W. A. Clark Theater

When W. A. Clark died in 1925, he was one of the fifty richest men in the United States. His wealth endowed the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, the School of Law at the University of Virginia, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. In Montana where he made most of his fortune, Clark built Columbia Gardens—a state-of-the-art amusement park—in 1899. Built for the people of Butte with uncharacteristic generosity, the park promoted Clark’s political ambitions. What little else of Clark’s vast fortune that came back to Montana went to the prison at Deer Lodge. He endowed the prison library and band in exchange for convict labor for his ranches and mines. Warden Frank Conley cultivated Clark’s friendship and that of his son. It paid high dividends. In 1919, the younger Clark gave the prison $10,000 for the construction of the W. A. Clark Theatre.

The W. A. Clark Theater opened in 1920 and was the first theater in the United States to be built inside a prison.
J. M Cooper photograph from Baumler and Cooper, Dark Spaces.

Clark’s state-of-the-art theatre was the first constructed within a prison in the United States. James McCalman—veteran builder of the prison wall and cell blocks—designed the building and oversaw the inmate laborers. Completed in 1920, the building’s white facade of brick and simulated stone was strikingly out of character within the prison yard. There was seating for one thousand in leather-covered seats and an ample stage and orchestra pit that could accommodate the most elaborate productions. The formal opening was on March 21, 1920, included a matinee for the male inmates and then an evening show for the public and women inmates. The traveling cast of the musical comedy My Sunshine Lady, starring Gudrun Walberg, brought down the house.

The theater included seating for one thousand, art painted by inmates, an orchestra pit, and a state-of-the-art projector system for moving pictures. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives.

Warden Conley’s pride was short lived. Governor Joseph Dixon removed him as warden and ended his career. The theater served inmates and the community until 1975 when arson left it a burned out shell. The inmates responsible were never identified.

Grant-Kohrs Ranch

Johnny Grant and his wife Quarra, a Bannock woman, brought 250 head of horses and 800 cattle to the Deer Lodge Valley where they settled in 1859. Indians, Mexicans, Canadian Metis like Johnny himself, and whites soon joined the Grants in the Deer Lodge Valley. It was a lively, ethnically diverse settlement called Grantsville.

Johnny Grant
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 942-460

Floods took the Grant’s cabin in 1861 and the family moved to the new settlement of Cottonwood. In the fall of 1862, Johnny Grant built one of the first clapboard homes in the territory for Quarra. Its twenty-eight glass windows, shipped at great expense by steamboat then freighted overland, were an expression of the Grants' wealth.

The house at the Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Park, built in 1862, is one of the oldest frame homes in Montana.

However, with white miners came racial tension, ending the days when neighbors were tolerant of other cultures, Grant’s numerous wives, and inter-racial marriages. Indians ran off most of his cattle and an arsonist destroyed his best barn. Grant told the Montana Post that he wanted to take his children away from such a rough country. The valley was not safe for his family. Conrad Kohrs, whom Grant had several times assisted financially, purchased the ranch in 1866. Grant sold the buildings and their contents, including the house and many of the furnishings he and Quarra had purchased from the east and shipped at great expense. Grant took his children away from Deer Lodge in 1867, but Quarra did not accompany them. She died of consumption, leaving six children.

Quarra Grant's pierced tin pie safe, dating to 1864, is one of the original pieces in the house.

Conrad Kohrs soon brought his nineteen-year-old bride, Augusta, to the ranch. The furnishings reflect her elegant taste although a few pieces—rosewood parlor chairs and a pie safe—date to the time when Quarra Grant was mistress there. Kohrs pioneered ranch management and cattle breeding and became of the most important cattlemn of the nineteenth  century.  Ownership of the working ranch remained in the Kohrs family until the 1970s. Today a National Historic Landmark and National Park, you can visit the ranch and tour its beautiful home.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream!

