African Americans in Montana

Several instances of the presence of African Americans in the territory before the major gold rushes are known. William Clark’s slave, York, traveled with the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805–1806, Henry “Negro Henry” Mills worked for the American Fur Company in Fort Benton from the late 1850s, James Beckwourth was a well-known trapper of the 1820s and 1830s whose life has been the subject of some interest, and Isaiah Dorman served as a Sioux interpreter for the army who fell with Custer at Little Bighorn. Blacks also often worked on the steamboats that traveled widely up and down the Missouri River and docked at Fort Benton.

James Beckwourth. Photo courtesy Nevada Historical Society.

With Emancipation in 1865, African Americans realized new opportunities and joined the westward migrations. While small in numbers, these pioneers contributed significantly to their communities. In 1870, the federal census counted 183 black people in Montana. The number doubled in 1880, reached 1,490 in 1890, and peaked in 1910 at 1,834. Western blacks, many of whom carried the burden of slavery, tended to settle in Montana’s larger urban areas and founded communities within a sometimes hostile and discriminatory larger society. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, blacks often found themselves caught in the bitter struggle between Democrats and Republicans who in theory supported African American equality, but did so in varying degrees. School segregation, black suffrage (achieved in 1867), and anti-miscegenation laws were controversial racial issues in Montana’s early territorial period. Finding consolation and community together, black citizens often established their own churches, benevolent societies, newspapers, and social clubs.

The Montana Federation of Negro Women's Clubs meets in Butte, August 3, 1921.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 96-25.2

Despite the proportionately small numbers, the 1870 census shows that blacks on the Montana frontier engaged in diverse occupations and mostly concentrated in towns, especially Fort Benton and Helena. More than half of males listed their occupation as laborers, domestics, servants, or cooks, and twenty-seven percent represented themselves as barbers. A smaller percentage proffered their occupation as ranch hands, cowboys, and miners, with one listed as a saloon keeper. A decade later in 1880, blacks still clustered in the larger communities of Helena and Butte where mining activities necessarily attracted service providers and laborers. Fort Benton’s African American population jumped from twenty in 1870 to fifty in 1880 because of the steamboat travel that brought in population from diverse places and because of the employment opportunities steamboats offered.

Canyon Hotel waiters, Yellowstone National Park, 1901. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, H-4873.

African Americans who came to Montana in the nineteenth century include William Taylor, a teamster, Samuel Lewis, a highly successful Bozeman barber, John Gordon, a trained chef, and James Crump who worked as a miner. African American women also came to Montana with the first settlers and some assumed non-traditional roles. For example, sisters Parthenia Sneed and Minerva Coggswell ran a Virginia City restaurant, Sarah Bickford eventually owned the Virginia City Water Company, Mary Gordon owned a restaurant in White Sulphur Springs, and Mary Fields drove the stage and held the mail route between Cascade and St. Peter’s Mission.

Mary Fields. Photo courtesy Ursuline Convent Archives, Toledo, Ohio.

In an interview in 1979 for the Helena Independent Record, Norman Howard, grandson of James Crump, reflected on what it was like to be black in Montana. He believed that discrimination was tougher for blacks than for Indians. While Montana never posted signs for “Whites Only” as in the South, the same rules applied and most blacks found menial employment as waiters, janitors, and hotel workers. Blacks were excluded from restaurants, bars, and barber shops. By virtue of such exclusion, tightly knit black communities formed; however, as the civil rights movement brought changes for the better, these communities slowly disappeared. Maintaining a strong black community also proved difficult as the lack of job opportunities in the state drew second and third generation blacks elsewhere.
Although Montana has made small gains in the last decade, 2012 statistics show this ethnic group makes up only 0.6% of the state’s population compared to 13.1% nationally.

Merrill Burlingame

Last week, Merrill G. Burlingame was inducted into the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans.

