Murder or Suicide?

The Grand Lodge AF & AM Museum in Helena displays the masonic apron of Meriwether Lewis. Not only is this treasure important to Freemasonry, it is also important for the role it played in the nation’s most intriguing unsolved mystery: Lewis’s controversial death.

Portrait of Meriwether Lewis by Charles Willson Peale
Independence National Historical Park

According to family lore, Lewis died with the apron in his breast pocket. He was traveling to Philadelphia along the Natchez Trace, on his way to Philadelphia to arrange publication of the Expedition’s journals. This was a dangerous route, called the “Devil’s Backbone,” infamous for criminal activity. Mystery surrounds what happened at Grinder’s Stand, a stopping place along the trail. Lewis died there of gunshot wounds. Mrs. Grinder, the innkeeper, wrote the letter informing President Jefferson that Meriwether Lewis had died by his own hand. The family, however, always suspected foul play.

Stephen Ambrose in Undaunted Courage does not examine the evidence and dismisses the possibility of murder, believing that Lewis was suicidal due to either depression, which he claims is evident at various times throughout Lewis’s life, or due to mental instability, possibly brought on by final stage syphilis. This narrow view ignores the evidence extant.

In 1848, the Tennessee legislature allocated funds to create a memorial at Lewis’s gravesite, but first had to prove Lewis was buried there. The body was partially exhumed and Dr. Samuel Moore examined the remains. He concluded that assassination was the likely cause of death, but it is unknown how he came to this conclusion. According to renowned forensics expert Dr. James Starrs, most historians fail to acknowledge this finding. Further, in 1928 when the Lewis monument was refurbished, the skull was “accidentally” exposed. Delong Rice of the National Park Service reportedly commented, “Isn't it interesting that a man who killed himself had a bullet hole in the back of the head?”

In the 1990s, Dr. Starrs collected 160 signatures of Lewis descendants on a petition to exhume Lewis’s body and settle the question once and for all. The Park Service has refused, perpetuating the mystery.

A Gruesome Legacy

Violence in Montana’s mining camps affected everyone, and Helena’s Hangman’s Tree was a community icon. Mary Ronan recalled in her memoir, Girl from the Gulches, that one morning she and her classmates saw a man hanging from the tree. She never forgot  “…that pitiful object, with bruised head, disarrayed vest and trousers, with boots so stiff, so worn, so wrinkled, so strangely the most poignant of all the gruesome details.” Nearly seventy years later as she dictated her memories to her daughter, Mary still remembered.

David Hilger recalled climbing the tree’s dead branches as a youngster and examining rope burns on its lower limbs. He and his friends played marbles beneath it. On April 30, 1870, vigilantes interrupted their game for the lynching of Arthur Compton and Joseph Wilson. Once the double hanging was over, according to Hilger, the boys resumed their game. These were the last two recorded hangings on the Hangman’s Tree.

Records show that some of the tree’s victims were buried in various Helena cemeteries, but the burial places of others are unknown.  At least two coffins have surfaced in the neighborhood where the Hangman’s Tree once stood. In 1900, a workman digging a foundation for an addition in a backyard uncovered one coffin. A crew hit the other working on gas lines on Davis Street in 1931. Were these victims of the Hangman’s Tree? Both burials were in close proximity to the spot where the tree once stood.

This photo of James Daniels' hanging in 1866 clearly shows his high-topped boots.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 948-124

David Hilger examined the contents of the pine box discovered in 1931. Along with shreds of clothing were the remains of the victim’s unusual high topped boots. Hilger compared the boots with a photograph of the 1866 hanging of James Daniels. The boots, further described as “wrinkled,” seemed to match those in the photograph. If the remains were those of Daniels, the boots could be the ones that Mary Ronan described.  

Dearborn Cemetery Part 2

The deaths of Hattie and William Moore caused much speculation. The couple married in 1872 and ranched along the Benton-to-Helena Road where they also kept a stage station. In the fall of 1885, Hattie moved to Dearborn City, some ten miles from the ranch, so their three children could attend school. Teachers usually boarded with their students’ parents. Thus teacher J. C. McConnell came to board with Hattie. She and McConnell soon became the subject of scandalous gossip.

