Dearborn Crossing Cemetery Part 1

The Dearborn River country in Lewis and Clark County is an area rich in cultural history where physical remains abound if you know where to look. Buffalo jumps, pictographs, and stone arrow points illustrate Native Americans’ use of the abundant natural resources. One overlook, according to locals, was an eagle-catching site. Below, a stone cage—still intact—housed captive eagles until they molted. Then the birds were freed and the feathers collected. The area saw crews building the Mullan Road, completed in 1860, and heavy traffic between Fort Benton and Helena on the Benton Road from the mid-1860s to the advent of the railroad in the mid-1880s.

Nothing remains of the hotel and other businesses at the site of Dearborn Crossing, which served travelers along the Benton Road from the 1860s until the 1880s and the advent of the railroad.

The settlement of Dearborn Crossing sprang up to serve stagecoach and freight traffic and included a large hotel, livery, general store, and other businesses. The historic Dearborn Crossing Cemetery served the early settlers. It sits on a high, flat knoll overlooking the Dearborn River about a mile from the present Highway 287 Bridge. It is a beautiful, peaceful place. But the cemetery’s silent residents could tell tales of early-day violence.

Dearborn Crossing Cemetery, on private property, once served the local community.

In 1866, Charlie Carson and Louis Marcotte went out one morning to fetch the stage horses. Piegan Indians ambushed them. Marcotte survived by hiding in a gulch, but Carson was killed. He was the first person buried in the Dearborn Crossing Cemetery. In 1878, Gus Cottle and several others were also killed by Indians and buried here. Not all the graves are marked.

A few tombstones like this one of Gus Cottle, one of four killed by Indians in 1878, recall the hardships of early settlers.

A fence, built by property owners in 1960 to protect the tombstones from cattle, surrounds a portion of the cemetery. Depressions in the ground, however, indicate that there are unmarked graves outside the fence. Victims of murder, accidents, and sickness speak to the hardships of Dearborn pioneers. Most intriguing among them are William and Hattie Moore whose shocking deaths in 1885 were ruled murder-suicide. But was that what really happened? Stay tuned for Part 2.

Helena’s First Decoration Day

Decoration Day, later called Memorial Day, was a tradition that sprang from the tremendous loses both the north and the south experienced during the Civil War. The tradition of decorating veterans’ graves took root in different states at different times from the 1870s through the early twentieth century. On May 30, 1883, Helena observed Decoration Day for the first time with a mile-long procession that assembled at Harmonia Hall on Broadway. It made its way out of the city to the cemetery on Benton Avenue. Nearly 1,500 people participated in the march, including some fifty veterans of the Civil War and a few veterans of the war with Mexico, accompanied by the Silver Coronet Band. Ladies and gentlemen in carriages joined the crowd at the cemetery, and flowers and evergreens were laid upon the graves of veterans. Wilbur F. Sanders gave a lengthy address while the Reverend T. V. Moore officiated as chaplain. This observance, the Helena Daily Herald pointed out on June 2, 1883, brought to light the deplorable condition of the city's protestant and Catholic cemeteries whose wooden head and foot boards had deteriorated and could not be deciphered:

Some of the noblest men and women... lie buried there; yet their resting places cannot be identified. After considerable inquiry, we do not find that plot of the lots… is kept. The county gravedigger keeps no record of interments. He digs a hole and covers a corpse and the name of the dead is buried in the same oblivion as is his body….

The only known historic photo of a Helena cemetery is this undated one of the Catholic Cemetery on Oakes, also known as St. Mary’s Cemetery. By the 1920s, it was abandoned. Robinson Park, created in 1972, covers some 1100 burials that still lie beneath the sod. Courtesy Charleen Spalding.

Only one-fourth of the graves in the city's several cemeteries were marked. This informal tally included the now-forgotten graves that remained in the old City Cemetery near the grounds of Central School and the Catholic Cemetery on Oakes, now Robinson Park. At this time in Helena’s history, the only well-tended burial ground was the Jewish Home of Peace, now tucked next to Capital High School.