Summer makes you think of ice cream, but have you ever wondered where it came from?
It has a longer history than you might think. The Roman emperor Nero used ice brought down from the mountains to mix with fruit. In the seventh century A.D., the Chinese introduced milk and ice mixtures which were then brought to Europe. Sorbets and ices were popular at French and Italian courts. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Dolly Madison served “iced cream” at their tables. Home cooks and ice cream parlor confectioners would put a bowl of sweetened cream into a larger bowl of salt and ice and stir until it froze. The invention of the wooden bucket freezer and rotary paddles was a major breakthrough, and along with the first hand-cranked freezers patented in 1846 and 1848, ice cream making became easier.
 

An early advertisement for an ice cream freezer.

Ice cream was made from the very earliest days on the frontier. In 1865, the Montana Post advertised a Ladies' Ice Cream Saloon in Virginia City.

Advertisement from the Montana Post, August 5, 1865. Via Chronicling America.

In 1868, ice cream was a major part of the Fourth of July in Helena. On May 11, 1869, as the steamer Nile made its way to Fort Benton, the crew acquired a load of ice from Fort Peck. The steamboat stopped at the mouth of the Musselshell to buy cordwood from woodchoppers “Liver Eating” Johnson and X. Beidler. As was customary, the woodchoppers were invited aboard. It was Captain Grant Marsh’s birthday, and the cook made ice cream to celebrate. Neither Johnson nor Beidler had ever heard of it. They were suspicious of its coldness on a hot day, but they bravely ate their portions. And in 1872 at Urgam’s Occidental Restaurant in Deer Lodge, a plate of ice cream cost twenty-five cents. But it wasn’t until the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 that “walk away” ice cream was introduced. We have been enjoying ice cream cones ever since.

Montana’s Death Penalty, Part 1

It seems that with the botched Oklahoma execution in the news, people might be interested in Montana's execution laws and procedures. This is adapted in two parts from my Montana chapter in Gordon Bakken's book Invitation to an Execution.

Montana’s last hanging was in 1943. In 1983, the legislature amended the law to allow the condemned to choose hanging or lethal injection. Changes also made county executions obsolete and specified the Montana State Prison as the place of execution. These changes essentially overhauled Montana’s death penalty. These changes were untried until the execution of Duncan Peder McKenzie Jr. in 1995. Sentenced in 1975 for the murder of teacher Lana Harding, McKenzie appealed numerous times. Governor Marc Racicot wrestled with his pleas for clemency. A converted house trailer at the Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge became the death chamber. Wearing orange prison overalls and lying on a gurney, McKenzie had no last words. He was the first in Montana to die of lethal injection.

The Montana State Prison does not have an official Death Row; the term is symbolic. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 78-57.125

When the 1997 Legislature further amended the law to eliminate hanging as an option, Terry Allen Langford had already been on “death row”—a symbolic term as there has never been a formally designated “death row” in the Montana State Prison—for nine years. He received the death penalty in Powell County for the kidnapping and brutal slayings of Edward “Ned” and Celene Blackwood at their ranch near Ovando in 1988. Langford's execution was set for January 17, 1992. He chose hanging but then moved for the District Court to declare hanging cruel and unusual punishment and a violation of his constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment. The court declared the position moot since Langford himself elected the method.

Years passed. As Langford initiated further proceedings, the legislature removed hanging as an option in 1997. Hanging passed into the annals of the state’s history. Langford then argued that the amending of the law deprived him of his choice of death by hanging—and the final opportunity to avoid the death penalty. If the Supreme Court had agreed that hanging was cruel and unusual punishment, the law would not have allowed his execution. Langford, also convicted of the murder of an inmate during a prison riot in 1991, lost this argument and became the second person in Montana to die by lethal injection in the converted house trailer on February 24, 1998.

