The Christies Recall Some Butte Adventures

Longtime Butte residents Colin Leys Christie and his wife, the former Ruth Lindsay, reminisced on the occasion of their seventy-fifth wedding anniversary in 1972. Ruth was the daughter of Judge John Lindsay who came to Butte in 1895 as legal counsel to Marcus Daly. Lindsay was later one of Butte’s two district judges. Christie was the son of Alexander Christie, a partner in Leys Jewelry, a family business established in 1888. Colin Christie became a certified gemologist and was the manager at Leys. The Christies told reporters that the key to their successful marriage was a long engagement; theirs lasted four years. When they finally tied the knot in 1912 at the Lindsay home at 831 W. Granite, the famed hack driver Fat Jack delivered the bridegroom and his best man to the wedding.
Ruth and Colin had vivid recollections of childhood in Butte. Colin’s parents were Scotch and tight with their money, so he never had an allowance. When a fossilized mastodon was unearthed during the excavation of Hamilton Street, the construction company charged ten cents for a look at the skeleton. Colin didn’t have a dime, so he never got to see it. And Ruth remembered that the children had to wear scarves over their faces because of the heavy sulfur in the air, and horses wore bells to announce their approach.

This c. 1920s photograph of North Main in Butte shows Leys Jewelry in the lower right corner. The sign is still faintly visible on the side of the building. Photo courtesy Ghost Signs of Butte.

Christie’s uncle, James Leys, started the jewelry business in a log cabin and later moved to Main Street. When the Centennial Hotel burned, it prompted a third and final move to 20 N. Main. The business had its ups and downs. During Prohibition, bootlegging tenants rented rooms above the store and did $1,000 in damages. Then robbers drilled a hole in the floor and stole $2,000 worth of watches. And Christie recalled giving away two thousand white roses when the store remodeled after World War II. After a long business life, Leys closed when Christie retired in 1965.

Friday Photo: Homestead Wedding

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 90-87 G065-002

Happy Valentine's Day! Here's a romantic photo: John and Christina Krenzler married on February 22, 1912, on this homestead. In traditional Russian-German style, schnapps and beer flowed liberally. Photo by Evelyn Cameron.

Friday Photo: Newlyweds

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 957-755

Clarence Goodell married Millie Priest on August 15, 1880. Millie's headdress marks her as a bride, but like most brides at the time, she probably designed her wedding dress to be worn again.

P.S. The Montana Historical Society has a fabulous collection of wedding dresses.

Marcus Daly’s Romance

Copper king Marcus Daly was the youngest of eleven siblings and began his career as a penniless Irish immigrant. He arrived in New York in 1856 when he was only fifteen years old. But Daly had a keen sense of business and a Midas touch with an uncanny instinct for the veins of copper that made his huge fortune. He founded Hamilton and Anaconda and was a generous patron to his fellow Irishmen and a benevolent boss to his workingmen. And he never forgot his humble Irish roots. But aside from all that, he was a great family man and father who loved his wife dearly. He and Margaret, or Maggie as he always called her, had a storybook marriage with a romantic beginning. In 1872, Daly was a foreman working for the Walker Brothers banking and mining syndicate of Salt Lake City. He was showing a newly discovered mine near Ophir, Utah, to miner Zenas Evans. Evans’ daughter, Margaret, was visiting the mine with her father. Daly hopped into a trench and held up some samples of the ore. Margaret was interested in looking at the samples and strayed too close to the edge. She lost her balance and tumbled right over the edge, landing right in Daly’s open arms. This chance encounter led to an engagement, and the couple was married in Salt Lake City at Joseph Walker’s home. Marcus doted on his Maggie until the day he died in 1900.

Margaret Daly. Courtesy the Daly Mansion

Curiously, Margaret had four sisters, and one of them, Miriam, was married to J. Ross Clark, a brother of Daly’s arch enemy, William A. Clark. The strange connection must have made for interesting family dynamics and dinner table conversation.

P.S. Remember Daly's prized racehorse?

