The Sad End of Major John Owen: Part 2

While John Owen was under the care of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth at Helena, he had the opportunity to prove his title to the Fort Owen properties, but he was too ill. So his fort was auctioned at sheriff’s sale. Friends, wanting to believe he would recover, elected him to the 1873 territorial legislature. Owen could not attend.

Major John Owen as he appeared in 1871.
Portrait from Dunbar and Philips, Journals and Letters of Major John Owen.

For the next several years, Owen, indigent and incompetent, was shuffled back and forth between the sisters’ care and the Lewis and Clark County Hospital. At the end of January, 1877, during the Tenth Session of the Territorial Legislature, House Bill No.1, “an Act to establish and maintain a hospital for the insane, and otherwise provide for the insane of the Territory,” unanimously passed. Governor Potts approved the bill on February 16, 1877, the very day that the legislature adjourned.  The bill contained the following clause: “...whenever, in judgment of the governor, it is desirable to send such insane person to friends out of the territory, he may do so at the expense of the territory . . . .” This clause was for Major Owen’s benefit and brought his days in Montana to an end.

The following morning, February 17, Tenth Legislative Assembly President W. E. Bass, Owen’s longtime close friend, escorted him from the territory. After an arduous journey by stage and rail, Bass handed over Major Owen to relatives in Philadelphia. Weeks later, on April 1, thirteen indigent mentally incompetent patients were admitted to the new, privately owned hospital at Warm Springs established under House Bill No. 1.

John Owen lived another twelve years, probably a victim of what we now know as Alzheimer’s disease. He died in 1889. The Helena Weekly Herald of July 12, 1889, quietly noted John Owen’s passing: “. . .  Maj. Owen was for a long time one of the most enterprising, prosperous, influential and public-spirited men in this section of the country. . . . In his prime he was a man of ability, culture and influence . . . . The older generation of Montanians will cherish pleasant memories of Maj. Owen as they first knew him.”

Fort Owen today is a state monument, operated as a state park.

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.”

A Legacy of War

Orville .G. Willett was an army veteran, a state senator, and the person who suggested the name for Mineral County. He was also the victim of a dreaded disease. Willett had suffered undiagnosed bouts of illness for years, but while serving in the legislature in 1917, the Mayo Clinic finally determined the cause. Willett had leprosy. He had become infected while serving his country during the Spanish American War in the Philippines in 1902. He was one of some two hundred veterans of this war to contract the disease.

Willett posed for this legislative portrait just months before his diagnosis.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 945-620

The State of Montana had no rules and regulations in place for the isolation and quarantine of lepers. It was a mysterious disease, believed to be a fatal and highly contagious. The Alberton community was horrified to learn of the Willetts’ troubles. Willett and his wife were newly married. The couple was placed under quarantine in a small cottage in rural Mineral County near Alberton and cared for at county expense. Willett refused to submit to painful chalmoogra oil treatments, which doctors at that time believed was a viable cure. Instead he resorted to faith healing as his health deteriorated.

Willett and his wife lived under quarantine near Alberton, Montana.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 945-621

Ten years later in 1927, a legislative act committed Willett—who had continued to refuse medical treatment—to the federal leprosarium at Carville, Louisiana. Although local residents had been supportive of the Willetts, arsonists wasted little time after their departure for Louisiana. Their house and all their possessions burned to the ground. Doctors at Carville were hopeful that Willett would benefit from chalmoogra oil treatment. The disease had not disfigured him, but it was far advanced. Despite treatment, Willett died in 1928.

Today, Carville, Louisiana, is still a center for the study of leprosy, or Hansens’s Disease. Undamaged by Hurricane Katrina, research was disrupted while the facility served as the identification center for 910 victims of the storm.

