Friday Photo: Bannack, Montana

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 940-695

Did you hear about the flash flood that swept through Bannack in July? Today's photo shows the town as it was circa 1900, looking west. The dredge on the left was launched in 1895. Click the photo for a bigger version.

P.S. A beautiful photographic tribute to Bannack
P.P.S. The Bannack Association has posted lots of photos of the cleanup, plus historic photos.
P.P.P.S. Do you think Bannack's Meade Hotel is haunted?

Homesteaders Take Care of Their Own

"Ma” Smith, a homesteading wife in Garfield County, was locally well known and greatly respected. She is a good example of women in isolated places who sometimes made difficult personal choices and material sacrifices because there was no one else to make them. In addition to running her own homesteading partnership with her husband, Ma was a practical nurse who traveled with elderly Doctor Lon Keith. Dr. Keith had given up his practice, but came out of retirement because Garfield County desperately needed him. Ma Smith helped Dr. Keith deliver scores of babies and assisted him in countless other cases.

From Garfield County History

In 1918, Dr. Keith made his last house call alone, breaking a fifteen-mile path through a blinding blizzard to set an elderly man’s broken leg. Before he left his patient, Dr. Keith was coughing. By the time he reached home, he was very ill. Ma hitched her horse to her bobsled when word came of Doc’s illness. She was by his side when he died of pneumonia. She took charge of the doctor’s household because there was no one else to do so. She bundled the doctor’s frail white-haired widow in warm clothes, packed her in the bobsled, covered her with a blanket, and took her to the nearest neighbor. While a neighbor hand made a coffin, she brushed and pressed the doctor's good black suit, prepared his body, and laid him out. She took a dress length of fine gray silk from the suitcase that she had hastily packed and stroked it with her work-roughened hand. The fabric was a special Christmas gift from her son in Chicago who was an inspector at the stockyards. She had intended to make herself a new dress with the gift. New dresses did not come often, and Ma hadn't yet had time to sew. She had, however, packed the silk thinking that it would make the perfect lining for Doc Keith’s coffin, if needed. She was right. And there was enough left over to make a pillow. Her sacrifice made a lovely bed for Dr. Keith’s final rest.

Auditor

Butte’s Berkeley Pit is as poisonous as battery acid. An entire flock of snow geese mistakenly landed on its surface in 1995 and died before they could take flight. But for one lonely matted, mangy canine, the pit’s acrid, crusted shores were home for seventeen lonely years. No one knows where the dog came from. The handful of miners working at Montana Resources, Butte’s only active mining company, named him Auditor because they could never predict when he would show up. He was not a friendly dog, shunning the humans who tried to love him. Miners left him food and water, built a doghouse shanty, and fixed him a bed. He only settled there at night occasionally.

Courtesy Travels with Ace

Auditor’s long, tangled dreadlocks made him look like a moving pile of rags. While the dreadlocks perhaps hinted at his lineage, they likely kept him warm in brutal weather. As he grew old, miners mixed baby aspirin in his food to ease arthritis. One miner once earned enough trust to clip the hair from Auditor’s eyes so that he could see. Miners say that beneath his dreadlocks, he had beautiful eyes. Auditor roamed the wasteland, living where no other living thing could. How the pads of his feet could escape burning from the acid of his habitat defies explanation. In the end, Auditor died peacefully in his shanty in 2003. He was 120 in dog years.

P.S. Remember this heartwarming cattle dog?
P.P.S. Today is Evelyn Cameron's birthday.

Friday Photo: Fighting Wildfires

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 2003-47.25

Humans aren't the only ones working to contain wildfires. These pack mules from the U.S. Forest Service Remount Station carried tools and food to men on the Forest Service fire lines. They got a well-deserved meal at the Swamp Creek Base Fire Camp in this July 19, 1938, photo. The photo's caption reads: "CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] enrollees from Co.'s 297, 591, 952-956, 1962, and 1998 spent a tough week here."

P.S. Remember this hard-working (and loyal) animal?