The Legacy of Lily Toole, Montana’s First First Lady

Springtime in Helena brings to mind Lily Toole and the gift she left her adopted community. Lily was a gentle soul. Born to the prominent family of Brigadier General William Stark Rosecrans of Civil War fame, Lily grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a devoutly Catholic family. The general’s brother was a Catholic bishop, and three of Lily’s siblings entered the religious life. On May 5, 1890, Lily married Joseph Kemp Toole, governor of the new state of Montana. The small, private wedding took place at the parsonage of St. Matthew’s Church in Washington, D.C. The New York Times explained that Governor Toole was not a Roman Catholic, and there was not time to obtain the dispensation required for a wedding in the Catholic Church. The service was informal. Lily wore a dark green traveling dress trimmed with elaborate black braiding and a black straw turban embellished with ribbons and velvet. Her father and two friends were the only guests. After a brief seaside honeymoon, the newlyweds were at home in Helena at 102 S. Rodney Street. Lily settled into her role as Montana’s first lady, but she was first and foremost a devoted mother.


Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 945-340

The Tooles’ first son, Rosecrans, named for his famous grandfather, was born in 1891. The couple had two more children, Edwin Warren in 1893 and Joseph Porter in 1896. In the yard of the Rodney Street house, Lily planted an apple tree for each boy, and she planted lilacs to remind her of Ohio. In 1898, when Rosecrans was seven, he was visiting his aunt and grandfather when he died of diphtheria. Two of the apple trees Lily planted for her boys still live. It is not known which of the three had a shorter lifespan. During his second term, Governor Toole presided over every interior detail during the building of Montana’s State Capitol. But the governor’s wife was the landscaping consultant. Lily saw to it that many lilac bushes were planted on the grounds. While those have since been removed, her lilacs still bloom in the yard on Rodney Street. From those bushes, cuttings produced many more. During that brief time every spring when lilacs spread their sweetness all over Helena, remember Lily Toole.

Thomas Walsh’s Mysterious Death

U.S. Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana became prominent as head of the senate committee exposing fraudulent oil leases in the 1920s. Walsh exposed the Teapot Dome scandals of President Warren G. Harding’s administration and sent Secretary of Interior Albert B. Fall to the penitentiary. In 1933, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt appointed Senator Walsh Attorney General. Just before the inauguration, on February 25, 1933, in Cuba, Senator Walsh married Mina Perez Chaumont de Truffin, widow of a wealthy Cuban sugar grower.

Photo by Harris & Ewing from www.old-picture.com

Cuba at this time was in political turmoil and Mina’s family was embroiled in dangerous diplomatics. Members of her family had even been assassinated. The marriage raised eyebrows. As the newlyweds traveled to Washington for Roosevelt’s inauguration and Walsh’s swearing in, Senator Walsh suddenly died of a heart attack. The press pronounced Walsh’s death a national misfortune, but his son-in-law, U.S. Navy Captain Emmit C. Gudger, believed that his father-in-law had been poisoned. Julio Morales, a successful Helena lawyer who fled Cuba with the advent of Castro, wrote that “...rumors were started by both parties, alleging that Senator Walsh had been poisoned.” It was no secret that Roosevelt opposed Cuba’s government. Walsh’s widow was very upset to learn that her half of the inheritance consisted of the senator’s Washington D.C. town house. She traded the property for other items, including a prized painting by C. M. Russell. The painting’s whereabouts today is unknown. Walsh’s longtime trusted employees had packed his files for delivery to his new office.  Among them were files in progress investigating the Harding administration and the American aluminum industry, against whom Walsh intended to proceed. These files disappeared and were never seen again.

The “M”

Here's a special edition "Montana Moment" in celebration of Valentine's Day. Be sure to read to the end.

Ever wondered about letters on hillsides? Many Montana communities display these letters, often visible for miles on barren slopes. These familiar icons seem to be a product of the American West.  According to the experts, the University of California Berkeley boasts the first hillside letter, a giant “C” displayed in 1905. Other colleges and universities soon followed suit. As land grant colleges became established in western states newly admitted to the union, they joined the tradition. Montana has 112 hillside letters, more than any other state. Carroll College in Helena, Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana Tech in Butte, and the University of Montana Western in Dillon all display hillside letters. Other smaller schools and high schools also joined the trend. The University of Montana’s “M,” however, was the state’s first.


