Poacher Gulch

Tales of Chinese terraces along a remote, heavily timbered hillside in Sanders County attracted the attention of Forest Service and University of Montana archaeologists in 2006. The site was unlike any other in Montana with rock-lined terraces, moss-covered with age, spanning several hundred feet along a steep slope. Forest Service archaeologists discovered these terraces in 1979, tucked away in an obscure drainage known as Poacher Gulch. Locals firmly believed that Chinese miners built them. The moss and a tree trunk growing through an iron wheel seemed good evidence that the site was of great age.

Photo by Chris Merritt

As the local story went, Chinese workers laying tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad along the Clark Fork River in 1883, underpaid and mistreated, left their jobs to search the hills for gold and silver. It was logical, and these terraces resembled terraces Chinese farmers constructed in Idaho’s Payette National Forest. So between 1979 and 2006, the Chinese terrace theory was so convincing that it nearly became accepted as fact. Archaeologists assumed they would discover evidence of 1880s Chinese occupation, when laborers were in fact laying track along the Clark Fork. However, that is not what came to light, and it served to prove that local stories do not always match historic facts. Forest Service archaeologist Milo McCloud, University of Montana graduate student Chris Merritt, and a Passport in Time volunteer crew worked for weeks under terrible conditions in cold and rainy weather in 2007.

Photo by Chris Merritt

They found no evidence of Chinese settlement. Instead, they found thousands of tiny pieces of tarpaper, mushy wood, nails dating to the early 1900s, and the cultivation of corn on the terraces. The “Chinese terraces” of Poacher Gulch turned out to be something completely unexpected. No Chinese ever lived there. Its real inhabitants were cultivating corn for moonshine during Prohibition in the 1920s.

Haunting of the Judith River Ranger Station

The Judith River Ranger Station has a homey ambiance where the past is everywhere. Some lucky guests have experienced this firsthand.

In the summer of 2009, a crew of six archaeologists, students, and volunteers excavated a portion of the long-abandoned mining camp of nearby Yogotown. The Judith Ranger Station served as headquarters for the crew. My husband Mark and daughter Katie were project volunteers. They, along with director Chris Merritt of the University of Montana, took the upstairs bedrooms while the rest of the crew camped nearby. The weather on the first night was hot and very still.

Mark awakened to the sounds of breakfast cooking in the kitchen downstairs. He could hear banter between the kitchen and the dining room, someone chopping something on the cutting board, and bacon or sausage sizzling. Mark thought it must be about 6 AM, and almost time to get up. Then he fell asleep again. He awakened sometime later to utter silence. It was still pitch dark, and so he knew it was not time to get up. Suddenly it struck him that with all that activity downstairs, there were no cooking smells. He began to worry that maybe some animal had gotten into the house. So he got the flashlight and looked at the time. It was 3:30. He tried to get Katie to go with him to check, but she wouldn’t get up. He went downstairs and found nothing amiss, so he returned to bed and both he and Katie went back to sleep.
Katie awakened a while later. The night had been hot and stuffy, but a cloud of cold air seemed to surround her. She lay there shivering in the deep quiet. Then she heard a very loud rhythmic creaking, like someone was coming up the stairs. The next morning, Mark asked if anyone had been up in the night. Everyone said they had slept soundly. Then as they all milled around waiting for breakfast, someone sat down in the living room rocking chair. It creaked loudly, and Katie suddenly realized that she had not heard footsteps on the stairs, but rather the rocking chair’s distinctive creak.

