Lewistown Satellite Airfield Historic District

In the dark days following the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress appropriated massive defense funds. The U.S. Army selected Great Falls, Montana, as the site of a major air base with satellite airfields at Cut Bank, Glasgow, and Lewistown. On October 28, 1942, the first Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses roared over Lewistown’s Main Street with their bomb bays open, buzzed the treetops, and landed at the Lewistown Airfield. Crews trained day and night combining navigation, bombing, and gunnery practice. The men familiarized themselves with all aspects of the B-17 and trained with the top secret Norden bombsight, a computerized aiming device that reportedly could “put bombs in a pickle barrel.”

The Norden bombsight storage building at the Lewistown Airfield is a rare WWII survivor.

Barbed wire encircled the double-compartment building that housed the Norden bombsight. A twenty-four-hour sentry kept armed guard. The top secret bombsight, a mechanical analog computer, was accessed through bank vault doors, removed for training missions, and returned under armed guard. The fifty-pound instrument was used to determine the exact moment a bomb should be released. Its accuracy depended upon the bombardier’s ability to correctly calculate speed, altitude, temperature, barometric pressure, and the “bomb curve.” Setting the instrument required such precision that one reporter likened it to playing a violin. Wearing silk gloves so that his fingers wouldn’t stick to the metal and breathing pure oxygen in temperatures reaching forty degrees below zero, the bombardier crouched in the Plexiglas nose of the aircraft, the worst seat in the house.

The community adopted the GIs and many married local girls. Nearly one thousand men trained at the Lewistown Airfield before they flew directly to Europe to join air combat. Many never came home. B-17s carried four thousand pounds of bombs and served in every World War II combat zone, but casualties among bomber squadrons were horrific. A single mission over Germany in October 1942 claimed sixty B-17s and six hundred lives. The Lewistown Satellite Airfield was deactivated after eleven months of service. The U.S. Department of Defense systematically removes “temporary” World War II buildings, so this airfield is a rarity and its intact Norden bombsight storage shelter is the only known identifiable example remaining in the United States.

Haunted Fort Assinniboine

Empty buildings with hollow windows sprawl across the windswept prairie off U.S. 87 outside Havre, Montana. Fort Assinniboine, established in 1879, once housed some five hundred soldiers and their families. As the largest fort in Montana, its famous residents included General “Black Jack” Pershing. Stationed at the fort in the mid-1890s, “Black Jack” earned his nickname as first lieutenant in the African-American Tenth Cavalry unit.  The fort closed in 1911, and over the decades the remaining structures served as a state agricultural experiment station, church retreat, farmers’ gathering place, shelter for the homeless, and a 4-H camp.

Although some of the fort’s buildings, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, remain intact, the hollow windows of this ghostly shell recall the fort’s former residents. Photo courtesy Havre Chamber of Commerce.

Former Hill County legislator Toni Hagener tells of an experience an elderly acquaintance once shared with her. He attended camp at the fort in the 1930s and recalled bunking in the enlisted men’s barracks. Upstairs, the fort’s records and ledgers lined the walls, leaving a narrow path down the center of the long room. It was forbidden territory, but this pathway offered the boys an irresistible sport. At every opportunity they snuck upstairs, took an open volume, got a running start, and flopped down for an exhilarating slide on the wooden floor.
One night, the boy awoke to an odd rustling overhead. Sneaking upstairs to investigate, he saw an old man sitting cross legged on the floor; his long grizzled hair hid his face. A quartermaster’s report lay open in his lap as he slowly turned the pages. The boy slipped back downstairs, woke his buddy, and together they climbed the stairs. Both saw the old man, turning pages. They returned to their bunks to watch the stairway. No one came down. At first light, the boys checked upstairs. The old man was gone.

In 1954, fire claimed these barracks where the boy had encountered the ghost of an old soldier, turning pages in the quartermaster’s ledger. 1955 NPS photo by R. H. Mattison.

The memory stayed fresh as the boy grew up. Fire left the barracks a burned-out shell in 1954, prompting the man to further speculate on the old timer’s identity. He concluded it was the ghost of an old soldier, searching for something in the ashen ruins. He could picture the scene in his mind’s eye, a ghost within a ghost.