St. Peter’s Hospital

Early Roman Catholic institutions in Montana included missions, schools, and hospitals. Many Protestants saw a great need to balance things out. This began in the 1880s in Helena when Helena Episcopalians planned a hospital to complement St. John’s, founded in 1870 by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth. Episcopal Bishop Leigh Brewer suggested the idea to his board of trustees in 1883. Men made up the board, but it was the churchwomen who did the real work. Bishop Brewer’s wife Henrietta, Mary Pauline Holter, Dr. Maria Dean, and Georgia Young stand out stand as the cornerstones upon which today’s St. Peter’s Hospital rests. The hospital first located in the Holters’ former home at Jackson and Grand streets in 1884. Of the 225 patients treated that first year, 80 were East Helena smelter workers sick with lead poisoning. Henrietta Brewer and Mary Pauline Holter had no hospital training and hired Georgia Young, a graduate of the New Haven, Connecticut, nurses training school, as supervisor. She was Helena’s first professionally trained graduate nurse. Hospital conditions were horrific; at the end of her first day, Miss Young was covered with lice.

St. Peters Hospital, at Eleventh Avenue between present-day Cruse and Logan,  was built upon tailing piles in 1887.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives,  953-531.

Dr. Dean joined the cause to build a better hospital. In 1887, St. Peter’s moved to its longtime location at Logan and Eleventh Avenue. The first photographs show the building starkly resting upon tailing piles left over from the gold rush. Under Georgia Young’s supervision, Henrietta Brewer and Mary Pauline Holter organized their friends as “lady visitors” who cooked for patients, cleaned, and conducted weekly inspections. Nursing supervisor Georgia Young nurtured St. Peter’s for three decades. Dr. Dean, who specialized in women’s and children’s health, did the same. These four founders left a living legacy to the Helena community that continues at St. Peter’s present eastside location. Its women’s health facility is appropriately named for Dr. Maria Dean.

Mathilda Dalton

Epidemics were a terrible danger in all mining camps. Not only were diseases and their causes not well understood, but miners were careless with their water sources and the streams needed for placer mining quickly became polluted. Typhoid, spread through contaminated water, was particularly common. The Dalton family learned about this danger firsthand. The Daltons were natives of Maine and came west from Wisconsin traveling with the first Fisk expedition in 1862. The family of six settled at Bannack. Granville Stuart nicknamed Mathilda “Desdemona” after the character in Shakespeare’s Othello because “she was beautiful and so good.” Edwin Ruthven Purple in his gold rush narrative Perilous Passage describes “Dez” as tall and magnificently formed, and one of the belles of Bannack. One smitten lad supposedly blew out his brains for her. Another spurned lover, however, said that everything she ate went to her feet which were unusually large.

Mathilda Dalton, Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

 The Daltons moved to Virginia City the following year in 1863. Mathilda Dalton, at twenty, was the oldest child; her three siblings were much younger than she. The family had hardly settled at Virginia City when Mathilda fell victim to typhoid. Mrs. Dalton nursed her daughter through the illness, but then fell ill herself. Her husband also contracted the disease. Mathilda was still recovering in January 1864 when both her mother and her father died. There were few options for single women, and men greatly outnumbered them in the gold camp. Mathilda was left to care for her three younger siblings, and so she decided to marry. She and her husband, Zebulon Thibadeau, returned to Wisconsin and later relocated to Wallace, Idaho.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Dalton are buried on Boot Hill, Virginia City’s first cemetery. The Daltons’ lonely graves are the only marked burials, except for the five road agents. Because of the stigma attached to the five, most families moved their loved ones’ graves to Hillside Cemetery across the ridge. By that time there was no one to move the Daltons, or who remembered where they were buried. It was not until the 1920s that Mathilda’s children returned to Virginia City to mark their grandparents’ graves.

Ghostly Visitors at the Bonanza Inn

Halloween is over, but I can't resist sharing one last ghost story.

The Bonanza Inn in Virginia City dates to the mid-1860s. It was built as the Madison County Courthouse, but three Catholic Sisters of Charity arrived from Leavenworth, Kansas, to convert it to St. Mary’s Hospital for miners in 1876. Mining waned, and the sisters moved on in 1879, but they, and some of their patients, left unusual legacies.

From the 1950s, guests have reported ghostly visits. A female spirit soothes the sick and comforts the depressed. Some claim to have seen the shadowy nun moving along Idaho Street or sitting in a pew in the Episcopal Church. I set out to discover her identity. One of the sisters was Irene McGrath, an 18-year-old novice who endeared herself to Virginia City. Community women, concerned about her safety among the rough miners, made a pact to secretly follow her whenever she went out alone. Years later as superior at St. James Hospital in Butte, Mother Irene cared for a patient who had known her at Virginia City. From her Mother Irene was overwhelmed to learn of this service. It’s not surprising that she might come back to repay the debt.