A Monument to Convict Labor

Upon Statehood in 1889, the federal penitentiary at Deer Lodge, Montana, became a state institution. The prison housed 198 inmates in a cell block built to hold no more than 140. Prisoners spilled over into the outbuildings in the yard, the wash house, and the prison’s carpenter shop. Warden Frank Conley foresaw the deterioration of the prison if nothing were done to repair and expand it. But the state had no money. Conley was convinced, like other penal administrators of the time, that idle convicts bred trouble. The prison had no funds, but it did have untapped manpower. The Board of Prison Commissioners gave Conley permission to use convict labor to build a stone wall around the prison. The Commissioners hired James McCalman, a skilled stone and brick mason, to serve as architect, builder, and teacher. McCalman never drew a plan. He designed his projects entirely in his head, and then, with the help of his construction foreman, he taught the unskilled and inexperienced prisoners how to build what he envisioned.

James McCalman building the wall at Deer Lodge State Prison.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Construction began in the spring of 1893 and it was a huge undertaking. Inmate crews first rerouted a Northern Pacific sidetrack to transport the buff-colored sandstone from a local quarry. The rail cars brought the raw chunks of stone directly through the prison’s main entrance and into the yard where inmates cut them. James McCalman ably taught the men and directed them in the construction of the elaborate wall. He designed the Romanesque-style enclosure, twenty feet high, with four massive round corner towers and two central square towers to resemble a medieval fortress. The walls extend four feet below ground to foil inmates who considered escape by tunneling beneath. The overall appearance not only brings to mind the medieval castle, but also the inevitable dungeon such places contain: a dark and dank place no one wants to visit.

Photo by J. M. Cooper, from Dark Spaces

When the imposing wall reached completion just one year later, incredulous officials pronounced it an architectural marvel and a “monument to convict skill and labor” unsurpassed in the United States.  It was the beginning of James McCalman’s long career designing and constructing buildings at the Montana State Prison.

Frankenstein’s Lab

Kenneth Strickfaden is not a household name, but everyone who has ever enjoyed the old Boris Karloff movies is familiar with his work, and he has a Montana connection. Strickfaden was born in 1896 in Deer Lodge where his father was in the real estate business. Strickfaden served overseas during World War I, and by the 1920s he worked as a studio electrician in California.  He was an electrical genius and had a knack for creating special effects. In 1931, he brought his unique skills to the set of the movie Frankenstein. Strickfaden was tasked with equipping Dr. Frankenstein’s tower laboratory. He was asked to create the lightning-powered engines that would jolt actor Boris Karloff to life. The first set designs called for a simple, modern laboratory. But Strickfaden was a master of science fiction contraptions. His elaborate spark-blasting machines whirred, chugged, cracked, and smoked from way too much voltage. You could almost smell the scorched metal. Levers, machines, and jars of electrical arcs set the standard for a mad scientist’s laboratory.

Courtesy Frankensteinia

Strickfaden resurrected the laboratory, stored in his garage, many more times for films including the Flash Gordon serials, The Munsters TV series in the mid-1960s, and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein in 1974. Strickfaden himself once even stepped in for Boris Karloff during a scene in MGM’s The Mask of Fu-Manchu. It was a good thing too. Strickfaden held a large sword with a streaming arc of lightning. The electrical blast threw him clear across the room. He was shaken, but fortunately not barbecued.

Montana State Prison’s Most Unusual Inmate

Paul Eitner was perhaps the Montana State Prison’s most colorful character. He was a German immigrant who worked as a porter at a Miles City saloon and lived in a local boarding house. One evening in January 1918, Eitner picked up his .38 revolver, strode down the hall and fired three times at a fellow lodger. The man died three days later. Eitner’s motive was never clear. At the last moment in court, he changed his plea from self-defense to guilty, hoping for leniency. The judge was not sympathetic and gave him a life sentence. Eitner was assigned to the state sanitarium at Galen to look after the prison’s flock of turkeys. He was thus employed until 1932 when he sold the all the birds to a passing farmer for twenty-five cents each. This incident earned him the nickname “Turkey Pete.” Eitner believed he had diamond mines and an imaginary fortune. Inmates printed “Eitner Enterprises” on checks in the prison shop, and he gave away millions of pretend dollars. He was mascot to the prison band and acted as manager of the boxing team, shadow boxing his way through every match. The prison board denied him parole a number of times believing Eitner could not adjust to the outside. In his later years, his prominent nose seemed to grow longer. Its extreme length made lighting his cigarettes potentially dangerous.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 78-57

Paul “Turkey Pete” Eitner died in 1967 at the age of eighty-nine after serving forty-nine years in the state prison. Many mourned his passing and attended his funeral in the prison theatre, the only funeral ever held within the prison walls. His empty cell, #1 in the 1912 cell house, was never reassigned.