Captain Keogh’s Love of Horses

Comanche, the favorite mount of Captain Myles Keogh, carried his master into many battles and survived him at the battle at Little Big Horn. Comanche was perhaps a special horse because of the exceptional way Captain Keogh treated his horses. One biographer points out that Captain Keogh was “a noble-hearted gentleman, the beau ideal of a cavalry commander, and the very soul of valor.” By all accounts, his good character extended to the treatment of his horses, and from his personal correspondence it is evident that his horses were important to him. During Keogh’s service in the Civil War, he wrote to his sister about the loss of Tom, an old horse that he had loved much and that had carried him through many charges. “I felt his loss severely,” he said. “I wish you could have seen how he could leap, and he saved my life, whilst riding on a bye road carrying an order. I suddenly rode into a heavy outlying thicket of the enemy. Tom saw them as they rose up to deliver their fire. He jumped sideways over a rail fence into the wood[s] …. and carried me safely out of range. I shall never have a horse like that again.” But a few years later in 1868, Keogh bought the celebrated Comanche. Soon after, during a skirmish with the Comanche Indians in Kansas, the horse took an arrow in his hindquarter, but continued to let Keogh fight from his back. Keogh named him “Comanche” to honor his bravery, and he proved to be every bit as special as old Tom. After the Battle at Little Big Horn, soldiers found Comanche nearly dead from loss of blood, the only living thing on the battlefield. The farrier walked him fifteen miles to the waiting steamer Far West and saved his life. Comanche never worked again, but he often walked, riderless, with the Seventh Cavalry in parades.

Comanche with Private Gustave Korn in June 1877. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, H-63

He lived to be twenty-nine and died in 1891. University of Kansas taxidermist Professor Lewis Dyche preserved Comanche and he is still on display at the university’s natural history museum.

Fort Keogh

Fort Keogh was established in July 1876 in the few weeks following the Custer loss at Little Bighorn. The army cavalry post takes its name from Captain Myles Keogh who served under Custer and died in the battle. The fort’s commander was General Nelson Miles. In 1879, Miles City—whose name honors the general—became the first seat of Custer County, and the fort grew to be one of the largest in the territory.

A distant view of Fort Keogh, c. 1878. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 003.63

Sixty buildings once sprawled across the diamond-shaped grounds. In 1907, the army withdrew its infantry troops, and in 1909, the fort became a remount station where the army trained and shipped horses worldwide. The army shipped more horses from Fort Keogh during World War I than any other army post.

Women and children pose in front of the officers' quarters at Fort Keogh, c. 1878.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 003.62

The military withdrew in 1924 and transferred the land to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for experimental stock raising and the growing of forage crops. This work continues today. The remains of the historic fort include the parade ground, 1883 wagon shed, 1887 flagpole, and seven other pre-1924 structures.

Observing Memorial Day

The first Decoration Day, or Memorial Day as it came to be called, was formally celebrated in 1868 when the Grand Army of the Republic designated a day of observance honoring casualties of the Civil War. The idea caught on nationally and observances gained popularity during the 1870s. On May 30, 1883, Helena celebrated its first formal observance of Decoration Day with a mile-long procession from Broadway out of the city to Benton Avenue Cemetery. Nearly 1500 people marched in the procession, including some fifty Civil War veterans and a few veterans of the war with Mexico. The Silver Coronet Band provided music. Ladies and gentlemen in carriages joined the crowd at the cemetery, bringing flowers to place on the graves of their loved ones. This observance, the Helena Daily Herald pointed out on June 2, brought to light the deplorable condition of the city's protestant and Catholic cemeteries whose wooden head and foot boards had deteriorated and could not be deciphered.

Wooden grave markers in Helena's Benton Avenue Cemetery, 2003.
Photo courtesy Ric Seabrook and Charleen Spalding. 

