cartoons and Caricatures of Men in Montana (1907) by E.A. Thomson
via Butte-Silver Bow Public Library's Flickr photostream

Bennett was behind the counter, and asked what he could do for them. One reached into his vest and the other reached for his hip, and both drew revolvers, which they aimed at Bennett’s head. One man produced a buckskin thong and tightly bound Bennett’s hands behind him while the other pressed his revolver into Bennett’s neck. Bennett had just unlocked the fireproof safe—bad timing—when the pair came in. One continued to press his gun into Bennett’s neck while the other rummaged through the open safe. They gathered up about forty-five hundred dollars and told Bennett not to sound the alarm. They headed out to the street, and Bennett followed, crying “Murder! Robbers!” A third man was waiting with the horses. The three made off on the road to Yellowstone Park. In their haste, they dropped one of the revolvers. It was a cut-down Colt with the trigger removed. The robber who held the gun on Bennett had been holding the hammer back with his thumb; the slightest movement could have caused the gun to fire. It was a professional job. The robbers had stationed fresh horses every thirty miles all the way to Yellowstone Park. Yet they overlooked twenty-thousand dollars in gold dust and seventy-five thousand dollars in currency. Authorities eventually apprehended the third man who held the horses. He claimed the other two gave him five hundred dollars and told him to get lost. He did ten years at Deer Lodge. Years later, speculation still held that the two who got away were Frank and Jesse James. The Elling Bank still stands on Wallace Street.

The Elling Bank today. Image via Virginia City Chamber of Commerce

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Friday Photo: Glacier Country



Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

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

Bill Hynson

Bill Hynson was a bad apple and a rough character who, in a strange manner, scripted his own death at Fort Benton in 1868. When saloon patrons who had overindulged began to report money missing from their pockets, many suspected Hynson. Locals observed Hynson keeping company with inebriated saloon patrons whose funds came up short. The local vigilance committee—that Hynson, ironically, took some credit for organizing—planned a trap to catch the perpetrator. They planted a supposedly drunken patron with heavy pockets in the local saloon. The plant pretended to pass out, and Hynson helped himself to the man’s pockets. The next day, the committee informed Hynson that the criminal had been discovered. Deputy Marshall X. Beidler was in town and the vigilantes announced that they intended to have a hanging. Hynson, unaware that he had been observed, volunteered to supply the rope and directed old-time trapper Henry Mills to dig a grave. Hynson promised Mills that in due time he would supply the corpse. Marshall Beidler, a cruel man well versed in the art of hanging, took the rope Hynson offered and placed it over his neck. Without a word, Hynson’s life was quickly snuffed. The corpse that filled the waiting grave was Hynson himself. His was one of three known vigilante hangings in Fort Benton.