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

Friday Photo: Little Pumpkin Creek

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 981-588

When he photographed these girls from a dryland farm on Little Pumpkin Creek, photographer L.A. Huffman noted that this was how the creek got its name. I hope your preparations for Thanksgiving are just as bountiful.

Evolution of the Drug Store

Butte druggist C. B. Hoskins had been in the pharmacy business more than forty years when he reminisced in 1931. When he started in the business in 1883, he had to make his own mixtures, fluid extracts, pills, and emulsions. He had to know his ingredients and the effects they would bring. There were not so many items in the inventory, but the reactions they caused were very well understood.  Physicians carefully monitored their patients, and if the prescribed drug did not work, physicians blamed the pharmacist for not correctly mixing the doctor’s prescription.

Hoskins's drug store would have looked much like this one.
Courtesy Montana State University Libraries

A druggist usually had an apprentice who learned the trade under him. Druggists were responsible for all aspects of their apprentice’s education. Many highly skilled druggists never saw the inside of a school. Hoskins pointed out how things had changed. Fifty years ago, he recalled, druggists made all the pills. But by 1930, there were so many manufacturers that druggists had become only servers. The shelves were stocked with pills of all kinds, ready made. All you had to do was count them out, and the druggist, once paid for his knowledge of mixing, now made only a small service charge. Radio advertising created a demand for a number of things, and unlike printed advertising that carried responsibility for the product, radio advertising could say anything with no consequence. Hoskins went on to lament that the student of today who went to pharmacy school learned all kinds of chemistry that really didn't help him in the job. He should be learning other skills, he said, like stocking notions, selling hardware, and making ham sandwiches.

Pierre Wibaux

Pierre Wibaux, for whom the town and county of Wibaux are named, was born in Roubaix, France, to a distinguished family of textile manufacturers. Pierre’s father sent him to England to study the English textile industry so that he could manage the family business. In England, Pierre heard stories of English relatives who had gone to the American West and made fortunes in cattle ranching. After two years, Pierre returned to France and informed his father that he would not take over the family business, but rather go into ranching in America. He first studied cattle in Chicago and arrived at the settlement of Mingusville in eastern Montana near the North Dakota border in 1883. Pierre established his ranch headquarters, the W-Bar, on Beaver Creek at the eastern edge of Montana Territory. Wibaux was very poor during this time and lived in a primitive dugout cave where he ate and slept and learned how to be a cowboy, foreman, and rancher.

Courtesy State Historical Society of North Dakota, D0187

Except for his financial status, Wibaux was much like his infamous North Dakota neighbor, the Marquis de Morés: young, handsome, courageous, rugged, and somewhat argumentative. Legend has it that on a visit to the Marquis’ chateau at Medora, North Dakota, Wibaux and the Marquis had a heated conversation. The Marquis’ wife excused herself and went to bed. But soon she heard her husband’s “en garde” and the clash of swords. She knew that Wibuax was no match for him, as her husband been involved in fatal duels. She descended the stairs and ordered them to stop. Fortunately, they did. One biographer speculates that the argument had more to do with an evening of champagne than real differences. After the hard winter of 1886-87, Pierre bought up remnant herds of unfortunate ranchers with money borrowed from his father. By the mid-1890s, his ranch was one of the largest cattle operations in the nation, running about 65,000 head of cattle.

Friday Photo: Blackfeet at Two Medicine Lake

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 956-503

This idyllic (and carefully posed) photo of a Blackfeet camp at Two Medicine Lake was probably used to promote Glacier National Park tourism. It was taken in 1915 by Herford T. Cowling.

Red Cross Quilts

As Americans agonized over their soldiers on the front in 1917, a quilting revival took wing. Women’s magazines encouraged quilters with the slogan: “Make quilts—save the blankets for our boys over there.” Individuals and organizations expressed their patriotism by stitching quilts for the Red Cross. Thousands of these comfort quilts went to Europe to the victims of World War I. Stitching comfort quilts at home was a way to support the war effort, and Montanans were especially involved. Also at this dark time, communities and organizations created hundreds of signature Red Cross quilts as fund-raisers. The Ladies Auxiliary of the United Commercial Travelers in Great Falls made one of these quilts in 1918.

Montana Historical Society museum collection. Click the photo for a bigger version.

According to practice, businesses or individuals purchased space to have their names embroidered on the quilt. Prices for a space ranged from twenty-five cents to one hundred dollars depending on where the name was placed. Auxiliary members donated the materials, did the all sewing and quilting, and stitched more than thirteen hundred names on the front and back. They then raffled the quilt, hoping to make one thousand dollars. They did even better, and in December of 1918, a total $1,060.80 went to the Cascade County Chapter of the American Red Cross. These quilts often came back to their makers. In 1926, the Ladies Auxiliary purchased the quilt from the raffle winner and, a few years later, gifted it to the Montana Historical Society where it is part of the museum collection.

