The Sad End of Major John Owen: Part 1

John Owen came west as a sutler—or provisioner—for the army. He was in the Bitterroot Valley in 1850 when Jesuits closed St. Mary’s Mission and offered it for sale. Owen’s purchase for $250 was reputedly Montana’s first recorded legal document. Relocating a short distance north of the mission, Owen built a trading post. In 1856, he was appointed special agent to the Flathead Indians, hence the honorary title, “Major.” Owen openly criticized the government and advocated passionately for the Indians.

Montana’s first written conveyance of property is this bill of sale.
Joseph Joset, S. J., to John Owen, recorded in Missoula County. MHS Archives.

Elected to both the first and second territorial legislatures, Owen attended neither. Yet even in his absence, Owen was named a charter member of the Montana Historical Society. Among the twelve original members, which included W. F. Sanders, Granville and James Stuart, and C. P. Higgins, Owen was the first to reside in Montana.

Owen’s hospitality at Fort Owen became widely renowned. Travelers and guests enjoyed excellent hospitality and fine wines, delectable meals, even iced lemonade. Owen’s library was, according to Lt. John Mullan, the finest in the Northwest. However, Owen’s status in the territory was tenuous. The government viewed his position as Indian agent and trading post proprietor as a conflict. Legality of the title to his land was in question even in the 1850s, and the boundaries were disputed. By the late 1860s, financial troubles forced Owen to mortgage his property. Worse, he began to suffer deteriorating mental capabilities and lapses of memory. Then in 1868, Nancy, Owen’s beloved Shoshone wife, died. This event escalated his diminishing mental health.

Fort Owen was an oasis in the wilderness from the 1850s through the 1860s.
Special Collections, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, The University of Montana-Missoula

In 1871 or 1872, friends committed Owen to St. John’s Hospital in Helena where the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth cared for the indigent “mentally deranged.” Owen’s fort was abandoned. Most blamed his dementia on alcoholism. Future president James A. Garfield, then a congressman, passed a night at Fort Owen and noted in his  journal that the major was a “bankrupt and a sot.” Father Lawrence Palladino, however, contended that “it may not have been so,” since Owen appeared robust but “his memory continued slowly to fail.”

Edgar S. Paxson

Beloved Montana artist Edgar S. Paxson was the son of Quaker parents. His father was a painter of theatrical scenery. Like his fellow artist Charlie Russell, Paxson came west looking for adventure. He arrived in Montana in 1877 and like Russell worked as a wrangler, cow punching, scouting, and hunting for his cattlemen bosses. Paxson’s life experiences on the range gave him subject matter, but he put his own twist on history. He knew and interviewed many of the characters he later depicted and carefully painted them as he wanted them to be, not always as they really were. For example, Paxson knew the great Salish chief Charlo. His painting of the Salish exodus from the Bitterroot Valley, The Salish, led by Chief Charlo, leaving their Bitterroot home for the Flathead Reservation, portrays finely dressed warriors brandishing rifles. In reality, the Salish were a poor and broken people forced out of their homeland.

E.S. Paxson, The Salish, led by Chief Charlo, leaving their Bitterroot home for the Flathead Reservation
Oil on linen, 1914, Missoula County Art Collection. Photographed by Chris Autio, 2000.

Paxson settled in Butte in 1880, painting signs and theatrical scenery to support his family. Paxson was entirely self-taught like Russell, but he lacked the marketing opportunities and exposure that that Russell gained from his wife Nancy’s determined salesmanship. The Spanish American War intervened with Paxson’s career, and he and his son Harry together volunteered for service. En route home, the ship encountered a typhoon, and a wave slammed Paxson against a spar causing serious internal injuries from which he never recovered. But despite his feeble health, he moved to Missoula and, driven by his art, worked until the day he died in 1919, leaving a wonderful legacy. His most famous work, Custer’s Last Stand, is in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. In Montana, Paxson’s murals grace the Montana State Capitol and the Missoula County Courthouse.

St. Mary's Mission Historic District

Jesuit priests and lay brothers founded St. Mary’s Mission—the first mission in the Northwest—in 1841. The Jesuits closed the mission in 1850, returning in 1866. For the next quarter century, they helped the Salish adapt from hunting to farming as the buffalo disappeared. The priests supported and advocated for the Salish people and provided medical services and spiritual guidance to both Indians and whites. When the U.S. government forced the impoverished Salish to leave their beloved Bitterroot Valley for the Flathead Reservation in 1891, St. Mary’s closed. An influx of homesteaders prompted the creation of St. Mary’s Parish in 1910, and the old mission church reopened. In 1911, the Salish returned to St. Mary’s for the first time since 1891 to celebrate their Bitterroot heritage. They still maintain this tradition.

A group of Salish visit St. Mary's circa 1955
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 950-754

The historic district includes the 1866 church and pharmacy, designed by the multi-talented Father Anthony Ravalli. Ravalli, also the architect of Idaho’s famed Cataldo Mission, employed log building techniques, ingeniously adapting European ecclesiastical architecture to the remote frontier. St. Mary’s historic church reflects his talents—the carpentry, paintings, and sculpture were all his handiwork.