Few burial records were being kept. The Herald noted that the county gravedigger simply dug a hole, covered the corpse, and the name of the dead was “…buried in the same oblivion as his body.” An informal tally taken at this time revealed that only one-fourth of the graves in the city's several cemeteries even had markers. Helena was not alone in this situation. If a grave had a wooden marker, it often deteriorated quickly, and until the mid-1880s, Montana had no stone monument makers. Tombstones had to be ordered from catalogs. A. K. Prescott, Montana’s first tombstone maker, did not begin taking orders until about 1885. Unmarked graves exist in nearly every Montana community.

With the moment of national remembrance, which comes at 3:00 p.m. local time on Memorial Day, consider all those forgotten dead that lie beneath the sod in your communities.

Civil War Vets

In honor of our veterans...

Montana’s earliest African American population carried the very real memories of slavery and its associated implications. Most of the first black Montanans were born into slavery or had parents or ancestors who were slaves. Many of them saw service during the Civil War. Upon President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the Union stepped up its recruitment of black volunteers. By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men, or 10 percent of the Union Army, had served as soldiers, and another 19,000 had served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war—30,000 of them succumbed to infection or disease. Black volunteers did many necessary jobs and earned a salary of ten dollars a month, with three dollars deducted for clothing. White soldiers received thirteen dollars a month with no deductions. Three black Union veterans who later made their homes in Montana were Jack Taylor of Virginia City, Moses Hunter of Miles City, and James Wesley Crump of Helena. In the Union Army, Jack Taylor took care of officers’ horses and learned the craft of teamster. Moses Hunter reenlisted after the war, served in the Southwest, and by 1939, was eastern Montana’s only living Civil War veteran. James Crump lied about his age and joined the Union Army. When his superiors discovered he was only fourteen, he convinced them to let him serve out his three-year term as a drummer. Crump thus was the youngest Civil War veteran in Montana, and because of this, he often carried the flag in parades and proudly held the flag at the laying of the cornerstone of the Montana State Capitol in 1902.


A buffalo soldier at the dedication of the Montana State Capitol in 1902
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

P.S. Remember this invention by buffalo soldier William D. Davis?
P.P.S. What about Mingo Sanders and the soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry?

Journey of the Scottish Rings

William Logan came from Scotland to the United States as a young man. Before he left home, his father gave him a signet ring carved with the family crest that had been in the family for generations.   Logan always wore this ring. He also wore a masonic ring he greatly treasured. William Logan served in both the Mexican and Civil Wars. As Captain in the Seventh Infantry, Company A, he came to Montana the day after Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn.  A year later in August of 1877, Captain Logan died at the Battle of the Big Hole. Indians desecrated the bodies of the dead. Captain Logan’s fingers were cut off and the rings taken. Logan’s wife advertised in the papers to recover the rings, but had no luck. Three years later, a Nez Perce was killed near the Canadian border; he had the signet ring. It was traded and bartered until Bill Todd, a friend of Captain Logan’s, recognized it in the possession of an old trapper. He persuaded the trapper to give up the ring and took it to Captain Logan’s son. Sometime later, the son was living at the Blackfeet Agency when an Indian woman came into the post wearing his father’s masonic ring. He bought the ring from her. She told him that a few months after the Big Hole battle, the Blackfeet and Piegans fought the Nez Perce. Her husband took the masonic ring from a fallen Nez Perce and wore it until his death. It then passed to his wife who was wearing it when Logan’s son saw it on her finger. Those rings came full circle, but they had quite a journey getting there.

Japanese Balloons

Historian Jon Axline tells a story about Oscar Hill and his son, who in 1944 were cutting firewood seventeen miles southwest of Kalispell. They found a strange parachute-like object with Japanese writing and a rising sun symbol stenciled on it. Sheriff Duncan McCarthy took the object to a Kalispell garage. Rumors flew and soon five hundred people crowded into the garage to take a look. It turned out to be a Japanese balloon rigged to carry a bomb. It was the beginning of an aerial attack on the United States by Imperial Japan as World War II wound down. In November of 1944, the Japanese began launching hydrogen-filled paper balloons believing the jet stream would carry them to North America. The attached incendiary and anti-personnel bombs would start forest fires and kill civilians. The Japanese also intended the balloon bombs as psychological weapons, designed to cause confusion and spread panic. The Japanese called them Fu-Go, “Windship Weapons.” They were the first intercontinental weapons, a low tech predecessor to the ballistic missiles of the late twentieth century.