Thomas Marlow

The transcript of a speech given in 1989 by Peggy Marlow Guthrie outlines the life of her grandfather, Thomas Marlow. He was a prominent banker and businessman and owner of principal fundraiser for Helena’s beloved Marlow Theatre, named in his honor. As a young man in Helena, he was on the eve of marriage to Katherine Sligh, daughter of an Anaconda physician, when she died of a heart ailment. The community mourned with her bridegroom and Marlow erected a huge angel as a monument to her memory at Forestvale Cemetery.

Photo via Find a Grave

The beautiful sculpture is a dominant feature in the cemetery. Marlow later married Agnes McNamara Louise Miltz, and they had five children. The Marlows employed a Chinese cook at the family home at 626 Harrison. Peggy Guthrie writes that after many years working for the family, the elderly cook approached Marlow and asked if it would be possible to bring his nine-year-old grandson to Helena from China before he was too old to care for him. Marlow brought the youngster to Montana. The following year, the grandfather died, and the boy became the Marlows’ cook. He was small boy and could hardly see over the kitchen counter when he became the family’s head chef, but he made the best cherry pie in the entire capital city. After some years it was time for the young man to go to college. Marlow offered to pay his way, but the young man did not want to go to school; he only wanted to be a chef for the Marlow family. And so Marlow and the young man parted ways. Peggy writes that in time they reconciled and eventually the young man wanted to open his own restaurant. Marlow generously financed the young man’s venture. His name was Jerry Wong and the restaurant was the House of Wong, one of Helena’s several premier Chinese restaurants.

Update: thanks to Peggy Marlow Guthrie for the corrections.

Sculpture Gardens

During the nineteenth century, there was a national movement to plan park-like cemeteries with curving driveways and landscaped grounds outside urban areas. The idea took hold in Montana. Our major cities have beautiful park-like cemeteries where turn-of-the-century residents went not only to visit graves but also to picnic and enjoy nature. Missoula’s City Cemetery, Kalispell’s Conrad Cemetery, and Billings's Mountview  are a few examples. Cemeteries were usually located out of town for aesthetic reasons, but planning cemeteries out of town in Butte was a necessity because of health and sanitation. Urban mining everywhere created ground disturbance, and early burials in city churchyards or on private property did not always remain underground. Bodies turned up in odd locations, and exposed burials, especially during epidemics, were a serious health hazard. Keenly aware of this grisly problem, fraternal organizations established Mount Moriah Cemetery in 1877. Rather than curving driveways, it was laid out in simple blocks since there was no landscape to accommodate curving driveways. As much as the community wanted a beautiful cemetery, in nineteenth-century Butte this was impossible. Open hearth smelting polluted the area and prevented anything from growing. The cemetery was bleak and ugly. Butte’s citizens, however, made up for the lack of landscaping by placing fanciful and lovely tombstones on their loved ones’ graves. Butte has the most unique and attractive cemetery art of any in Montana. The desire to create “a spot of beauty” was at first far-fetched. But by 1905, as smelting centralized in Anaconda, trees and shrubs did begin to grow. Today Mount Moriah and Butte’s other sculpture garden cemeteries rival any in Montana.

Mount Moriah has many beautiful sculpture tombstones like this tree stump, which symbolizes a life cut short.
Photo from Buried in Butte by Zena Beth McGlashan

C. E. Conrad Memorial Cemetery

One fine fall day in 1902, Kalispell founder Charles E. Conrad and his wife Alicia took a last horseback ride to a favorite  area and rested on the narrow overlook where the valley spread below. Charles told his wife there could be no lovelier place for his final rest. Charles died weeks later, but not before he sketched the mausoleum he wanted Alicia to build in the place he had chosen.