Hattie’s rented home suspiciously burned to the ground and the family barely escaped. Hattie and William quarreled over McConnell. William demanded that she and the children return to the ranch. McConnell gave Hattie a .44 British Bulldog “pocket” revolver to take with her for protection. In the meantime, a second arson fire destroyed the Dearborn City hotel. An investigation revealed that McConnell was the arsonist. However, he was never prosecuted.

Hattie Moore. Courtesy Charleen Spalding, via Gayle (Moore) Tadday

In February 1886, soon after Hattie’s return to the ranch, the Moores placed their children at St. Peter’s Mission, paid for three years’ tuition, and began divorce proceedings. On February 25, travelers discovered the bodies of William and Hattie amid the signs of a violent struggle. Hattie lay propped in a doorway. Her husband sprawled nearby on top of a Winchester rifle with one shot in the breast, another to the head.

William Moore. Courtesy Charleen Spalding, via Gayle (Moore) Tadday

The coroner theorized that during a quarrel, Hattie drew her revolver; William grabbed it and threw it outside. Hattie went for the Winchester, fired at her husband, missed, and fired again, hitting him in the breast. A struggle ensued. William shot his wife in the side, staggered toward her and embraced her. Hattie’s bloody finger prints were smeared across his shoulders. He then stood up and shot himself in the head. Widely publicized as murder-suicide, the coroner’s jury actually found the Moores died “by their own hands or at the hands of others.”

Several years later, on December 7, 1889, at a Helena hotel, J. C. McConnell put a .44 Bulldog to his temple. Was it the same gun he gave Hattie? McConnell may have had money troubles, but he was implicated in the two arson cases and there were suspicions about his complicity in the Moores’ deaths. McConnell took the answers with him when he pulled the trigger.

Sieben Ranch

The Sieben Ranch encompasses a vast 115,000 acres in Lewis and Clark County. It has a rich archaeological history that includes fragments of the roads that brought miners to Montana’s goldfields. Trader Malcolm Clarke was the first to settle on a knoll overlooking Prickly Pear Creek in 1864 where he ran a stage stop.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 941-761

Clarke, embittered over his expulsion from West Point because of an altercation with a fellow student, had come west with the American Fur Company in 1841. The itinerant trader finally settled down on his ranch to raise horses and cattle. A dispute with Clarke’s Blackfeet in-laws and trouble in Fort Benton between whites and Blackfeet led to his murder at the ranch in 1869.

Malcolm Clarke's ranch. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 941-762

Clarke’s family buried him on a gentle rise north of the house. Pioneer rancher James Fergus added the Clarke ranch to his large holdings in 1875. General William T. Sherman, an overnight guest at the Fergus house in 1877, stumbled upon Clarke’s grave. He was saddened to discover Clarke’s fate. The two had been classmates at West Point and Sherman had long wondered what became of the promising young cadet. Henry Sieben purchased the ranch in 1897, and it remains in the Sieben-Baucus family today, still a working sheep ranch with a legacy its owners treasure.

Reed and Bowles

The Reed and Bowles Trading Post outside Lewistown is a little-known gem well worth a visit. The oldest standing building in the area, the post originally stood about a mile and a half southeast of its present location. It was part of a short-lived post called Fort Sherman intended to serve a large Crow reservation, but by 1874 the plans for the reservation had fallen through. Construction of the Carroll Trail, a freighting route between Carroll on the Missouri River and Helena, prompted Alonzo S. Reed and John Bowles—a notorious pair—to purchase the post, dismantle it, and move it to its present site along Spring Creek.

Photo courtesy Montana State Historic Preservation Office

The post served traffic along the trail between 1875 and 1880 and catered to the many tribes passing through. Major Reed—so called from his brief stint as Milk River Indian agent from which he was fired—was the kingpin and Bowles was his assistant. Reed reputedly settled disputes with gunfire and planted his victims in the burial ground across the river. Bowles supposedly even sold the bones of his father-in-law, the Crow leader Long Horse, to an Irish ornithologist. The pair was well known for brutality toward their wives, drunken sprees, and trading liquor with the Indians, a violation of federal law. Reed and Bowles sold a wicked brew of ethanol laced with plug tobacco and red pepper. During the five years the post operated, visitors included American naturalist George Bird Grinnell, trader Pike Landusky, “Liver Eating” Johnson, and the Nez Perces, who stopped there briefly to rest in 1877 during their tragic flight from the U.S. Army.