Not all encounters at the Bonanza Inn are comforting. In the summer of 1975, the Bonanza Inn housed the production crew filming The Missouri Breaks with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. The occupant in Room 1 was ill and declined dinner in Ennis. As he dozed alone in the building, a loud knocking jolted him awake. He flung open the door to find no one there. Then behind him came a sharp knock at the window.  He whirled around, pulled up the shade: no one was there. Then at the door, at the window, at the door—he gathered his belongings and thereafter slept in his car.

Room 1 sat locked and unused for twenty years. In 1997, the State of Montana acquired the building for housing state workers and others. Fear paralyzed one of the first overnight guests in Room 1. She awakened to see a male figure looming at the foot of her bed, wearing a wide brimmed hat and duster. She watched him fade away. Another guest in Room 1 felt someone watching her through the window. Drawing back the curtain, she found a figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a duster, staring at her.  During renovations to the building, another worker spent a scary night as something under his bed plucked at the bedsprings.
I stayed in Room 7 in the summer of 2000. Coming out of the steamy bathroom after a shower, a strong unpleasant odor hit me, like that of the geriatric ward where I worked as a candy striper in high school. The cloying smell lingered then dissipated. Another guest in Room 7 awakened to the sound of water splashing, as in a bowl. Later she discovered that the sisters used basins for washing wounds and bathing patients.

One hot and still August afternoon I lay down to rest in Room 2, thinking about my lecture that evening. I had the Bonanza Inn all to myself. At first they were so soft I didn’t notice. Then I could hear the small female footsteps in sturdy shoes at the far end of the hallway. She came closer, pausing midway down the hall. I clearly heard a key turn in a lock. The door clicked open and softly closed. I heard a few bumps and clunks, and then more footsteps behind the closed door. Slowly they grew faint and then faded away. I felt honored that Sister Irene visited me.

Homesteaders Take Care of Their Own

"Ma” Smith, a homesteading wife in Garfield County, was locally well known and greatly respected. She is a good example of women in isolated places who sometimes made difficult personal choices and material sacrifices because there was no one else to make them. In addition to running her own homesteading partnership with her husband, Ma was a practical nurse who traveled with elderly Doctor Lon Keith. Dr. Keith had given up his practice, but came out of retirement because Garfield County desperately needed him. Ma Smith helped Dr. Keith deliver scores of babies and assisted him in countless other cases.

From Garfield County History

In 1918, Dr. Keith made his last house call alone, breaking a fifteen-mile path through a blinding blizzard to set an elderly man’s broken leg. Before he left his patient, Dr. Keith was coughing. By the time he reached home, he was very ill. Ma hitched her horse to her bobsled when word came of Doc’s illness. She was by his side when he died of pneumonia. She took charge of the doctor’s household because there was no one else to do so. She bundled the doctor’s frail white-haired widow in warm clothes, packed her in the bobsled, covered her with a blanket, and took her to the nearest neighbor. While a neighbor hand made a coffin, she brushed and pressed the doctor's good black suit, prepared his body, and laid him out. She took a dress length of fine gray silk from the suitcase that she had hastily packed and stroked it with her work-roughened hand. The fabric was a special Christmas gift from her son in Chicago who was an inspector at the stockyards. She had intended to make herself a new dress with the gift. New dresses did not come often, and Ma hadn't yet had time to sew. She had, however, packed the silk thinking that it would make the perfect lining for Doc Keith’s coffin, if needed. She was right. And there was enough left over to make a pillow. Her sacrifice made a lovely bed for Dr. Keith’s final rest.

Thomas Dimsdale’s School

Health was among the many reasons that people came west to the booming gold camps. They believed that the high mountain climate could cure tuberculosis, but they did not realize that primitive living conditions and brutal winters could neutralize healthful benefits. Thomas Dimsdale was one of those pioneers afflicted with tuberculosis who came west for the mountain climate. He opened a private school in the winter of 1863-1864. Students paid two dollars a week to attend classes in this tiny cabin, which stood on Cover Street in Virginia City.