Merrill Burlingame's lifelong work and interest in Montana history earned him the nickname “Mr. Montana History.” In 1929 he joined the faculty of Montana State College (now Montana State University) and became chair of the history department in 1935, a position he held for 33 years. He wrote numerous works on Montana history, including The Montana Frontier, (1942); A History of Montana (with K. Ross Toole, 1956); and John M. Bozeman, Montana Trailmaker (1971). He also wrote texts pertaining to the history of Montana State University and researched local history related to Gallatin County. He was a founding member of the Gallatin County Historical Society and Pioneer Museum. In fact, Burlingame was keenly interested in museums and was the director of the Caroline McGill Museum which would later become the Museum of the Rockies. He also assisted in the reorganization of the Montana Historical Society where he was a member of the Board of Trustees from 1949 to 1978.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 940-871

Throughout his life Burlingame was active in the Montana Institute of the Arts, the American Historical Society, the Christian Church, the masonic fraternity, and the Rotary Club. Merrill Burlingame died in Bozeman, Montana, on November 14, 1994, at the age of 93. His publications and the Merrill G. Burlingame Papers housed at the Montana State University Library special collections, as well as materials housed at the Montana Historical Society Research Center, continue to be an invaluable legacy as sources for scholars, students, and, researchers interested in Montana history.

Yellowstone Trail

The Yellowstone Trail was a transcontinental road that ran from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound in the era before numbered roads and maps. As travelers exchanged horses for automobiles, they began to demand roads instead of disconnected muddy wagon roads full of potholes. The Yellowstone Trail Association was a grassroots effort that grew from this need. It was the first transcontinental route through the northern part of the United States. Begun in 1912, the trail was completed by 1919. The association did not build roads, but rather encouraged local groups to organize, choose the best roads to improve—usually near railroad routes—and fund their improvements. Montana caught the spirit of the effort and understood its potential for tourism. The Yellowstone Trail Association had chapters in many Montana cities along the trail. They organized Trail Days when businesses closed so employees could volunteer their time. There would be picnics, and volunteers would drag the dirt roads to smooth them out. Brochures and promotional literature were part of the effort to entice tourists to travel the trail. Yellow circles marked the route so that travelers could find their way.

These markers still exist in some Montana cities. The yellow circles painted on prominent buildings can be found in Billings, Livingston, Deer Lodge, and Bozeman. The Bozeman sign on the Story Block downtown at the corner of Black and Main is typical. During the 1920s, highways began to be numbered, named highways and trails became obsolete, and road maps eliminated the need for trail signs. As the Yellowstone Trail celebrates its centennial in 2012, the bright yellow markers are rare reminders of the days when a system of connected roads was a new idea.

Methodist Deaconesses

Happy Women's History Month! Today's post celebrates some particularly dedicated women.

The Deaconess Movement rose from within the Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, and other Protestant denominations. It sought to incorporate professional women in ministerial duties. The Chicago Training School was the center of the movement and prepared its deaconesses to serve as missionary nurses, teachers, and social workers. Unlike Catholic sisters, deaconesses took no perpetual vows, but if a woman chose to remain a deaconess and single, she could count on care in times of illness and in old age. These dedicated pioneers earned no salaries, but rather worked in exchange for their living expenses and small stipends supplied by their institutional boards.

A procession of deaconesses and candidates, May 7, 1914, probably in New York
Bain News Service photo, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ggbain-15754

The first trained deaconesses came from Chicago to Montana in 1898 to staff a small twenty-bed hospital in Great Falls. Chicago-trained Augusta Ariss arrived in 1902 to found the nursing school there. Deaconesses from the Chicago School also arrived to take charge of the Montana Deaconess School in Helena.

The Montana Deaconess Preparatory School, Helena. The building was damaged in the 1935 earthquake and demolished.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 953-410

From 1910 to the 1940s, it was the only Protestant-based boarding school west of the Mississippi. (It survives today as Intermountain, a treatment center for emotionally traumatized children.) Until the 1930s, deaconesses staffed the Great Falls hospital, its nursing school, and other deaconess hospitals in Glasgow, Sidney, Bozeman, Billings, Havre, and Butte. The Great Falls Deaconess Hospital evolved into today’s Benefis Healthcare. The old Deaconess Hospital campus today serves a worthy purpose as an assisted living and memory care facility.