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.

Sedition

Montana had one of the nation’s harshest sedition laws, making it illegal to speak out against U.S. involvement in World War I. Among the dozens of people who went to prison for this crime, Janet Smith was the only woman who did time at Deer Lodge. She and her husband William ran the post office at Sayle south of Miles City and had a ranch in the Powder River country. Mrs. Smith was famous for her cooking and often fed dozens of cowboys at her table. She stood accused of bragging that if the people revolted, she would be the first one to shoulder a gun and get the president. She called the Red Cross a fake and said the disabled, insane, and convicts should be killed to save food instead of the government’s restricting it from the rest of the population. The jury found her guilty. The judge gave her five to ten years, and she was taken from the courtroom sobbing.


Montana Historical Society Research Center, Montana State Prison Records

Her husband had also made seditious statements and was found guilty. Author Clemens P. Work in his book Darkest Before Dawn suggests that the isolation of ranchers like the Smiths made them particularly vulnerable, not realizing the implications of their casual talk. “In 1918,” Work writes, “what was skeptical became unpatriotic, what was thrifty became miserly, and what was opinion became sedition.” Janet Smith served twenty-six months before the Supreme Court reversed her conviction on the grounds that the language with which she was charged was not specific enough to convict her. William Smith was paroled at about the same time. What happened to the Smiths after their release has yet to be discovered.


Montana Historical Society Research Center, Montana State Prison Records

Patrick Largey’s Murder

Patrick Largey, Butte’s fourth Copper King, was president of the State Savings Bank, located on the site of the present Metals Bank Building. In January of 1898 miner Thomas Riley gunned Largey down as he sat at his desk. The shooting took place nearly three years to the day after the great powder explosion in the warehouses of the Kenyon Connell and Butte Hardware companies. Illegally stored dynamite caused the blast that killed at least fifty-nine and injured one hundred others. Riley lost a leg in the blast and held Largey personally responsible. Though Largey owned stock in the hardware business, he had no part in the disaster. But Riley, who could no longer work, demanded compensation. Largey and Riley had several violent quarrels, and the last culminated in Largey’s murder.

Portrait of Patrick Largey from A Brief History of Butte, Montana, The World's Greatest Mining Camp
Via the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library's Flickr photostream

Charged, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison, Riley went to the federal prison at Deer Lodge in 1898. He kept his union membership in Local No. 1. In 1910, 170 members signed a petition asking the governor and the Board of Pardons to review Riley’s case. But the influential Largey family made sure that nothing came of it. Riley wrote letters to friends, lawyers, priests, and legislators to no avail. Nearly forty years later, Governor Roy Ayers met Riley during a prison inspection. He found no bitterness left in him and granted seventy-year-old Riley a full pardon. Riley left Deer Lodge in 1937. He died in 1938 after little more than a year of freedom.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

P.S. Remember what happened when a couple of prisoners tried to escape from the Deer Lodge prison?

Wreck of the Bertrand

John J. Roe of St. Louis founded the Idaho and Montana Transportation Line and the Diamond R Transportation Company in 1864. The company carried everything imaginable by steamboat up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Ft. Benton. Its ox-drawn freighters then carried the goods to the various destinations. The treacherous steamboat voyage took two months. The steamer Bertrand left St. Louis in the early spring of 1865 carrying an astonishing inventory bound for Fort Benton, including 6,000 kegs of nails, mining equipment, and food and clothing. The goods were to be delivered to Virginia City, Deer Lodge, and Hell Gate (present day Missoula). On April 1, the boat hit a snag twenty miles north of Omaha and sank. All passengers and crew escaped, but the inventory—fortunately insured—was lost. In 1968, the wreck was rediscovered and the goods, preserved for a century in the river’s silt, were recovered. The cargo is a microcosm of frontier life. Among the recovered items are powdered lemonade; canned pineapple; brandied cherries; imported olives; salted and dried beef, mutton, and pork; jars of French mustard, catsup, and honey; clocks and combs; lamps and mirrors; patent medicines with their paper labels intact; 3,000 textiles including bolts of silk and 137 men’s coats in 7 different styles; shoes and boots; barrels of whiskey; hammers, doorknobs, pick axes, and blasting powder; washboards; plows; and sleigh bells. It’s hard to imagine some of these luxury items for sale in primitive log cabins. The DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa includes a museum displaying some of the artifacts recovered from the Bertrand.