She carried out her husband’s wishes and had more than one hundred stone steps set into the steep cliff below, allowing private access to her husband’s gravesite. Alicia Conrad worked tirelessly to establish a community cemetery serving all people and all faiths as a memorial to her husband. She traveled extensively to find the right design. At her invitation, A. W. Hobert, superintendent of the famed Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota, visited the site and agreed there was none more beautiful. He designed the cemetery in 1903 as a classic Rural Garden Landscape. This concept in urban cemetery planning, first employed in Paris, France, and later in Boston, Massachusetts, offered a park-like setting for the enjoyment of nature as well as burial of loved ones.

A. W. Hobert's original design.

Alicia initiated a legislative bill, passed in 1905, establishing cemetery management and perpetual care. This cemetery became the prototype for perpetual care cemeteries in Montana. Today, 104 acres include more than 18,000 burials among winding driveways, sweeping lawns, and formal plantings that blend into the spectacular natural setting. Alicia Conrad laid the foundation for thoughtful management and careful stewardship. This unique cemetery welcomes all to enjoy its special features.

Langford Peel's Tombstone

When Helena became the territorial capital in 1875, the capital city wanted its buildings and community resources to showcase its importance. A federal assay office—one of only five in the nation—opened in Helena in 1876, and so did Central School, the first school in the territory with  graded classrooms. The rise overlooking the gulch was the best, most visible location to build the school, but that entailed moving part of the City Cemetery, active since 1865. It was neither an easy nor a pleasant task, moving a cemetery. Most graves were unmarked, and so in many cases it was a game of move-them-when-you-find-them. The method of burial in roughly and hastily made pine boxes or worse left corpses in various stages of decomposition. This made removal difficult and grisly. Another problem was where to put the newly unburied dead. Lewis and Clark County created Benton Avenue Cemetery in 1870, and so it provided the solution to the latter problem. Benton Avenue became the receptacle for burials clearly marked with tombstones or wooden markers as well as unmarked graves encountered during the digging of the school’s foundation. Among the graves transferred to Benton Avenue was that of desperado Langford Peel, killed in a saloon affray in 1867. A tombstone, five feet tall and expertly carved, marked his grave. The enigmatic inscription read in part, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the lord. I know that my redeemer liveth.” Peel’s contemporaries viewed it not as religious, but rather as a curse against Peel’s murderer.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Wilbur Sanders took the wooden tombstone to his house at nearby 7th and Ewing. There it rested in his attic until the 1930s when it was rediscovered and given to the Montana Historical Society. It remains in the collection today, a rare, well-preserved relic of Helena's earliest history. Peel himself lost out; his new grave at Benton Avenue was, and is today, unmarked.

Observing Memorial Day

The first Decoration Day, or Memorial Day as it came to be called, was formally celebrated in 1868 when the Grand Army of the Republic designated a day of observance honoring casualties of the Civil War. The idea caught on nationally and observances gained popularity during the 1870s. On May 30, 1883, Helena celebrated its first formal observance of Decoration Day with a mile-long procession from Broadway out of the city to Benton Avenue Cemetery. Nearly 1500 people marched in the procession, including some fifty Civil War veterans and a few veterans of the war with Mexico. The Silver Coronet Band provided music. Ladies and gentlemen in carriages joined the crowd at the cemetery, bringing flowers to place on the graves of their loved ones. This observance, the Helena Daily Herald pointed out on June 2, brought to light the deplorable condition of the city's protestant and Catholic cemeteries whose wooden head and foot boards had deteriorated and could not be deciphered.

Wooden grave markers in Helena's Benton Avenue Cemetery, 2003.
Photo courtesy Ric Seabrook and Charleen Spalding. 

Few burial records were being kept. The Herald noted that the county gravedigger simply dug a hole, covered the corpse, and the name of the dead was “…buried in the same oblivion as his body.” An informal tally taken at this time revealed that only one-fourth of the graves in the city's several cemeteries even had markers. Helena was not alone in this situation. If a grave had a wooden marker, it often deteriorated quickly, and until the mid-1880s, Montana had no stone monument makers. Tombstones had to be ordered from catalogs. A. K. Prescott, Montana’s first tombstone maker, did not begin taking orders until about 1885. Unmarked graves exist in nearly every Montana community.