Montana’s Death Penalty, Part 2

The cruel and unusual punishment argument again surfaced in 2006 with the impending execution of David Thomas Dawson. Dawson kidnapped and killed Monica and David Rodstein along with their eleven-year-old son Andrew in a Billings motel room in 1986; police rescued their fifteen-year-old daughter Amy who survived. Dawson fought his conviction for years, but gave up the fight in 2004 to become a willing participant in carrying out his death sentence. A month before Dawson’s scheduled execution, the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana led a coalition arguing that the state’s method of administering lethal injection was cruel and unusual punishment. The law stipulates that the executioner need not be a physician, registered nurse, or licensed practical nurse but only someone selected by the warden and trained to administer a lethal dose. The dissenting groups claimed that the lethal substance, if improperly administered, could cause excruciating pain and thus violate the U.S. and Montana Constitutions. The Montana attorney general decided, however, that there was no indication that lethal injection had caused pain and that the groups had nothing personally at stake. They thus had no reason to be involved. Dawson wanted the execution to go forward and not to do so would infringe upon his constitutional rights. The courts had no right to infringe on Dawson’s rights in the attempt to uphold the concerns of others. Dawson was executed by lethal injection on August 11, 2006.

The Ryegate Gallows, on display at the Old Prison Museum at Deer Lodge, was used in one of Montana's last hangings in 1939. Its thirteen steps leading up to the platform are chilling reminders of frontier justice. Photo by J. M. Cooper

Montana has legally executed seventy-five individuals since Montana Territory carried out its first legal hanging in 1875. There are currently two men on Montana’s symbolic “death row.”  The Montana legislature considered abolishment of the death penalty in 2007, with the passage of a repeal bill in the Montana Senate, but the legislation died in State House committee by a single vote.

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.

The Death of Mrs. Spratt

Helenans may be familiar with the story of the sheriff’s wife who died in the Lewis and Clark County jail when her husband’s gun discharged. This story has long floated around, and here are the facts that go with it. The tragedy took place upstairs in what is now the Myrna Loy Center for the Performing Arts.

Lewis and Clark County Jail and Courthouse. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 953-357

It was 8:30 on the morning of November 11, 1922. Sheriff Thomas Spratt was in his private office just off the family living quarters. Mrs. Flora Spratt sat three feet away at the desk, looking through the phone book. Sheriff Spratt had just completed cleaning one gun and was examining another when it accidentally discharged. The gun was a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson police special six-shooter. The trigger was slightly out of order and after cleaning the gun, the sheriff removed a side plate from it, thinking he had extracted all the shells, and was working the trigger when it discharged. The bullet entered Mrs. Spratt’s right armpit, passed through her chest, and came out under her left arm. She cried out and Sheriff Spratt asked if she had been hit. She replied “Yes,” and died instantly. Drs. O. M. Lanstrum and S. A. Cooney and the county coroner were immediately called to the scene. The coroner decided not to hold an inquest. The Spratts had been married for thirty-six years and had three grown daughters. Before a brief appointment as sheriff in 1921, Spratt was an accountant in the state auditor’s office, dairy owner, and County Hospital superintendent where Mrs. Spratt was matron. His previous employment raises the question whether Sheriff Spratt was adept at handling weapons. After his wife’s death, Spratt was custodian and purchasing agent at the county garage. He remarried two years after the tragedy and died in 1956 at age ninety-four.

P.S. Remember Montana's first woman sheriff?

Long George Francis

One of the most colorful characters of the High Line was an old time cowboy who came to a hideous end. Long George Francis was well known on the rodeo circuit. He lived along the Milk River west of Havre on a small ranch.

This photo of Long George Francis was taken at the Great Northern Montana Stampede in Havre
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 952-167

But Francis lived by the old range rules, believing unbranded stock was fair game. Times were changing, range laws evolving, and opinions about Francis were divided. Some were outraged when the court convicted Francis of grand larceny for the theft of a bay mare. Others saw Francis as a cattle rustler and approved of his conviction. But after sentencing in 1918, Francis went into hiding. He was on the lam for two years until he finally grew tired of running. On Christmas Eve, 1920, he prepared to give himself up to serve his sentence. But first he determined to make one last trip to visit his schoolteacher girlfriend near the Canadian border. He loaded his car with apples and gifts for her and the children and started out on the journey. It was snowing and cold. Thirty miles northwest of Havre in the middle of nowhere, he wrecked his car and broke his leg in the accident. Fashioning a splint from an apple box, he tried to crawl for help. Exhausted and in pain with little hope of rescue, Francis slit his own throat and bled to death in the snow.