The interior of historic St. Mary’s Mission Church shows Father Ravalli’s artistic skills

Adjacent is St. Mary’s Cemetery and Father Ravalli’s final resting place. Chief Victor’s log home and the Indian burial ground recall the Salish presence. Two gnarled apple trees provide living evidence of Jesuit agriculture. Father Ravalli planted one of the trees in 1869, and it is the oldest living apple tree in the Bitterroot Valley, where settlers later planted orchards during the Apple Boom. The tree is all that remains of Father Ravalli’s extensive garden. Salish elder Mary Ann Combs recalled her grandmother picking apples from the tree. Its aged trunk still puts forth shoots, and its buds, grafted onto rootstock, have produced numerous offspring in the Stevensville area.

This crabapple tree planted by Father Ravalli is one of two apple trees listed in the
National Register of Historic Places at St. Mary’s Mission in Stevensville. 

The new St. Mary’s Church, built in 1954 with donations from Montana and beyond, represents an unprecedented preservation effort to save the endangered mission church from deterioration through constant use. Today, St. Mary’s churches—old and new—define the historic complex as a place of significance to both Indian and white communities.

The Story of Sack Woman

Beloved Salish elder Louis Adams recently shared the story of Sack Woman with a group of high school students at Fales Flat in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Centuries-old Ponderosa pines surrounded the group. These trees bore scars that Sack Woman herself had made more than a century ago in teaching her people how to gather nourishment.

Louis Adams tells stories in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness

Louis told the students that when he was a boy, Sack Woman was very old. But she was a powerful person. He and the other kids were afraid of her because it was her job to punish children. When a child misbehaved, parents would say, “I am going to tell Sack Woman.” If a child stole something or talked back to a parent or disobeyed, Sack Woman would come looking for the guilty child. She would catch him, put him in a gunny sack, and dunk him in the river. One day Louis did something that got him into big trouble. His mother told Sack Woman, and Louis was scared. Sometime later, the family was at a gathering and Sack Woman came after him. But she was elderly, and Louis moved much faster than she could. Although she chased him, Louis got away. And he thought he had escaped. Sometime later, Louis had forgotten all about his misdeed and figured Sack Woman had forgotten too. He was at a family gathering, and Sack Woman was there. She came up quietly behind him and threw the sack over his head. She had him, and Louis was so scared! Sack Woman dragged him screaming down to the water and dunked him. Later on, Sack Woman called Louis over to her side, invited him to sit down beside her, and talked with him for a long time. She gently explained why she had dunked him. Children have to learn to be good, she told him, and it was her job to make sure that children grew up to be good people. And to be a good person, you have to learn from your mistakes. After that, Louis greatly respected Sack Woman, and loved her for what she had taught him.

Scarred Trees

Culturally scarred trees in Glacier National Park, the Nez Perce and Bitterroot Forests, the Flathead Lake area, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, and elsewhere in western Montana are indicative of travel corridors that native people used seasonally. Majestic Ponderosa pines and, less often, western larch and other types of trees served as a source of nutrition in the spring when the sap was running. Food was scarce at this time of the year and the people were hungry. Various tribes harvested the sweet bark, or cambium. For the Salish, it was women’s work. They used a stone knife or ax to make a foot-long waist-high incision on the outer trunk of the tree. A pole thrust upward into the bark served as a lever to loosen and peel the outer bark. Then the women used a sharp knife to shave thin strips from the inner layer. Some of the strips were eaten raw on the spot and immensely enjoyed. What remained was dried on drying racks like jerky. When the strips were completely dry, the women pounded the strips into a fine powder and used it as a nutritious sweetener. The procedure did not kill the tree, and often the scars are so old they are nearly healed over. Lewis and Clark noted the practice of peeling bark in their journals, and some scarred trees were harvested as long ago as the 1700s, before Lewis and Clark trekked through Montana. Ponderosa pines are not ready for harvest until the bark turns a reddish color when the tree is about two hundred years old. Forest fires have claimed some of these treasures, but some of the massive survivors have stood for centuries.

Medicine Tree

The Medicine Tree south of Darby on U.S. Highway 93 once towered over the landscape. The four-hundred-year-old Ponderosa pine was a timeworn icon, a site sacred to the Salish-Kootenai tribes. According to a legend handed down by local tribes, a monstrous bighorn sheep terrorized the southern Bitterroot valley. Coyote used his guile to trick the ram into charging a small tree to prove his strength. The ram's large curled horns sank deeply into the trunk and trapped him there. Coyote cut off his head and promised that in the generations to come, there would be no more wicked creatures and the tree would be a place of peace and good luck. But the real facts are just as dramatic. On March 11, 1824, Alexander Ross of the Hudson Bay Company came upon the tree. He wrote in his journal, “Here is a curiosity called the Ram's Horn—out of a large pine five feet from the root projects a ram's head, the horns of which are transfixed to the middle. The natives cannot tell when this took place but tradition says when the first hunter passed this way, he shot an arrow at a mountain ram and wounded him; the animal turned on his assailant who jumped behind a tree. The animal, missing its aim, pierced the tree with his horns and killed himself. The horns are crooked and very large. The tree appears to have grown round the horns.” No sign of the ram’s head remains today. In 2001 a storm snapped the tree’s trunk, leaving only 20 feet of it standing. Vandals poisoned this remaining portion. But travelers still pay homage to the Medicine Tree with offerings and prayers for good luck.

Photo of the Medicine Tree when it was still alive from Montana Living