With the moment of national remembrance, which comes at 3:00 p.m. local time on Memorial Day, consider all those forgotten dead that lie beneath the sod in your communities.

Red Lodge Mausoleum

Above-ground burials in mausoleums are the norm in Europe and in some places in the United States. In New Orleans, above-ground burials are required to prevent cemeteries from becoming bone gumbo during frequent flooding. While private mausoleums dot Montana cemeteries, above ground mass burials were never common practice. After 1900, inexpensive concrete construction made building large multiple crypt facilities economically feasible. At the same time, Progressive-era ideology was encouraging individuals to join together for community improvement. Thus, the communal mausoleum movement was born, placing above-ground entombment within financial reach of ordinary citizens. In 1921, the Consolidated Mausoleum Company advertised communal mausoleums in Montana newspapers. “The present high state of civilization demands,” read the ad, “a more humane and sanitary method of taking care of the dead, than found in earth burial.” This opportunity intrigued Red Lodge, and construction of a mass mausoleum engaged the community. More than two hundred people subscribed to the project, and construction of the mausoleum with more than two hundred crypts, or burial spaces, began along Montana Highway 78. Designed as a “time-defying” monument, its simple, but massive temple front, heavy bronze doors, and enormous Tuscan columns emphasize strength and permanence. The reinforced concrete walls are durable and moisture tight, fulfilling the requirements for the mausoleum to survive in perpetuity.

Courtesy Montana State Historic Preservation Office

Nationwide, hundreds of communities joined the movement, but the Red Lodge Communal Mausoleum, recently listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is one of only three identified in Montana. True to plan, the mausoleum housed Red Lodge citizens of all classes. Wealthy businessmen, immigrant coal miners, and their families, lie entombed together “within the walls of one building… imposing and everlasting.”

Pete Zortman Comes Home

Oliver Peter Zortman came west in 1888, lured by gold discovered in eastern Montana’s Little Rocky Mountains. He struck it rich several times, ran a cyanide mill, and left his name on the town of Zortman. He was part of an elite group—one of very few to leave the Little Rockies with a small fortune in gold.

Zortman, Montana, 1908. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 951-885

He joined the Masons in Chinook and eventually ended up in Big Timber where he died of cancer in 1933, penniless. No stone marked his final resting place, but the local newspaper that documented his passing mentioned that he was buried in a hand-dug pauper’s grave. A few years ago, Zortman residents decided to honor their namesake. It was no small task to discover Zortman’s unmarked resting place. A long search led to Zortman’s membership in the Masons. The leatherbound records of the Big Timber Masonic Lodge offered details of Zortman’s funeral. With permission from Zortman’s relatives, several veterinarians, a Chinook undertaker, cemetery workers, and assorted Zortman residents oversaw the exhumation. The remains of Pete Zortman surfaced from the chocolate soil in Big Timber’s Mountain View Cemetery with some difficulty. Water from an irrigation ditch immediately flooded the hole as the backhoe dug. Three feet of muck was removed, and pieces of the coffin and Zortman began to surface. The yellowed bones were placed in a newly made pine coffin and loaded onto a truck. On August 27, 2005, a vintage hearse carried the pine box to the Zortman Cemetery. A smattering of relatives and most of the town of Zortman attended the graveside services. Pete Zortman was home.