Pictograph Cave Cannibals

English professor H. Melville Sayre of the Montana School of Mines at Butte led the first archaeological excavations at Pictograph Cave, a National Historic Landmark, near Billings. Under foreman Oscar T. Lewis, a Glendive rancher and self-taught archaeologist, the dig was funded by the Depression-era New Deal Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. It put numerous crew members to work. According to locals who frequented the excavation site as visitors in 1937 and 1938, both Sayre and Lewis told fantastic tales. They claimed to have found evidence that Ice Age occupants practiced cannibalism. They backed up their story with the supposed discovery of human teeth, a human skull with knife marks consistent with removal of the tongue, and butchered human rib bones bearing human teeth marks. While Sayre’s formal report to Governor Roy Ayers is considerably less flamboyant, he does mention that some items yielded evidence consistent with cannibalistic activity. Lewis further speculates in his notes that notched bone projectile points found in the caves came from Inuits in the Arctic. He figured that the Inuits harpooned buffalo that did not die, but migrated south where they were eventually killed by the early inhabitants of the Yellowstone Valley. Writer Glendolin Damon Wagner, who wrote about evidence of cannibalism among other indigenous peoples, painted a vivid picture of the finds in Pictograph Cave in the Rocky Mountain Husbandman of May 3, 1938. But when professional archaeologist Dr. William Mulloy took over the Pictograph Cave excavations in 1941, these tales died a swift death. If evidence of cannibalism existed, it has been lost along with many of the artifacts discovered under Lewis and Sayre. Most scientists discount cannibalism among Montana’s first peoples as nothing more than bunk.


Bill Browne, photographer, Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 90-96 P3 #18

Archaeologists Gus Helbronner (left) and Wahle Phelan during excavation of Pictograph Cave, c. 1937 Click the photo for a bigger version.

Crow Agency Archaeology

Archeological investigations have recently exposed the foundations of the second Crow agency in the Stillwater Valley near Absarokee. A full-scale excavation, conducted by Aaberg Cultural Resources, came about as preliminary to the Montana Department of Transportation’s planned widening of a three-mile stretch of Highway 78. Testing for archaeological sites is required for projects that disturb the right-of-way. The highway bisected the suspected location of the agency that existed there between 1875 and 1884. The agency is historically important because it encompasses a difficult period in Crow history. Not only were the Crows struggling to transition from hunting to farming during this decade, the tribe also suffered from epidemics of measles and scarlet fever. Preliminary test pits of the area yielded enough artifacts to warrant further investigation. In 2006 Aaberg surveyed the site with a magnetometer. This instrument reveals solid objects underground and translates them to a computer generated map. Comparing his findings with an 1878 map of the agency, Aaberg determined that the rectangular compound exactly lined up with scattered anomalies the magnetometer revealed. This exciting discovery led to the excavations in the summer of 2011. Crews uncovered portions of the foundations of the compound that included the agent’s, clerk’s, and doctor’s offices. A layer of charcoal and ash substantiates the fact that the site was burned upon abandonment. Decorative beads, animal bones, broken bottles, and other artifacts, currently under analysis, will eventually be housed at the curation facility on the Little Big Horn College campus in Crow Agency. Study of these artifacts and the tragic story they tell will help write this chapter of Montana’s past.

Archaeologist Steve Aaberg sites the location of the next unit to be dug, while field crew members
excavate a unit believed to be the agency doctor's office.

Staff members from the State Historic Preservation Office work with the field crew to screen for artifacts.
Both photos from the Montana Historical Society's Facebook page

Unearthing Chinese History

Distinctly Montana recently published my article on Montana's Chinese history. Here's a tidbit:

The story of Montana’s Chinese pioneers has almost entirely escaped the state’s written history. By 1870, Chinese comprised ten percent of Montana’s population, but by the mid-1950s, few remained. Their homes and businesses fell victim to urban renewal programs. Time erased their remote mining and railroad camps. Traces of their culture disappeared, and their stories have become the stuff of myth and legend. In 2008, Big Timber gave up some information about its Chinese residents.  University of Montana archaeology graduate students, led by Justin Moschelle and Chris Merritt, uncovered a Chinese restaurant and laundry next to a brothel. Historic maps confirm that Chinese businesses and a “female boarding house”—the euphemism for prostitution—operated in the neighborhood in the early 1900s. Western red light districts and Chinese settlements, both housing outcast populations, were often adjacent. Volunteers working on the Big Timber project unearthed 35,000 artifacts, which comprise Montana’s only known Chinese deposit of the 1930s and 1940s. Among the artifacts are shards of pottery and porcelain, a bluing ball used in laundry operations, Chinese game pieces, and one very curious item. Intentionally placed beneath the doorframe of the entryway was a domestic cat’s paw. Likely some kind of talisman, its placement remains a mystery.

The crew also accessed Big Timber’s tunnels, which locals insist are Chinese. But in Big Timber as in other communities, passageways dubbed “Chinese tunnels” provide convenient access or under sidewalk storage. While they might have been used by Chinese residents, others used them too, and nothing makes these passageways exclusively Chinese.