Hangman’s Tree

A lone Ponderosa pine, just west of Helena's present-day Blake Street between Highland and Hillsdale, served as the town’s Hangman’s Tree. It was the only tree left standing in 1865 after miners had denuded the countryside for cabins and sluices. Mary Sheehan Ronan attended school up the hill in a simple cabin at Rodney and Broadway. From the schoolyard the children had a clear view of the lone Ponderosa. One morning as they arrived at school, the children saw the limp form of a man dangling from the tree. The boys ran up and down the gulch, speculating about the “bad man” who received such awful punishment.  Mary later wrote: “I hated the talk. It made me shiver… that dreadful, pitiful object, with bruised head, disarrayed vest and trousers, with boots so stiff, so worn, so wrinkled, so strangely the most poignant of all the gruesome details. I tried to forget, but I have never forgotten.” At least eleven men suffered this fate on the famed Hangman’s Tree. The last of the eleven hangings took place in 1870 when vigilantes hanged Arthur Compton and Joe Wilson for the attempted murder of a local rancher. Photographer Mary Ann Eckert captured the grisly scene in a graphic, horrific photograph.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 948-121

Until recently a copy of it graced the hallway of a Helena elementary school, a strong message that crime doesn’t pay. In 1875, thousands thronged the neighborhood to cut a souvenir sliver from the tree when Reverend Shippen, a Methodist minister, cut it down. He claimed recent flooding had undermined its roots and the tree was so unstable that he feared it would fall on his barn and kill his horse. Many years later, while workers were digging a foundation for a new house, the huge roots of the Hangman’s Tree came to light. They were just as sturdy and secure as they must have been when the tree was young.

P.S. Tales of hauntings abound throughout the neighborhood around the tree. Read about them in Beyond Spirit Tailings, now available as an ebook.

Dorothy’s Rooms Part 2

The demise of Dorothy’s business partly came about because of her civic conscience. Downtown Helena was seedy and deteriorating, and Dorothy hoped to set a good example. In the fall of 1972, she received a $500 federal Urban Renewal grant to refurbish her building. Aspiring politicians saw publicity about Dorothy’s property as detrimental to Helena’s reputation. An undercover officer visited Dorothy’s Rooms. He maintained that she sold him a drink without a liquor license. He then paid twenty dollars to watch a girl “take off her clothes and roll around on the bed.”  That was enough for the county attorney, who alleged that Dorothy Baker’s rooming house was being used “for the purpose of lewdness, assignation, and prostitution.”

Vintage clothing owned by Big Dorothy's employees from the Montana Historical Society collection.

Dorothy had survived other raids in 1963, 1969, and 1970 by simply ignoring the charges. The district judge therefore ordered law enforcement to remove the occupants and secure the premises.  One outraged citizen blamed the afternoon raid on the “the asinine morality of a pipsqueak.”  Letters supporting Dorothy poured in to the Helena Independent Record.  “You lost your best tourist attraction,” one out-of-towner lamented, “and a true asset to your town when you put the heat on the law to close Dorothy Baker’s.” One woman voiced her own father’s observation that “a town without a whore house [is] a stupid place in which to live.” But on May 14, before Dorothy Baker could have her day in court, she died suddenly in a Great Falls hospital. Her passing was widely noted, and a female legislator, also named Dorothy, proposed designating Dorothy’s Rooms an historical landmark. By 1976, Ida Levy’s old Silver Dollar Bar had become Big Dorothy’s Saloon. Today, the popular Windbag Saloon and Grill and the Ghost Art Gallery in the St. Louis Block, and Lasso the Moon toy store in the Boston Block, are downtown anchors. Offices and a frame shop now fill Dorothy’s Rooms where one spectacular treasure remains. Big Dorothy Baker’s private bathroom is a 1960s showplace, done up in black plastic tiles with green fixtures. It is a rare and well-cared for survivor of a legendary place and a bygone time.

Big Dorothy's bathroom, Ghost Art Gallery

P.S. You can read the earlier history of Dorothy's Rooms in part 1.