Army Intelligence Captain W. Boyce Stanard (left) watches as FBI special agent W. G. Banister examines the balloon that fell in Kalispell. Army Air Force Major J. E. Bolgiano is holding the balloon's pressure relief valve. Photo from Project 1947.

By April 1945, the Japanese launched over nine thousand balloons. Only 277 reached the United States and Canada. Only one caused injuries, killing five Oregon picnickers when they inadvertently detonated one of the bombs. The project was a failure. A voluntary news blackout in the United States kept the Japanese from discovering if the balloons landed. At least thirty-two balloon bombs reached Montana between 1944 and 1945. A hiker discovered the last one hanging from a tree southwest of Basin in 1947. Axline points out that balloon bombs in Montana proved that the state was not as isolated and free from world events as the public thought.

Update: Here's a better photo of FBI agents examining the bomb. This one is an illustration in my new book, More Montana Moments.

Donald D. Cook, photographer, Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 93-1

Horace W. Bivins

I've enjoyed celebrating Black History Month. To finish it out, here's a look at the accomplishments of Horace W. Bivins, plus more resources on Montana's black history.

Horace W. Bivins was born in Virginia of free ancestry and was college educated. He enlisted in the Tenth Cavalry, the famous Buffalo Soldiers, in 1887 as a noncommissioned officer. Bivins served in Arizona in campaigns against Geronimo. The Tenth Cavalry was reassigned to Fort Custer in Montana. There Bivins became famous as such an expert marksman that Buffalo Bill Cody tried to entice him to travel with his show. Bivins preferred the military. He was a veteran of two Cuban wars and three Philippine engagements. At the attack on San Juan Hill, he fought beside Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and later received the Silver Star for his heroic actions. Some years later when Roosevelt visited Billings, he was disappointed to learn that Bivins was not at home, but at Camp Dix, New Jersey, commanding a labor battalion.

Photo from BlackPast.org

Bivins retired in 1913 and reenlisted at personal hardship in 1918 during World War I, retiring a second time as captain in 1919. Bivins’s record for marksmanship stood until the 1970s, and today remains one of the all-time highest. During his thirty-two-year career in the military, Bivins received thirty-two medals, one for every year of service. Bivins studied taxidermy at the University of Minnesota, practiced that for a while, and did extensive truck gardening in the Billings area where he lived a long, quiet life.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

P.S. Remember the accomplishments of another Buffalo Soldier?
P.P.S. Here are a few places to start your own research into our state's black history:
The Montana Historical Society has a lot of resources on African Americans in Montana.

Historian Ken Robison has shared much of his research on his blog, Historical Fort Benton.

Blackpast.org has information on African Americans in Montana and nationwide, including some primary source documents.

Listen to a series of oral history interviews from the Washington State University Libraries.

Read an interesting tidbit about jazz and CCC workers in Libby here.

If you or your library have access to JSTOR, start with this article from the Spring 2007 issue of Montana The Magazine of Western History.

And of course, you can always look back at all the Montana moments labeled black history.
I'd love to know what you turn up in your research. Leave a comment!

Friday Photo

In celebration of Black History Month, here's a look back at one of the contributions of blacks in the military stationed in Montana. Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk, “Vignettes of Valor,” profiling some more of those contributions. It's here at the Historical Society at 2:00. Hope you can make it!

 

From Montana Views. Original in Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, H-3614. Used by permission.

A group of bicyclists stands on Minerva Terrace in Yellowstone National Park in August 1896. The men belong to Lt. James A. Moss's company of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, U.S. Army Bicycle Corps, Fort Missoula, Montana. Photo by F. Jay Haynes.

P.S. It's possible that one of the men pictured is Mingo Sanders.
Update: Thanks to Mike Higgins for identifying the men in this photo. See his comment below for their names.