Thomas Dimsdale. Courtesy Yanoun.org

Later, as editor of the territory’s first newspaper, the Montana Post, Dimsdale wrote an account of the vigilantes in installments for the newspaper. It became Montana’s first published book, The Vigilantes of Montana, and is still in print. Mary Ronan was a student of Dimsdale's, and she later recalled in Girl from the Gulches, “Professor Dimsdale was an Englishman, small, delicate looking, and gentle. I liked him. It seemed to me that he knew everything. In his school all was harmonious and pleasant. While his few pupils buzzed and whispered over their assignments, the professor sat at a makeshift desk writing, writing, always writing. When, during 1864, The Vigilantes of Montana was being published at the Montana Post, I thought it must have been the composition of those articles that had so engrossed him. We children took advantage of Professor Dimsdale’s preoccupation and would frequently ask to be excused. We would run down the slope into a corral at the bottom of Daylight Gulch. We would spend a few thrillful moments sliding down the straw stacks.” Dimsdale was appointed the first territorial superintendent of schools in 1866, but he died soon after from the tuberculosis that brought him west. The tiny cabin, in ruins in a Virginia City back yard, was moved out of harm’s way to Nevada City in 1976.

The Dimsdale School in its present location in Nevada City

Mining Camp Dangers

Epidemics were fairly commonplace throughout the nineteenth century and knew no social boundaries. Rich or poor, no person was immune. Typhoid and cholera plagued mining camps because miners quickly polluted the water source. But measles, whooping cough and diphtheria also invaded the communities. The great silver camp of Elkhorn that flourished in the 1880s has a particularly pathetic legacy, reminding us that sometimes the sacrifices of parents—leaving home and family for new opportunities—were minor compared to the sacrifices they imposed on their children. Dr. William Dudley served as camp doctor but could do nothing when a diphtheria epidemic in 1889 claimed most of Elkhorn’s children. His wife was pregnant with their second child, and the Dudleys left Elkhorn abruptly, leaving their first born son, a casualty of the epidemic, buried in the hillside cemetery. During that same year, on September 27, Harry Walton, 9, and Albin Nelson, 10, found a quicksilver container full of black powder. Adults filled these containers to detonate for community celebrations like the Fourth of July, and had overlooked this one. The boys managed to explode it and blew themselves to bits. They share a grave in the small cemetery.

Young boy in a coffin. Illness knew no social boundaries in Montana’s mining camps.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Mining-related accidents were a hazard to children, and explosives and mine shafts were not the only perils. Dredging created its own danger. At Bannack in 1916, three girls were enjoying the warmth of a summer afternoon, splashing and wading in Grasshopper Creek. Laughing and talking, they waded out into a pond created by the dredge boat, not realizing they had gone too far. Suddenly the girls stepped off a ledge into nine feet of water. None could swim. Twelve-year-old Smith Paddock heard the commotion and managed to pull two of the girls out, but the third girl, sixteen-year-old Dorothy Dunn, drowned.

Dorothy Dunn, second in line on the left, wading in the dredge pond at Bannack.
Courtesy of Kathie Stachler, Dorothy's great-niece.

St. Vincent’s in Billings

The Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, Kansas, came to Montana in 1869 to pioneer health, education, and social services in many Montana communities.  Billings was the Sisters’ final Montana frontier. In 1896, Father Clarence Van Clarenbeck and Billings mayor Dr. Henry Chapple traveled to Leavenworth to make an appeal to the Mother House. The need for a hospital in the bustling railroad town of 3,000 would soon be critical. The men were so persuasive that Mother Mary Peter Dwyer assigned two Sisters from St. John’s Hospital in Helena to assess Billings’ needs. Dr. Chapple, who was not Catholic, had lamented a chronic shortage of nurses throughout his career. He challenged the Sisters and they accepted, caring for patients first in makeshift quarters above Chapple’s drug store. The first patients were admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital in 1898. In 1916, infantile paralysis afflicted at least 125 children in Billings. When Mother Irene McGrath, Superior of St. Vincent’s, established a children’s ward for these young patients, the overcrowding this caused underscored the need for a new building. The work was underway when World War I intervened. Mother Irene halted construction, deciding the Red Cross and Liberty Loan drives were more important. Her patriotic sacrifice won the hearts of the community.