Friday Photo: Crow Indian Winter Camp

Happy Friday! We got a dusting of fresh snow for Christmas in Helena. It was almost as picturesque as the scene in this stereograph.


Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 002.101

Henry Bird Calfee, a photographer from Bozeman, snapped this photo of a Crow Indian Camp circa 1874-1881 in the Yellowstone River Valley.

Montana Trolleys

More than 80,000 trolleys once clanged over 45,000 miles of track in cities across the United States. Between 1888 and 1890, there were twenty-seven attempts to establish street railway service in nine Montana cities, but credit goes to Billings for establishing the first operational system. Two bright yellow horse-drawn cars ferried passengers in 1883. Business boomed temporarily when railway promoters offered twenty-five cent tickets and coupons for free beer at a local brewery. But the company soon went out of business. Its two wayward horses refused to keep to a schedule. Reliable service in Montana began in Helena on September 25, 1886. Hundreds watched in awe as the Helena Street Railway Company’s two horse-drawn Pullman cars made their maiden trips to the depot on newly laid iron rails. Soon, steam engines pulled some of the cars, but residents complained about the noisy, dirty coal-burning engines. Dust from the smoke settled in homes and the commotion frightened horse traffic. By the early 1890s, an assortment of trolleys operating on steam, horsepower, and the new electric system operated in Montana cities.
 

Horse-drawn trolleys like this newly-refurbished gem on Helena’s south Walking Mall once ferried passengers to the depot. Photo courtesy of Dean Rognrud.

Montana first licensed automobiles in 1913. This, World War I, postwar inflation, and changing travel patterns took their toll. The Billings Traction Company folded in 1917. Bozeman’s system closed because of complaints that trolleys pushed aside snow, interfering with automobiles. Helena’s last car entered the barn at midnight on New Year’s Day in 1928; bus service began a few hours later. The Rainbow Hotel in Great Falls hosted a funeral in December 1931 for its trolleys. Guests filed past a battered streetcar and sang specially composed songs conceding that the trolleys "ain't gonna run no more." Missoula’s streetcar service ended in 1932, Butte’s in 1937, and Montana’s last trolley bell clanged in 1951 with a final run between Anaconda’s smelter and the town of Opportunity.

A Persistent Myth

Stories abound across the West about “Chinese tunnels” beneath the buildings and streets of cities and towns. According to Priscilla Wegars of the University of Idaho, a foremost authority on Asian culture in the West, there is overwhelming evidence that “Chinese tunnels” are nothing more than myths. Not a single “Chinese tunnel” has ever been identified. While it is true that Chinese businesses, opium dens, and even living quarters are sometimes found in basement spaces, these in no way can be called “tunnels.” The Chinese were often targets of discrimination, but they did not live underground because of persecution as many believe. Basements were simply cheaper to rent than rooms above ground. Further, the basements of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century business blocks frequently had arched doorways leading to sidewalk vaults. These were storage or delivery areas. Lit by glass blocks turned purple with age, these mysterious vaults had nothing to do with the Chinese. Tunnel systems beneath downtown areas in Helena, Butte, Missoula, Bozeman, and elsewhere do exist; they served as steam-heat delivery systems. While sometimes steam tunnels served clandestine purposes, particularly for alcohol delivery during Prohibition, these passageways cannot be termed “Chinese tunnels.” Finally, in all settlements where mining was extensive, hand-dug tunnels often remain beneath residential neighborhoods and downtown business areas. Miners of all ethnic groups dug tunnels, and there is nothing that makes a tunnel exclusively Chinese.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. Remember this remnant of Chinese culture found in Big Timber?

Cattle Dog

An undated clipping from the 1940s in a Bozeman newspaper tells a poignant story of man’s best friend. Oldtime cattleman Ott McEwen was devastated when the cattle dog who had been at his side through blizzards and summer winds, long days and lonely nights, suddenly disappeared. The dog had been his constant companion, sharing hardships and joys. McEwen grieved for the loss of the best friend he ever had.