Friday Photo: Dolly Davis

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 97-72.7

Dolly Davis displays coyotes killed near Roundup circa 1937. I know hunters who wish they could shoot as well as she did. Have a great weekend.

Savenac Nursery

When the Forest Service celebrated its one hundredth anniversary, it recalled one historic site in Montana that played a major role in its history. Creation of the National Forest Service in 1905 brought Elers Koch, one of the nation’s first professional foresters, to inspect and evaluate the Forest Reserves of Montana and Wyoming. As Forest Supervisor of the Bitterroot and Lolo National Forests in 1907, Koch happened upon the abandoned homestead of a German settler named Savannach in Mineral County. He thought it a perfect spot to establish a tree nursery. Work began in 1908. As the first pine seedlings were ready for transplant in 1910, fire swept through the region, burning three million acres of timber and destroying the nursery. The disaster made fire prevention and conservation a primary mission of the Forest Service. Reforestation figured prominently in that goal, and so the Forest Service wasted no time in rebuilding the nursery. Savenac became the largest tree nursery in the Northwest, producing up to twelve million trees annually. Regional reorganization closed the nursery in 1969, but during its long service, Savenac pioneered much of the theory and practice of silviculture right here in Montana’s Mineral County.

Men from the Civilian Conservation Corps mix concrete for improvements to the nursery in 1934.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 2003-47.14

Ghostly Visitors at the Bonanza Inn

Halloween is over, but I can't resist sharing one last ghost story.

The Bonanza Inn in Virginia City dates to the mid-1860s. It was built as the Madison County Courthouse, but three Catholic Sisters of Charity arrived from Leavenworth, Kansas, to convert it to St. Mary’s Hospital for miners in 1876. Mining waned, and the sisters moved on in 1879, but they, and some of their patients, left unusual legacies.

From the 1950s, guests have reported ghostly visits. A female spirit soothes the sick and comforts the depressed. Some claim to have seen the shadowy nun moving along Idaho Street or sitting in a pew in the Episcopal Church. I set out to discover her identity. One of the sisters was Irene McGrath, an 18-year-old novice who endeared herself to Virginia City. Community women, concerned about her safety among the rough miners, made a pact to secretly follow her whenever she went out alone. Years later as superior at St. James Hospital in Butte, Mother Irene cared for a patient who had known her at Virginia City. From her Mother Irene was overwhelmed to learn of this service. It’s not surprising that she might come back to repay the debt.

Not all encounters at the Bonanza Inn are comforting. In the summer of 1975, the Bonanza Inn housed the production crew filming The Missouri Breaks with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. The occupant in Room 1 was ill and declined dinner in Ennis. As he dozed alone in the building, a loud knocking jolted him awake. He flung open the door to find no one there. Then behind him came a sharp knock at the window.  He whirled around, pulled up the shade: no one was there. Then at the door, at the window, at the door—he gathered his belongings and thereafter slept in his car.

Room 1 sat locked and unused for twenty years. In 1997, the State of Montana acquired the building for housing state workers and others. Fear paralyzed one of the first overnight guests in Room 1. She awakened to see a male figure looming at the foot of her bed, wearing a wide brimmed hat and duster. She watched him fade away. Another guest in Room 1 felt someone watching her through the window. Drawing back the curtain, she found a figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a duster, staring at her.  During renovations to the building, another worker spent a scary night as something under his bed plucked at the bedsprings.
I stayed in Room 7 in the summer of 2000. Coming out of the steamy bathroom after a shower, a strong unpleasant odor hit me, like that of the geriatric ward where I worked as a candy striper in high school. The cloying smell lingered then dissipated. Another guest in Room 7 awakened to the sound of water splashing, as in a bowl. Later she discovered that the sisters used basins for washing wounds and bathing patients.

One hot and still August afternoon I lay down to rest in Room 2, thinking about my lecture that evening. I had the Bonanza Inn all to myself. At first they were so soft I didn’t notice. Then I could hear the small female footsteps in sturdy shoes at the far end of the hallway. She came closer, pausing midway down the hall. I clearly heard a key turn in a lock. The door clicked open and softly closed. I heard a few bumps and clunks, and then more footsteps behind the closed door. Slowly they grew faint and then faded away. I felt honored that Sister Irene visited me.

Friday Photo: Winter Weather

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 97-93.2344

This is far from the first time Montana's had snow in October. This photo by Warren McGee shows Northern Pacific engine #X5106E TF approaching the Bozeman tunnel at the west end. He snapped the photo on October 2, 1939.