The Great Falls

The entire two-month journey from the Mandan villages where the Corps of Discovery wintered was easy compared to the portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri. From fifteen miles away Captain Meriwether Lewis, traveling overland with a small advance party on June 13, 1805, saw telltale spray and soon heard “a roaring too tremendious to be mistaken.” Approaching the sound, Lewis saw “spray arise above the plain like a collumn of smoke.”

The Great Falls circa 1901. Stereograph by N. A. Forsyth
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.292

Humbled by the magnificence of the falls, Lewis felt his written description impossibly inadequate. The grueling eighteen-mile portage around the natural wonder, however, was a month-long ordeal with many days spent in preparation and eleven days in transit. Grizzly bears, rattlesnakes, and “muskquetoes” kept the men vigilant while, scorched by the summer sun, they dragged crude wagons filled with supplies across gullies and around ravines. Today the great rock cliffs over which the water tumbled lie exposed, the falls long since harnessed for hydroelectric power. Although the town of Great Falls has grown up around the area and the portage itself is not discernible, the visitor can still locate the route, identified through documentary and cartographic research. Sites include several campsites, the sulfur spring that saved a critically ill Sacagawea, and Giant Springs. The portage, a National Historic Landmark, is under varied ownership and ranges from highly developed to near pristine.

Friday Photo: Charlie Russell

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 944-703

Charlie Russell posed for this formal portrait in his Great Falls studio in 1912 while he was working on Lewis & Clark Meeting Indians at Ross' Hole. The painting hangs in the senate chambers of the Montana State Capitol.

Friday Photo: Toy Hospital

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 81-34.2732

Great Falls firemen brought joy to local children from their toy hospital in 1923. The photo was taken by the Anaconda Copper Company photographer. What would you have brought to Santa for repair?

P.S. Remember this adorable kid?

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.

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.

African Americans in Great Falls

Great Falls’ African American community and its prominent black citizens have amply contributed to the state’s history. African Americans established the Union Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1890. The small 40-member congregation raised funds door to door to build the current church in 1917. It became the religious and social heart of Great Falls’ black community. The church offered institutional support for those who took leading roles in the fight against segregation.

Union Bethel Church today. Photo courtesy State Historic Preservation Office.

In 1953, the Cascade County Community Council appointed a committee to study discrimination against black soldiers stationed at nearby Malmstrom Air Force Base. Although Montana had no Whites Only signs as there were in some places, blacks were not allowed in most businesses. An exception was Great Falls’ far-famed Ozark Club. From the 1940s until it burned in 1962, the Ozark Club was Montana’s only social club that employed integrated jazz bands and welcomed an interracial clientele. Great Falls’ black community made other important contributions. Among them, Alma Jacobs was elected the first black president of the Pacific Northwest Library Association in 1957. She was a founder of the Montana Committee for the Humanities, helped build the modern Great Falls Library, and became Montana’s State Librarian in 1974. Geraldine Travis of Great Falls was elected to the Montana House of Representatives, the first black person to serve in the legislature. Currently Great Falls has Montana’s largest African American population, partly because many black soldiers are stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base. And after a period of declining membership, the Union Bethel Church—listed in the National Register of Historic Places—is now a vital part of the interracial community.

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.

Walter Marshall Remembers John F. Kennedy’s Montana Visits

With the election tomorrow, politics are on everyone's minds. The candidates are wrapping up their full travel schedules. Here's a look back at another president's memorable Montana travels:

Walter Marshall was a great showman, promoter, Democratic supporter, and founder of Helena’s famous Brewery Theater. His book, I’ve Met Them All, describes the dignitaries and politicians he knew personally. Marshall first met John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie as newlyweds in the mid-1950s when Senator Kennedy spoke at the Finlen Hotel in Butte. Then Kennedy visited Helena in 1960, just before his nomination as a presidential candidate. Marshall arranged the logistics. Kennedy spoke at the Marlow Theatre and at a formal dinner at the Civic Center. During dessert, Kennedy whispered to Marshall, “Can we get out of here? My drivers haven’t shown up and I need to get to the airport.” Marshall took him outside to his old station wagon, which was a garishly painted advertisement for the Brewery Theatre. Marshall’s three big dogs were in the back seat. They had a little time, so Marshall, always the promoter, seized the moment to show off his theater. All the way, the three big dogs licked the back of Kennedy’s neck. And Kennedy did not like dogs. But Marshall got him to the airport on time.