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.

Shoebox Annie

Alice Finnegan’s great book Goosetown: In Their Own Words puts the spotlight on oldtimers who grew up in this Anaconda neighborhood. Shoebox Annie is one memorable character that many recall with mixed emotions. She lived in Goosetown in the 1920s, but so great was the impression she left that even those growing up in the 1950s avoided the area of Alder and Commercial where her house once stood. Shoebox Annie carried a shoebox out of which she sold soap, shoelaces, and other items. She also carried her moonshine in the box. She had a pet magpie whose split tongue allowed it to talk. She sometimes went door to door with her magpie, selling soap. The bird knew how to pick up jewelry off dressers and fly out of the house with it. If you invited Annie into your house, she would steal things. The only way to get rid of her was to buy her soap. While some Goosetown kids frequented Annie’s house, others were deathly afraid of her.

Photos courtesy The Unknown History of Misandry

Annie and her son Skidmore supposedly killed people and buried them in the basement. Sometimes horrible smells came from her house, and neighbors were convinced she was boiling body parts. There was truth to these tales. Annie’s real name was Mary Eleanor Smith. Authorities suspected her and her son of killing four people, including two who went missing while the pair lived in Anaconda. Authorities believed Annie and Skidmore dismembered the bodies in the bathtub and burned and disintegrated the pieces with acid. They did go to prison in Washington State for possessing items belonging to one of their victims. But lacking physical evidence, neither was ever convicted of murder. Annie is infamous as one of a few female serial killers.

P.S. Here's what the newspapers had to say about Annie and Skidmore.
P.P.S. Remember this sensational murder trial?

Mountain View School for Girls

The Montana legislature created the Boys and Girls Industrial School at Miles City in 1893. This reformatory was for boys and girls who were either in serious trouble with the law or had nowhere else to go. It was one step toward the establishment of the juvenile court system that came about in 1907. Some felt strongly that there should be separate industrial schools for boys and girls. One of these advocates was Dr. Maria Dean, a Helena physician whose practice specialized in the diseases of women and children. A great humanitarian, Dr. Dean took up many causes during her lifetime, but she felt most strongly about separating boys and girls in detention. Dr. Dean worked tirelessly with other women’s groups toward this end, and finally, in 1919, legislator Emma Ingalls sponsored a bill establishing the Mountain View Vocational School for Girls in Helena. Dr. Dean died just weeks after the bill passed. The first six girls were transferred from Miles City to the new facility seven miles north of Helena in April 1920.



Stewart Hall, 1961. Image clipped from "State of Montana Vocational School for Girls"
Montana Historical Society Research Center

By 1922, fifty-three girls between the ages of nine and eighteen lived in cottages on the campus. Some were orphans, some were runaways, and others had behavioral problems. Until the 1950s, harsh discipline included solitary confinement and lock up. By the 1960s, there was more emphasis on education and less on punishment. In 1996, the school closed and the Montana Law Enforcement Academy moved in. A few buildings, stables, and attic graffiti recall the former use of the campus.

From More Montana Moments

Ruth Garfield

Ruth Lane was visiting relatives in Montana when she met Jesse Garfield, a Yellowstone County homesteader. The couple married in 1912 and later moved to a ranch near Ryegate. Jesse became the first sheriff of newly created Golden Valley County in June of 1920.

Photo courtesy Ford and Barbara Garfield, via Ancestry.com

He had been reelected to his first full term of office in November but had not yet been sworn in. On December 6, Jesse went out to the Snowy Mountains to investigate a complaint. When he knocked on the rancher’s door, the man fired his rifle, seriously wounding the sheriff. He made it to his car and tried to drive back to town, but the gas tank had been hit and he ran out gas. He walked back to the town of Franklin where a stopped freight train took him to Billings. Jesse died two weeks later. County commissioners appointed Ruth to fill out her husband’s term as sheriff.  She never carried a gun, but she earned the same salary as her husband: $166 a month. The couple’s son, Ford, was about seven at the time. Every day after school, he would wait at the jail in the Golden Valley county courthouse for his mom to finish work. Ruth served out her husband’s two year term. Upon his election in 1922, Sheriff Dick Carr appointed Ruth Garfield undersheriff and probation officer. She served in that capacity for two years before retiring from law enforcement. Ruth Lane Garfield was the first female sheriff in Montana.