Fort Keogh

Fort Keogh was established in July 1876 in the few weeks following the Custer loss at Little Bighorn. The army cavalry post takes its name from Captain Myles Keogh who served under Custer and died in the battle. The fort’s commander was General Nelson Miles. In 1879, Miles City—whose name honors the general—became the first seat of Custer County, and the fort grew to be one of the largest in the territory.

A distant view of Fort Keogh, c. 1878. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 003.63

Sixty buildings once sprawled across the diamond-shaped grounds. In 1907, the army withdrew its infantry troops, and in 1909, the fort became a remount station where the army trained and shipped horses worldwide. The army shipped more horses from Fort Keogh during World War I than any other army post.

Women and children pose in front of the officers' quarters at Fort Keogh, c. 1878.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 003.62

The military withdrew in 1924 and transferred the land to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for experimental stock raising and the growing of forage crops. This work continues today. The remains of the historic fort include the parade ground, 1883 wagon shed, 1887 flagpole, and seven other pre-1924 structures.

Kirby Grant

Here’s a bit of Montana trivia. Kirby Grant Hoon Jr., who used the stage name Kirby Grant, starred in the 1950s television series Sky King. Remember that? He was born in Butte in 1911 and grew up in Helena where his father, Kirby Grant Hoon Sr., was postmaster. Kirby Jr. was a 1929 graduate of Helena High School. In the series, he played wealthy Arizona rancher Schuyler King, nicknamed “Sky,” who fought bad guys and rescued people with his airplane. His niece Penny, who lived with him on the Flying Crown Ranch, was his sidekick on these adventures. Kirby was a pilot in real life and learned to fly the airplanes in the series. Early television demanded simultaneous filming of multiple episodes, and so Sky wore the same clothes on every show. File footage, especially of the plane flying, was often used numerous times, and sometimes the film would be reversed so that the plane appeared to fly in the opposite direction. On these occasions, observant fans could notice that the numbers on the aircraft would be backwards. Seventy-two episodes aired on ABC in 1953 and 1954. CBS later rebroadcast the series.

Kirby Grant (left) with Gloria Winters and Ron Hagerthy. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Kirby Grant did little acting after Sky King. He and his wife founded a ranch for orphaned or abandoned children, and he was often honored at aviation events. On October 30, 1985, Kirby died in a traffic accident in Florida en route to the last successful launching of the space shuttle Challenger. Astronauts had planned to honor the Montana native for his encouragement of aviation and space flight.

Friday Photo: Grass Dance

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.308

N. A. Forsyth called this photo "The Grass Dance of the Blackfeet." He probably snapped it between 1900 and 1911.

Dorothy’s Rooms Part 2

The demise of Dorothy’s business partly came about because of her civic conscience. Downtown Helena was seedy and deteriorating, and Dorothy hoped to set a good example. In the fall of 1972, she received a $500 federal Urban Renewal grant to refurbish her building. Aspiring politicians saw publicity about Dorothy’s property as detrimental to Helena’s reputation. An undercover officer visited Dorothy’s Rooms. He maintained that she sold him a drink without a liquor license. He then paid twenty dollars to watch a girl “take off her clothes and roll around on the bed.”  That was enough for the county attorney, who alleged that Dorothy Baker’s rooming house was being used “for the purpose of lewdness, assignation, and prostitution.”

Vintage clothing owned by Big Dorothy's employees from the Montana Historical Society collection.

Dorothy had survived other raids in 1963, 1969, and 1970 by simply ignoring the charges. The district judge therefore ordered law enforcement to remove the occupants and secure the premises.  One outraged citizen blamed the afternoon raid on the “the asinine morality of a pipsqueak.”  Letters supporting Dorothy poured in to the Helena Independent Record.  “You lost your best tourist attraction,” one out-of-towner lamented, “and a true asset to your town when you put the heat on the law to close Dorothy Baker’s.” One woman voiced her own father’s observation that “a town without a whore house [is] a stupid place in which to live.” But on May 14, before Dorothy Baker could have her day in court, she died suddenly in a Great Falls hospital. Her passing was widely noted, and a female legislator, also named Dorothy, proposed designating Dorothy’s Rooms an historical landmark. By 1976, Ida Levy’s old Silver Dollar Bar had become Big Dorothy’s Saloon. Today, the popular Windbag Saloon and Grill and the Ghost Art Gallery in the St. Louis Block, and Lasso the Moon toy store in the Boston Block, are downtown anchors. Offices and a frame shop now fill Dorothy’s Rooms where one spectacular treasure remains. Big Dorothy Baker’s private bathroom is a 1960s showplace, done up in black plastic tiles with green fixtures. It is a rare and well-cared for survivor of a legendary place and a bygone time.