Four years later at a Stockgrowers meeting, cattlemen had gathered in the Bozeman Hotel’s lobby. Someone noticed a shaggy old dog, limping badly, whining outside the door. The man let him in and watched curiously as the dog wandered from man to man sniffing. Finally the dog dove into the crowd and leapt upon an old geezer. Old Ott McEwen couldn’t believe it. He went down on his knees and on the floor of the lobby, threw his arms around the dog as tears ran down his cheeks. Someone said he had seen the dog weeks before way over in eastern Montana. How did the dog make his way across the mountains, and how did he know his master would be there? Many a gruff cattleman wiped away a tear, and the talk grew gentle among the men, for they understood well the special bond between a cattleman and his dog.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. Remember this faithful dog?

Cattle Drives

Cattle drives might be a thing of the past, but supposedly there are still three cows to every person in Montana. Some still practice cowboy skills. And for greenhorns like myself, there are learning opportunities if you know where to look. I will be honing my limited skills at a cow horse cutting clinic this weekend! 



B.B. Sheffield cattle roundup in coal creek badlands, Diamond W Ranch, Calabar, Montana, date unknown.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 981-624

Jesuit missionaries in the Bitterroot Valley and some of the early traders, including Johnny Grant in the Deer Lodge Valley, drove the first shorthorn cattle herds to Montana long before the gold rushes of the 1860s. James Liberty Fisk noted cattle grazing in the Prickly Pear Valley in 1863. But it was Nelson Story who drove the first herd of Texas longhorns into Montana in 1866 in a legendary drive fraught with danger. Story invested a good portion of his $30,000 fortune in gold dust on this venture. He purchased a thousand head of cattle at ten dollars a head and hired twenty-five of the most experienced, toughest cowboys. Armed with colt revolvers, these men were full of courage and grit driving the huge herd through dangerous territory in Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. At Fort Laramie, Story armed his men with new Remington breech-loading rifles for protection along the dangerous Bozeman Trail. It was needed, too, as Sioux attacked the group, wounded several drovers, stole some cattle, and stampeded the herd. At dusk, drovers rode into the Sioux camp and, in a daring raid, recovered their stolen cattle.  Sioux again attacked several times more.  At Fort Reno, the army ordered Story to halt, promising that Indians would kill them all. But defying orders, Story and his men drove the cattle by night, and in December 1866, after nine months, they arrived in the Gallatin Valley. Livestock and open range ranching quickly became a huge industry, and skilled cowboys were essential. Roundups gathering the herds for spring branding and fall shipping were the pulse of the cowboy life. As the Northern Pacific steamed across America’s last frontier in 1883, overland cattle drives, once a necessity to move livestock to market, became a thing of the past. Barbed wire encroached and the open range and the vast herds of yesteryear disappeared. Cowboys and their way of life passed into legend.

Samuel Lewis

In celebration of Black History Month, today's post looks at the accomplishments of Samuel Lewis...

Samuel Lewis settled in Bozeman in 1868, joining a small population of African Americans who came to Montana after the Civil War. Lewis, a native of the West Indies, was a skilled barber, an expert sleight-of-hand performer, and a first-class musician. He established a thriving tonsorial parlor and bathhouse on Main Street. Lewis shared his success with his younger sister, Edmonia, financing her studies abroad. Highly acclaimed as one of the most gifted African American sculptors of the nineteenth century, Edmonia displayed her work at the 1894 Chicago Exposition. In 1889, Lewis transformed his modest home into a fine Queen Anne style showplace that reveals a high level of architectural sophistication. Its grand and beautifully maintained interior features a frescoed parlor ceiling, tin ceiling in the kitchen, and ornate woodwork.


From History of Montana, 1739-1885

 Completed in 1890, the Lewis residence was then and is now one of Bozeman’s most delightful homes. When Lewis died in 1896, he left an estate valued at twenty-five thousand dollars. It was a well-deserved fortune likely unparalleled by other contemporary African American Montanans.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go