P.S. Remember this gun-toting woman?

Josephine Doody

On the way to isolated Harrison Lake, in the wilderness area on the southern border of Glacier National Park, lie the ruins of a secret cabin. The area is extremely difficult to access because you have to cross the Middle Fork of the Flathead and there is only a short time when it’s not frozen or deep. The remote cabin was home to Josephine Doody, a woman even more notorious than Calamity Jane. And unlike calamity, the events of her life are not disputed. John Fraley, in his book Wild River Pioneers, details Josephine’s adventures. Around 1890. Josephine shot a man in Colorado, she claimed in self-defense. Awaiting trial, she fled to MacCarthyville, Montana, a railroad town Montana along James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway. There, as a dance hall girl, she met Dan Doody who fell for her. But Josephine had an opium addiction. So Dan kidnapped her, tied her to a mule, took her to his homestead on the Flathead River and locked her in to dry out.

Josephine Doody in front of her cabin on the Flathead. Photo courtesy Glacier National Park.

Josephine survived and took up moonshining. Dan kept a tiny cabin where she could hide when the revenue officers of Colorado lawmen came looking for her. James Hill built a siding to the Doody place, and the engineer would blow the whistle once for each quart of moonshine the engineers wanted. Dan was one of the first park rangers at Glacier, but was soon fired because he liked to poach the game.

Dan Doody. Photo courtesy Glacier National Park.

He died in 1919, and Josephine stayed in the two-story homestead, keeping guest rooms and leading occasional fishing parties. She died in 1936 after a long, colorful life.

J. P. Ball and Son

In honor of Black History Month, today's post features a father-son team of photographers and their bold and unique statement of equality. Warning! The photos after the jump are shocking. I'd rate this post PG-13 for violence.

James Presley Ball was a professional photographer who came from Cincinnati to Montana in 1887 with his son, J.P. Ball, Jr. They set up a studio in Helena. They were talented and influential African Americans who left an interesting legacy. The younger Ball was the first editor of the Colored Citizen, a short-lived newspaper dedicated to capturing black endorsement of Helena as the state capital.

James Presley Ball. Photo from Calabash by Esther Hall Mumford

As photographers, the Balls documented events and people. They left portraits of prosperous Chinese, blacks, and European immigrants. They also took some curious photos. One bizarre three-photo sequence documents the tragedy of African American William Biggerstaff. The first portrait shows Biggerstaff as a prominent, well dressed gentleman in a suit and vest, posing confidently.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

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?

Thanksgiving Day Murder at Elkhorn

The silver mines at Elkhorn yielded $14 million and the mining camp once had more than 2,500 residents. Three passenger trains arrived weekly on the Northern Pacific’s branch line.


Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

In 1893, the Fraternity Hall Association built the town’s architectural and social centerpiece. Fraternity Hall was aptly named: the town’s various fraternal organizations, including the Masons, Oddfellows, and Knights of Pythias, shared its upstairs lodge room. Dances, traveling theatrical troupes, graduations, prize fights, and other public gatherings at Fraternity Hall bound citizens together. The building’s outstanding architecture blends the western false front with a sophisticated twist. A unique neo-classical style balcony is suspended above the entry. After the Silver Panic of 1893, the mine began to play out and operated only off and on until 1931 when the Northern Pacific removed its tracks. Fraternity Hall has endured time, neglect, and heavy snows to become one of Montana’s most photographed buildings.


Gilliam's Hall and Fraternity Hall in Elkhorn

Although local lore says that an argument over a dance led to a murder at Fraternity Hall, the true incident actually began at a Thanksgiving Eve dance in 1889 at Gilliam’s Hall, Elkhorn’s other substantial surviving building. A shortage of women compelled Thomas King and George Peters to dance together. Manager Mat Fogarty asked them to stop. The ensuing quarrel later became a huge free-for-all bar fight at Lloyd’s Saloon. Taking their fight into the street early on Thanksgiving morning, King shot and killed Fogarty. Thomas King was hanged at Boulder for the crime in June of 1890, several years before Fraternity Hall was built. And this was especially noteworthy because King’s hanging was the first in the new state of Montana.

P.S. It makes Thanksgiving in Virginia City seem downright tame, doesn't it?