Artifacts recovered from the steamboat Bertrand, displayed in the visitor center at DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge

Deer Lodge Prison

The historic prison at Deer Lodge served Montana from 1870 during territorial days until 1979. Today it is a museum, but over the course of more than a century, thousands of prisoners lost their identities within its walls. Some horrific events occurred there. One took place on March 8, 1908, when George Rock and W. A. Hayes attacked Warden Frank Conley and his chief deputy, James Robinson, in an attempted escape. Conley shot both Rock and Hayes, hitting Rock in the head and Hayes twice, once through each lung. These shots should have been fatal, but the bullets stopped neither man. The two prisoners were still able to fatally slit Robinson’s throat with a pocketknife and slash Conley so severely it took 103 stitches to close the wounds. Conley carefully nursed Rock and Hayes so that they would be healthy when, convicted of murder, both were hanged in the prison yard as an example to the other men. These were the only hangings within the walls, but not the only violent deaths. And the prison is a place that captured men’s souls. Little wonder that both visitors and staff report the sounds of murmuring voices, the doors of empty cells clanging shut, the sounds of heavy boots patrolling the cell blocks, and unseen hands plucking at their clothing.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Mary Gleim

Every western town had its houses of ill repute. In Montana, a few significant remnants of these colorful businesses survive. There’s the Dumas in Butte, Big Dorothy’s in Helena, and two of Mary Gleim’s West Front Street brothels in Missoula. Gleim was a flamboyant character who operated eight “female boarding houses” in Missoula’s red light district where railroad men patronized its honky tonks and saloons. Gleim’s splashy career included conviction in 1894 for the attempted murder of a rival. Her prison record notes that she arrived at Deer Lodge to serve her sentence dressed to the nines in a “complete outfit.” During her prison term, another female prisoner viciously stabbed her, and Gleim never quite recovered from the attack. Reputedly a smuggler of laces, diamonds, opium, and Chinese railroad workers, the mountainous madam weighed three hundred pounds. She was a formidable opponent and a match for any man. “Mother Gleim,” as she was also known, operated brothels until her death in 1914. She left an estate of one hundred thousand dollars. Her former brothels, both nicely renovated and adaptively reused as businesses, add to the interesting history of the 200 block of West Front Street. According to her wishes, Gleim’s tombstone—unlike all the others in the Missoula city cemetery—faces the railroad tracks. This way, Gleim could bid farewell to the many railroad men who were her customers.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. Remember this flamboyant madam?

William A. Clark

Historian Joseph Kinsey Howard said that a dollar never got away from Copper King William A. Clark except to come back stuck to another. Clark was intelligent, ambitious, and obsessed with his own vanity. Butte was his stronghold. Clark gave his miners there a magnificent park and an eight-hour workday.

Clark with his daughters, Andrée (left) and Huguette, c. 1917.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Clark spared no expense on his 1880s mansion in Butte. The thirty-plus rooms had electric as well as incandescent and gas lighting, and a fifteen-hundred-gallon tank on the third floor supplied the household with running water. The home’s beveled French plate glass windows with blinds of hardwood that folded into pockets and frescoed ceilings had no equal in the West.

Today, Clark's mansion is a bed and breakfast.