Big Dorothy's bathroom, Ghost Art Gallery

P.S. You can read the earlier history of Dorothy's Rooms in part 1.

Dorothy’s Rooms Part 1

Prohibition and World War I brought reforms, and Helena, along with two hundred other American cities, closed its old red-light district in 1917. The women re-emerged in other locations billed as “furnished rooms.” Such places never mentioned exactly what was “furnished.” Madams Ida Levy, Pearl Maxwell, and a few others ran businesses above the Boston Block and the St. Louis Block on South Last Chance Gulch.

Ida Levy. Photo courtesy Susan Bazaar.

By 1927, Ida Levy operated her “rooms” upstairs at 19 1/2 South Last Chance Gulch. Ida was handsome, big-hearted, and fond of jewelry so gaudy it didn’t look real. But the diamonds and gems she wore were not only authentic, they were the best.  Ida bought distinctive, expensive neckties for her regular customers at Helena’s best stores. Employees noted Ida’s purchases, and waited to see what prominent citizens would turn up wearing them. After Prohibition, Ida’s Silver Dollar Bar (where the Windbag Saloon and Grill is today) was a favorite watering hole. Her upstairs “furnished rooms” had regular customers too. Marks in the flooring reveal that Ida’s rooms consisted of a long row of tiny cribs, one-room offices where prostitutes conducted business. In 1943, however, federal law banned cribs and Ida remodeled her upstairs into “proper” bedrooms. In 1954, Ida retired and Dorothy Baker took over as madam. She eventually purchased the property and leased the downstairs storefronts. Customers visiting Dorothy’s Rooms entered as they had during Ida’s tenure, at the back.

Dorothy's back door, where the Ghost Art Gallery is today.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Dorothy had no liquor license, but ushered her patrons hospitably into a small kitchen/bar where she sold drinks anyhow. Beyond the bar, a long hallway connected seven bedrooms, five sitting rooms, and Dorothy’s private apartments. Dorothy was a generous benefactor. She rewarded her paperboys with five-dollar tips and was a soft touch for youngsters peddling fundraisers. She donated hundreds of children’s books to local institutions; she wrote countless checks to charities; and she paid for several college educations. She loaned money without question, tipped off the police to drug pushers, and was polite to tipsy teenagers who knocked on her door. She sent them off with humor if they were underage. Little wonder the town was outraged when police finally closed her down in 1973.

P.S. Remember this Helena madam who operated nearly a century earlier?

Friday Photo: Chuck Wagon

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 981-256

Rodrick "Butch" Munroe prepares to feed the cowboys on the LU Bar cattle roundup in eastern Montana in August 1904. The man on the right is LU foreman Ben Fleming. L. A. Huffman snapped the photo.

Early Aviation in Montana

Eugene Ely and Cromwell Dixon celebrated aviation firsts in Montana in 1911, and ironically, both young pilots met tragic ends soon after. Twenty-five-year-old Ely was already famous as the first pilot to take off and land on a naval ship. The well-known aviator was also the first to fly an airplane in Missoula. On June 28, 1911, he took off and landed at the baseball field at Fort Missoula. He made three successful flights, the third with his mechanic as a passenger. It was the first dual flight in Montana. His Curtiss Pusher airplane arrived at the Missoula depot by train after similar flights in Butte, Great Falls, Kalispell, and Lewistown. To transport excited spectators to the fort for the event, both the railroad from the Bitterroot Valley and the Missoula streetcar line added extra cars. Over three thousand people witnessed the flight. On October 18, 1911, at the Georgia State Fair in Macon, Georgia, Ely died after jumping from his plane as it crashed. In Helena, Cromwell Dixon made headlines that same year. On September 30, spectators watched him take off from the fairgrounds and land on the west side of Mullan Pass, becoming the first aviator to cross the Continental Divide.