Photo courtesy Western Heritage Center, Billings

When the new 200-bed hospital opened in 1923, Mother Irene opened a school for children whose deformities had heretofore prevented their education. It was the first school of its kind in the West. These efforts laid the groundwork for Billings’ modern medical and social services.  The Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health Care remains today St. Vincent’s parent system.

P.S. Remember these dedicated nurses?

Octavia Bridgewater

The Army Nurse Corps formed in 1901, and African American nurses served throughout all wars. However, they served as contract nurses and not in the military. At the end of World War I, when the Spanish flu epidemic caused a severe shortage of nurses, the Army Nurse Corps accepted eighteen African American women after Armistice to care for German prisoners of war and African American soldiers stateside.  In 1941, the Army Nurse Corps began accepting a few African American nurses. In 1942, there were 8,000 black nurses in the United States. The Army’s strict quota, however, allowed only 160 to enlist. One of the first black nurses accepted for active duty was Octavia Bridgewater of Helena. She served from January 11, 1943, until November 29, 1945.

Octavia Bridgewater is standing on the far right in this 1926 photo, probably taken in Colorado Gulch near Helena.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 2002-36 11

Octavia received her nurses training at the Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing in the Bronx in the late 1920s.  At that time, the Lincoln School and the Harlem School of Nursing were the only two schools exclusively for African Americans. Even so, both were under white administration. When Octavia returned to Montana after graduation in 1930, her only option was private duty nursing. After her enlistment in the Army, Octavia and her colleagues realized that if the military quota situation was not lifted, black nurses could never be integrated into the mainstream medical community after the war. Nationally through the black press, these women mobilized for their cause. Slowly, African American nurses pierced the barriers within the military system. The Army and Navy lifted the boycott in 1945. Octavia returned to civilian life to give many years of service to the Helena community as a maternity nurse at St. Peters Hospital. She was also very involved in Montana’s vibrant black community. Octavia was especially proud to have been part of the national movement that helped pave the way for her own civilian nursing career and for the careers of many other black nurses.

Caroline McGill

Dr. Caroline McGill came to Butte in 1911 to work at the Murray Hospital, returned to Johns Hopkins to complete her medical degree, and turned down an offer to stay at Johns Hopkins to return to Butte in 1914. She practiced there until she retired in 1956. Dr. McGill was a highly skilled physician, but she was also a friend to her patients through Butte’s ugly labor management strife, fires, explosions, and accidents that were common in the mining town. She made house calls to the crudest of miner’s shacks where she ministered to families under primitive conditions. She once said, “I made up my mind that I would never offend one of these good women by seeming to notice that their standards of sanitation were not mine. I couldn’t abide the habit of some of my colleagues of dusting off a chair with a clean handkerchief before daring to sit on it.” Dr. McGill was a familiar figure in saloons where stabbings, gunshot wounds, fractures, and concussions tested her skills. She frequently visited the women of Butte’s sprawling red light district, calling equally at low-rent cribs and high-class parlor houses. Small, attractive, and full of energy, Dr. McGill was a cut above the rest.

Dr. Caroline McGill relaxes on the front porch of a guest cabin of her 360 320 guest ranch in Gallatin Canyon.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

The Place Where the White Horse Went Down

In the summer of 1837, a smallpox epidemic spread from a steamboat as it lay docked at Fort Union. Although the federal government initiated massive inoculations among the tribes of the Midwest in 1832, the effort did not reach this far north, and Montana’s native people had no immunity. The disease struck the young, vigorous, and most able-bodied family members so quickly that before one person could be properly laid to rest, another family member died. In the end, the epidemic claimed at least ten thousand victims. The Crows tell a story about two young warriors who returned from a war expedition to find smallpox decimating their village. One warrior discovered his sweetheart among the dying, and both grieved over the loss of many family members. Realizing that nothing could alter these events, the two young men dressed in their finest clothing. Riding double on a snow white horse and singing their death songs, the two young warriors drove the blindfolded horse over a cliff at what is today the east end of the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds at Billings. Although time has reduced the height of the cliff, the spot where they landed is remembered even today as The Place Where the White Horse Went Down.


A historical marker stands at the site today.
Image from Historical Marker Database