Montana saw little of Clark after 1900, when he served an undistinguished six years in the U.S. Senate. Clark endowed a library and built a theater at the prison in Deer Lodge—the first prison theater in the United States—to thank the warden for the use of convict labor on his ranches and in his mines. But Clark took his vast fortune elsewhere. His wealth endowed the University of Virginia’s law school, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and the University of California’s library. None of it ever came back to Montana.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. Check out this menu for a banquet given by Clark.

Prison Escape

Warden Frank Conley at the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge kept fearsome full-blooded hounds trained to track escapees. They were enclosed in a high fence inside the prison walls. In 1902, prisoner Thomas O’Brien foiled these hounds in a spectacular getaway. O’Brien, who claimed he was innocent of grand larceny, had served half of his five-year sentence. He was a trustworthy prisoner who had some freedom in his assigned job as stable boss of the large barn outside the prison walls. O’Brien claimed he had veterinary training, and so he obtained medicines for the animals. He had worked for two weeks conditioning George Tighe, the warden’s prize Thoroughbred racehorse. When the time was right, O’Brien obtained some opium, supposedly to treat one of the animals, and used it to put Warden Conley’s bloodhounds into a deep slumber. He then calmly saddled George and rode off toward the prison ranches. The guards assumed that he was on some legitimate errand. As the distance between them grew greater, O’Brien coaxed the horse into his fastest run and went the other way. The hounds were of no use. Officials later found the saddle and bridle hanging in a tree and George loose in a pasture. O’Brien was on the lam for eighteen days, then gave himself up. En route back to Deer Lodge, the prison escort treated O’Brien to breakfast and a cigar. Once back in prison, Warden Conley shook O’Brien’s hand and commended him for surrendering. Perhaps O’Brien really was innocent. Less than a year later, the governor pardoned him.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Edith Colby’s Mistake

Aspiring journalist Edith Colby came to Thompson Falls from Spokane in 1916 and took a job with the democratic Independent-Enterprise. Edith and others wrote some personal attacks on A. C. Thomas, chairman of the Republican County Central Committee, published in the paper. She and Thomas traded verbal insults and Thomas accused Edith of loose morals. Edith was enraged and stole a loaded revolver, which she showed to her boss, attorney A. S. Ainsworth, and her editor, John Manire. Manire showed her how to use the weapon and suggested that shooting Thomas would be good for the newspaper. The two men later testified that they had no idea Edith would actually pull the trigger. But she did. Edith met Thomas on the street and shot him three times. The coroner’s inquest found that both Ainsworth and Manire shared the blame with Edith. All three were arrested. Burton K. Wheeler of Butte, later a well-known political figure, was the relentless special prosecutor. However, the court dropped all charges against Ainsworth, and the judge directed the jury to find Manire not guilty. Edith pled not guilty by reason of insanity, and her mother testified that mental illness ran in the family.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 85-91 5276

Newspapers across the Northwest covered the spectacular murder trial. Edith’s dramatic lapses into unconsciousness earned her no sympathy. Found guilty, she received ten to twelve years at Deer Lodge. Edith’s attorneys appealed, claiming that Wheeler maligned Edith Colby’s character during the trial and made public remarks that affected the verdict. The Supreme Court of Montana denied a new trial. Edith Colby served only two years at Deer Lodge, returned to newspaper work, and died in California in 1942.

P.S. Yesterday I realized that this blog's default settings were preventing some people from commenting. I adjusted the settings, so now anyone should be able to leave comments, regardless of whether or not you have a blogger account. Shoot me an email if it still gives you trouble!

Friday Photo

Happy Friday! I'm gearing up to give a talk about “Women Who Went Astray”—and who served time in Deer Lodge. Today's photo is a sneak peek. The talk will be Wednesday at 12:00 at the Historical Society. $5 admission. More details on the Society's event calendar here or call Katie at 444-9553.


From Montana The Magazine of Western History. Original from Powell County Museum & Arts Foundation

Mattie Lee was convicted of murder in 1904 in the death of a man she shot point-blank in a Philipsburg saloon over a small debt she claimed he owed. Her counsel was not able to convince the jury that she was insane and shouldn't be imprisoned.