Image from Hotdogger Blog

Students constructed Missoula’s first “M” of whitewashed rock in 1909. Throughout the early decades, upperclassmen used the “M” to exert authority over the freshmen who were responsible for its upkeep. The sophomore class replaced the first “M” with an upright wooden model outfitted with $18 worth of lights. A larger wooden “M” soon replaced the upright one, but students did not properly attach the pieces and a blizzard carried them off. Forestry students built the trail leading up to the “M” in 1915. It has since served university and community groups who have used the “M” to advertise events or causes, and it has seen demonstrations and pranks. And once, with the addition of giant letters, a creative suitor even spelled out the message, “MARRY ME!” If the offer was accepted, it is not on record.

Brother Van’s Love Story

Here's a love story to tug your heartstrings.

Montana’s famous itinerant Methodist minister, William Wesley Van Orsdel, known to most as “Brother Van,” never married. And this is the story of why that was. As Brother Van traveled across Montana territory in the 1870s, he stopped at the sheep ranch of Richard Reynolds in the Beaverhead valley. The family invited him to stay, and there he met Reynolds’ stepdaughter, 13-year-old Jennie Johnston. She and Brother Van became fast friends. When Jennie turned 18, Brother Van was 31. Jennie’s mother wanted her to go to college, and so in September, 1879, she and brother Van postponed their plans and Jennie headed off for Northwest University in Evanston, Illinois. But Jennie became ill with tuberculosis. In the summer of 1880, she returned home to Montana. The next February, 1881, Jennie caught the measles but recovered and helped nurse other family members through what was then a very dangerous illness. But by summer, 1881, Jennie’s health began to fail and she died in October. As she lay in state in the Reynolds’ parlor, Brother Van slipped the wedding ring he would have given her onto her finger. He wore the ring she would have given him for the rest of his life. Jennie, whose mother was a Poindexter, was buried in the Poindexter family cemetery that today is in a cow pasture. Jennie’s grave was moved to Mountain View Cemetery northeast of Dillon and is marked with only a small nameplate. Brother Van lived a long, full, useful life and died in 1919. He is buried in Helena, far from his beloved Jennie.
 

Brother Van (with hand inside his coat) officiated at many weddings around the state, including Helena newspaperman Charles Greenfield's marriage to Elizabeth Nelson in 1913, probably in her home in Vandalia, northwest of Glasgow. But Brother Van himself never married. Photo from I Do: A Cultural History of Montana Weddings by Martha Kohl. Original in Montana Historical Society photograph archives, Helena, 942-477



Virginia City Mansion

On a gently sloping plateau overlooking Alder Gulch, J. S. Rockfellow built the fanciest, most modern home yet constructed in Montana Territory. It was completed in time for his wedding, an affair attended by more than 150 guests in January of 1867. James Knox Polk Miller, who clerked for Rockfellow’s grocery business, described the wedding which took place at the home of W. Y. Lovell in Virginia City. Miller observed that the room was very small, the bride very little, and the ceremony very short. Carriages then conveyed the guests in their silks and finery to the mansion on the hill. The house, described in the Montana Post, had seven well-warmed, well-lit, and well-ventilated rooms, a luxury for sure at that time. Designed with an eye to convenience and beauty, the wall paper and furnishings were in the best of taste. The parlor was furnished in walnut, the dining room in oak, and the bed chambers in rosewood. There were frescoed ceilings and mountain scenery in water colors painted on the walls that, according to the reporter, spread through the house like “oriental pearls of random string.” There was a system of delightfully pure spring water piped directly into the house—the first running water in Montana. The same water source fed a beautiful fountain in the yard. The house, with its tidy outbuildings perched upon the hill, appeared to locals as a grand estate like no other. Unfortunately, within a year, Rockfellow died and the house on the hill fell into other hands. It still stands in Virginia City above Cover Street, an unoccupied eerie relic reminiscent of a tragic past.