JFK greets the crowd in Billings. Photo by Cecil Stoughton.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, via Linternaute.com

After Kennedy’s election, the president spoke at the Shrine Auditorium in Billings. Marshall arranged the logistics. He drove his Brewery station wagon into the Shrine Auditorium to await Kennedy’s motorcade. When President Kennedy arrived, he recognized Marshall and the station wagon right away. “I am glad to see you, Walter,” said the President. “But I hope you left those blankety-blank dogs at home.” JFK visited Great Falls in September 1963. Fifty thousand people heard him speak. He told Marshall how much he had enjoyed that time in Helena and promised to return. Weeks later on November 22, an assassin’s bullet left that promise unfulfilled.

P.S. You can listen Kennedy speaking at the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds in 1963 here.

Great Falls UFOs

Historian Jon Axline has extensively studied and written about a famous incident in 1950. On the morning of August 15, Nick Mariana, the manager of the Great Falls Electrics baseball team, spotted two shiny objects hovering over the Anaconda Company’s Black Eagle smelter across the Missouri River from the Legion Ballpark. Mariana captured the two objects on his hand-held 16mm movie camera before they sped off and disappeared into the clear blue sky.

Image from National Archives via nicap.org

The grainy film footage is reportedly the first ever shot of unidentified flying objects and is still a mystery. For several weeks, Mariana showed the film to local civic and sports organizations before he submitted it to the air force for further study. At first, the air force offered contradictory explanations when it returned the film to him, but eventually concluded that the objects on the film were probably two fighter jets known to be in the vicinity at the time. Mariana didn’t agree with the air force’s conclusion and enthusiastically promoted his amazing film for the rest of his life. Private and government investigators periodically interviewed Mariana about the film and what he saw that day in August 1950. Even today, researchers have not determined what the film actually shows. The objects were not reflections of birds, weather balloons, or meteors. They might have been military jets, but most believe they moved too fast and seemed to generate their own light. The grainy film footage is legendary in UFO lore and has never been scientifically explained. Axline concludes that the film may actually be what Mariana claimed it to be—the images of two visitors from outer space.

Paris Gibson Junior High Blows Up

Central High School in Great Falls opened in 1896. It took a creative community three years to build it. To prepare the uneven ground, sheepherders drove a herd of sheep around the site one hundred times trampling down the dirt. Huge logs floated to Great Falls on the Missouri River were shaved flat on all four sides and became the beams for the floor supports, attic framework, and stairways. The massive blocks of sandstone that form the walls came from a quarry near Helena and rest on a foundation sixteen feet thick in some places.

From National Register of Historic Places listing

Great Falls judged Central the best school west of the Mississippi. Its crowning feature, a huge Norman-style clock tower, arose out of the central part of the building. However, it was so heavy that it finally became unsafe, and the school took it down in 1916. According to locals, the custodian and his family lived in the school’s attic. A sink with running water and wallpaper on the walls made the apartment quite homey. The daughter, however, was embarrassed to live in the school’s attic. She would leave home early in the morning, walk away from the building before the other students began to arrive, and then walk to school with her classmates. In 1913, a brick annex with an auditorium and gymnasium doubled the size of the school. From 1930 to the 1970s, the school served as Paris Gibson Junior High. In 1977, it became the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art. But just before this adaptive reuse, movie makers blew up the annex in a controlled demolition for a scene in Telefon, starring Charles Bronson and Lee Remick.



New Year’s in 1913

One of the greatest New Year’s celebrations Montana has ever seen took place at Luther Hall in Great Falls in 1913. Nearly 1,000 people ushered in the New Year at the Electricians Ball hosted by the Electricians Union. The party went on for two nights on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s night. There was a matinee of silent films sandwiched in between for those who did not care for dancing, but wanted to experience the most lavish decorations Great Falls had ever seen. Following a “rose garden” theme, it took 40 people to decorate. More than 10,000 roses in white, red, pink, and yellow festooned the hall. 13,000 feet of vines and rose garlands fastened above draped to a musicians’ pedestal in the center of the hall. Sixty pots of live palms and ferns hung below the balcony, camouflaging it in a veritable wall of greenery interspersed with huge pots of American Beauty roses. There were so many roses that the lovely smell even perfumed the wintery outdoors all the way down the block. The Great Falls Electricians Union accomplished what other groups could not, installing a huge searchlight that played in various colors over the dancing couples while electric signs and several large tungsten lights cast a brilliant glow. The decorating committee spent a whopping $1200 on their efforts, which was a huge sum for 1913. The Tribune commented that the decorating committee reached the uttermost heights. It was indeed a fitting celebration for the town famous as the Electric City. On one further note, at the door each lady received a beautiful rosebud, but alas, these were artificial.