The Fairy Steps

There is a very special place known to generations of Kalispell’s children as the Fairy Steps. This enchanting stairway leads up a very steep cliff from the heavily wooded banks of the Stillwater River. At the top, there is small grassy promontory overlooking the Flathead Valley. This promontory is part of the Charles Conrad Memorial Cemetery. It was on this scenic overlook in the early twentieth century that Alicia Conrad had her husband’s remains placed in the family mausoleum. The mausoleum today sits by itself on this dramatic outcrop, surrounded by dense forest and very steep terrain. Long ago there was a road that ran along the river bank at the base of the cliff.  It was the most easily accessible route for her to visit the remains of her dearly departed husband.

She had the cliff face buttressed with a stone retaining wall and sections of concrete to prevent erosion. The tiny stone steps switchback up the steep incline, and several stone benches along the way allow necessary resting places. Mrs. Conrad would have her coachman drive the carriage to the steps at the base of the cliff so that she could visit the gravesite. Local children have scampered up and down that treacherous stairway for the last hundred years, but adults find the climb challenging. Local legend has it that if you count the steps on the way down and again on the up, you will always come out with different numbers. It’s little wonder. Once you are midway down, you have already lost count. And on the way back up, you are so winded that keeping track of numbers—at least for me—was impossible.

Update: The cemetery has just been listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Here's an article about it.

Charity Dillon

Priscilla Jane Allen is not the name she left behind when she died. She is known to posterity as Charity Jane Dillon, and her grave, high above Canyon Ferry Lake, is perhaps the most visited site in Broadwater County.

There are several accounts of her life and death, but the common threads recount how this young woman came west, alone and on horseback looking for her errant lover.  She came to Diamond City, twenty miles northeast of present-day Townsend, in the mid-1860s and eventually found him happily married to another woman and the father of several children. She kept her true identity and heartbreak to herself, and never revealed the man’s name. Under the assumed name of Jane Dillon, she settled near a spring on the stagecoach road between Hog ‘Em and Radersburg where she built a log cabin inn. The inn was not an overnight hostelry but rather a place where travelers could stop and have a drink or a meal. The hospitality of this half-way house was well known. Some old timers claim that she was called Charity because of her kindly acts, but others believe that her name came from the inn’s geographic location near Charity Gulch. In 1872, passersby found Charity Dillon dead in her bed, a bottle whiskey hidden underneath. While some conclude that she died an alcoholic, she may have simply stored the whiskey—which she kept for customers—there for safekeeping.  Others believe she died of ptomaine poisoning from contaminated canned goods, a fairly common occurrence. Still others insist that Charity Dillon died of a broken heart.  Whatever the cause, it is this poignant mystery that brings visitors to her grave.

Bill Fairweather

Some men just weren’t meant for good fortune. Bill Fairweather was a tragic example of luck gone awry. In the company of a party of miners on May 26, 1863, Fairweather panned the first gold at Alder Gulch, setting off the famous stampede. The gulch made him rich, but to Fairweather, the gold meant little. Legend has it that he would ride up and down the streets of Virginia City on his horse, Old Antelope, scattering gold nuggets in the dust. He loved to see the children and the Chinese miners scramble for them. He mixed gold dust in his horse’s oats, saying that nothing was too good for Old Antelope, the horse that brought him such good luck. But Fairweather died of hard living at Robber’s Roost in 1875. His pockets were empty and a bottle of whiskey was his only companion. He was not yet forty years old. A diet of gold dust did Fairweather’s horse, Old Antelope, no harm. He long outlived his master, enjoying the Ruby Valley pasture of E. F. Johnson into extreme old age. Fairweather’s remains lie in Hillside Cemetery, a windswept burial ground overlooking Alder Gulch where an iron fence surrounds his grave. A recent marker credits him with the Alder Gulch discovery.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Old Pitt

Happy Monday, history buffs. Today's post might be my favorite story from all of Montana history.