Mingo Sanders

Good morning history buffs! What are you up to this week? I’ll be giving a talk, “Vignettes of Valor,” profiling some of the contributions of blacks in the military stationed in Montana or with Montana connections. It will be here at MHS on Saturday, 2:00 PM, in celebration of Black History Month. This is the little-known story of Mingo Sanders,  one of these courageous men.

African American buffalo soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry arrived at Fort Missoula in May of 1888. Some of these men participated in the famous bicycle experiment, riding 1,900 miles from Missoula to St. Louis in the summer of 1897. One of the key riders was Mingo Sanders, a 16-year army veteran.


From The Brownsville Raid by John D. Weaver.

Mingo Sanders (center, in uniform) with his baseball team at Fort Missoula.

Although partially blind from an explosion, Sanders had an excellent service record and the respect of his commanding officers. In 1898, the Twenty-fifth was ordered to Cuba at the start of the Spanish American War. Sanders and the Twenty-fifth distinguished themselves fighting alongside Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Today historians credit the buffalo soldiers with saving the Rough Riders, who instead got all the press and praise, and Roosevelt, who got himself elected president. Sanders then served in the Philippine Insurrection and received the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions. In 1906, Sanders, stationed at Fort Brown, Texas, was a year away from his retirement and well-deserved pension. He and 166 others of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, many of them fellow members of the famous bicycle corps, were falsely accused of murdering a white bartender. Fabricated evidence and President Roosevelt’s political agenda led to their dishonorable discharge without a trial. The incident was known as the “Brownsville Affair.” Mingo Sanders, blind in one eye and diabetic, gave most of his life to his country, but never received his pension. He died in 1929 during the amputation of a gangrenous foot. Decades later in 1972, Congress reopened the case and found all 167 men innocent. They received honorable discharges posthumously and each received $25,000 in restitution, paid to their heirs.


Harper's Weekly, January 12, 1907

Sanders upon hearing the verdict.

Friday Photo

What are you up to this weekend, history buffs? I have a batch of "History on the Go" radio scripts to write, but I'm hoping to find time for a little horseback riding. Nothing this fancy, though...


From Montana Views. Original in Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 95-68 A-183. Used by permission.

Horsemen from the M Troop, Sixth Cavalry—considered the U.S. Army's finest trick riders in 1903—perform the pyramid. Top to bottom, left to right, are Pvt. Vessey, unidentified, Corp. Dick Hill, Sgt. Chase, Corp. Hunker, unidentified, Sgt. Harry Chartran, Corp. Singeltary, unidentified, and Sgt. Jonnie May. Photo by Christian Barthelmess.

William D. Davis and his Innovative Saddle

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Let's celebrate with a post on some of the African American heroes in Montana history—buffalo soldiers.

There were some 5,000 African American Buffalo soldiers who served in the all-black 9th and 10th Cavalry and 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments. Buffalo soldiers made up about 10% of the total troops who guarded the vast borders of the Western frontier in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. These highly skilled, courageous, and patriotic soldiers served in Montana at forts throughout the state including Fort Missoula, Fort Keogh and Fort Assinniboine.  White officers commanded these black troops. In 1895, famed general “Black Jack” Pershing took his first command of the 10th Cavalry, Troop H, at Fort Assinniboine. Pershing’s men participated in a 600-mile journey to flush Cree Indians out of the coulees and draws for their deportation to Canada. This grueling military expedition required patience and stamina and Troop H accomplished it without the firing of a single shot. One of Pershing’s men, William D. Davis, had a novel idea to make such long expeditions more comfortable. Black soldiers typically were issued the roughest stock, and he invented a special type of improved saddle designed to render an easier ride on hard-trotting horses. Davis filed a patent on his improved saddle in 1896. His idea was to add springs beneath the seat and at the tops of the stirrups. While Davis did not invent the use of springs on saddles, the type of spring, its longevity, and its placement were his own. Although never standard army issue, Davis saddles provided a smoother ride for cavalry, cowboys, and gentlemen riders.

U.S. Patent Office, 568,939

P.S. More resources on African Americans in Montana.

P.P.S. Historian Ken Robison of the Overholser Research Center has done extensive research on Montana's black community. Check out a sample here.
And last but not least, Montana has long had a small but vibrant black community.