Cromwell Dixon at the controls of his plane, the Hummingbird, after crossing the Continental Divide.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 941-849

Days later on October 2, Dixon died when his plane crashed at the state fair at Spokane, Washington. Both pilots died within two weeks of each other, having made aviation history in Montana.

St. Mary's Mission Historic District

Jesuit priests and lay brothers founded St. Mary’s Mission—the first mission in the Northwest—in 1841. The Jesuits closed the mission in 1850, returning in 1866. For the next quarter century, they helped the Salish adapt from hunting to farming as the buffalo disappeared. The priests supported and advocated for the Salish people and provided medical services and spiritual guidance to both Indians and whites. When the U.S. government forced the impoverished Salish to leave their beloved Bitterroot Valley for the Flathead Reservation in 1891, St. Mary’s closed. An influx of homesteaders prompted the creation of St. Mary’s Parish in 1910, and the old mission church reopened. In 1911, the Salish returned to St. Mary’s for the first time since 1891 to celebrate their Bitterroot heritage. They still maintain this tradition.

A group of Salish visit St. Mary's circa 1955
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 950-754

The historic district includes the 1866 church and pharmacy, designed by the multi-talented Father Anthony Ravalli. Ravalli, also the architect of Idaho’s famed Cataldo Mission, employed log building techniques, ingeniously adapting European ecclesiastical architecture to the remote frontier. St. Mary’s historic church reflects his talents—the carpentry, paintings, and sculpture were all his handiwork.

The interior of historic St. Mary’s Mission Church shows Father Ravalli’s artistic skills

Adjacent is St. Mary’s Cemetery and Father Ravalli’s final resting place. Chief Victor’s log home and the Indian burial ground recall the Salish presence. Two gnarled apple trees provide living evidence of Jesuit agriculture. Father Ravalli planted one of the trees in 1869, and it is the oldest living apple tree in the Bitterroot Valley, where settlers later planted orchards during the Apple Boom. The tree is all that remains of Father Ravalli’s extensive garden. Salish elder Mary Ann Combs recalled her grandmother picking apples from the tree. Its aged trunk still puts forth shoots, and its buds, grafted onto rootstock, have produced numerous offspring in the Stevensville area.

This crabapple tree planted by Father Ravalli is one of two apple trees listed in the
National Register of Historic Places at St. Mary’s Mission in Stevensville. 

The new St. Mary’s Church, built in 1954 with donations from Montana and beyond, represents an unprecedented preservation effort to save the endangered mission church from deterioration through constant use. Today, St. Mary’s churches—old and new—define the historic complex as a place of significance to both Indian and white communities.

Friday Photo: First Elected Women

On this day in 1919, Montana became the thirteenth state to approve the Nineteenth Amendment.

Not all women favored suffrage. Those against it, called “Antis,” argued that no woman could possibly find time for politics without neglecting her family. Harriet Sanders, wife of pioneer attorney and politician Wilbur Fisk Sanders, countered the opposition, saying that suffrage made women better mothers. Better mothers kept better homes, and their children were better educated. Better homes and educated children in turn improved the nation. Women had much work to do.

Jeannette Rankin speaks in Washington, D.C., just before her election to Congress.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Montana women helped elect Jeannette Rankin to Congress in 1916, four years before women achieved national suffrage. But other equally significant victories were overshadowed by Rankin’s election. Not only did Montanans send the first woman to Congress in that historic election, they also elected the first two women to the Montana House of Representatives and the first woman Superintendent of Public Instruction. The first women legislators, Emma Ingalls of Flathead County and Maggie Smith Hathaway of Ravalli County, both championed the cause of woman suffrage and spoke out for the disenfranchised. As Ingalls and Hathaway took the seats they earned in the Montana House in 1917, they became the voices of many more than the voters who elected them, especially children and their welfare. And Flathead County’s May Trumper defeated three men in the race for school superintendent. Together these women represented the ribbon at the finish line of a long and hard-won race.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go