John Robinson III at one time had the largest elephant herd in captivity. From the 1880s until the 1910s, he trained and traveled with his pachyderms, known as the Military Elephants for the military-themed act that made them famous. Financial hardship forced Robinson to sell several elephants to Ringling Brothers in 1916, but he kept the oldest ones with him at his farm outside Cincinnati. Neighbors got used to seeing them lumbering down the road, pulling wagons, and grazing. After Robinson’s death in 1921, one by one the last three elephants succumbed to old age until the fourth, Petite, nicknamed Pitt, was the last survivor. She was more than 100 years old when Robinson’s widow gave her to the Cole Brothers Circus in 1942.
 

The three elephants on the left became Robinson's Military Elephants, Clara, Petite (Pitt), and Tony.
Photo from Elephants Encyclopedia

The next year, 1943, the circus was traveling across Montana playing one night engagements. They stopped at Dillon to do a show. The crowd thronged into the exhibition tent to marvel at the elephants’ performance. The animal exhibition was just over and the crowd had gathered under the Big Top to enjoy the main show. A storm came up suddenly, and a bolt of lightning hit the exhibition tent striking Pitt. The 102-year-old veteran died instantly. The other elephants and circus owner Zach Terrell were stunned but recovered. Old Pitt had a fine funeral and was buried on the Beaverhead County Fairgrounds. A year later the Cole Brothers Circus again performed at Dillon. Circus folk gathered silently around a granite marker they had paid for. Its careful wording tells Pitt’s story and ends with this: May God Bless Her. Today a white fence in the middle of barren ground surrounds the lonely marker. A recently-planted sapling inside the fence, evidence that someone still cares, will hopefully grow to someday shade Old Pitt’s final resting place.

Photo from RoadsideAmerica.com

Hog ‘Em

Hog ’Em was originally the name for the town of Springville, one of the first-named towns in Montana Territory. With gold discoveries in the mid-1860s, greedy miners staked out claims over such a wide area that miners named this camp Hog ’Em. Other local camps were Beat ’Em, Cheat ’Em, Rob ’Em, and Sinch ’Em. Hog ’Em was known as the “father of the ’Ems.” When the post office came to Hog ‘Em, officials didn’t like the name so they changed it to Springville. Springville took its name from nearby warm water springs. The tiny settlement was a stopping place for trappers, traders, and, later, freighters and stagecoaches. In 1879, the Springville post office moved to Bedford and Hog ’Em ceased to exist. Only a few foundations and a small cemetery remain. You may have heard the local myth that the cemetery contains the graves of suicides and murder victims. But the truth is that only two of its silent occupants have actually been identified. Jack Wright committed suicide in the Missouri River, date unknown, and Michael O’Keefe died in 1878 of complications from a fall down a mineshaft.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. Remember the mystery of Missoula's first cemetery?

First Missoula Cemetery

In the summer of 1974, a Missoula homeowner was adding a porch to his house on Cherry Street when he got a big surprise. The backhoe digging the foundation unearthed something that should not have been there: human bones. The coroner confirmed the discovery of two sets of bones encased in the decayed wood of old-fashioned coffins. Authorities determined that no foul play was involved. These were simply historic burials, the individuals placed in the ground by loved ones hoping for their eternal rest. The pieces of metal hardware, splintered wood, and bone fragments were collected in a box that today sits on a shelf in a University of Montana laboratory. The bones serve as teaching tools for anthropology students. Those who have studied the contents of the box have solved some of the mystery. Historic maps of Missoula and newspaper clippings show that Missoula’s first cemetery was located in the area in 1865. It fell into disuse with the opening of the current city cemetery in 1884, and the last burial there occurred in 1895. When the land was subdivided in the 1940s, traces of the old cemetery disappeared, but, according to city records, most burials were not removed. This is not particularly uncommon. Other Montana communities have subdivisions located on historic burial grounds. Helena’s Robinson Park and its adjacent residential streets, built over the town’s first Catholic cemetery, is one example. But to whom did the two sets of bones belong? Students determined long ago that one was a child and the other a female adult. Coffin hardware fragments were consistent with nineteenth-century caskets styles. But whose eternal sleep was so rudely interrupted? That is a part of the mystery that will probably never be solved.