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.

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.

Celebrate Woman Suffrage Today!

When Congress created Montana Territory in 1864, women had few opportunities. Not only could they not vote, they could not work in most professions and could not attend most colleges. Some women were against woman suffrage because they believed it threatened traditional views. Belle Winestine of Helena, a great campaigner for women’s rights, explained the controversy this way: Men said, “Women’s place was in the home. Women are on a pedestal. Why should they come down and mix in ‘dirty politics?'” Well,” we women replied, “who made politics dirty and how many women who worked in factories or labored on the farm are on pedestals?”

Between 1869 and 1871, seven western legislatures considered giving women the vote. Montana was not one of them. Only Wyoming and Utah granted women the right to vote. Men dominated Montana Territory seven to one, and this is partly why suffrage was slow in coming. One small victory came in 1887 when an amendment to Montana’s territorial constitution gave women the right to vote for school trustees if they paid taxes in that district. An important “first” came about upon statehood in 1889 when Ella Knowles Haskell became Montana’s first female attorney and, in 1892, the first woman in Montana to run for public office.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 951-821

The Montana Woman Suffrage Association formed in 1895. Suffrage amendments repeatedly came before the Montana legislature. In 1911, Jeannette Rankin pled the cause. “Men and women are like right and left hands;” she said, “it doesn't make sense not to use both.” But the amendment failed again. Finally in 1913, Governor Sam Stewart took up the cause, and Montana’s suffrage amendment passed with only two dissenting votes in each house of the legislature. Put to public ballot on November 3, 1914, men voted 41,302 to 37,588 in favor of the suffrage amendment. Montana women won the right to vote in state elections and to hold state offices. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted all women citizens the right to vote in national elections.
Exercise your right to vote on November 4!

Sidney Edgerton

Helena City Commissioners have proclaimed the week of May 17, 2014, Sidney Edgerton Week in tribute to the man who helped create Montana Territory and for whom Lewis and Clark County was originally named. Sidney Edgerton’s contributions to Montana’s earliest history have been largely forgotten. Appointed chief justice of the supreme court of Idaho Territory, he arrived at Bannack in September, too late to cross the Continental Divide. He soon learned that Idaho’s governor had snubbed him by assigning him to the territory’s most remote district area east of the Divide. Edgerton became committed to the creation a new territory to include the recently discovered gold fields in what became Montana. He traveled to Washington carrying two thousand dollars’ worth of gold dust sewn into his clothing to plead the case.

Sidney Edgerton, Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 942-074

The new territory was already under consideration, and on May 26, 1864, Congress created Montana Territory. President Lincoln appointed Sidney Edgerton the territory’s first governor. On February 2, 1865, the territorial legislature established Edgerton County as one of Montana’s original nine counties with Silver City as its county seat. Helena residents, however, had quickly garnered more population than any other community in the county and wanted to claim that designation for itself. Legend has it that attorney Wilbur Fisk Sanders, Governor Edgerton’s nephew, rode to Silver City and stole the scant county documents. With the papers in his saddlebags, he rode to Helena and thus unofficially transferred the county seat. Politics were fickle, however, and Edgerton County’s name changed to Lewis and Clarke County in December 1867 with a legislative vote of 7 to 0. Civil War rivalries were vicious. Montana had some radical Republicans like Sanders and Edgerton, but by now Democrats outnumbered them. Republican Judge Hezekiah Hosmer noted in the December 28 Montana Post that the change came about only because of “partisan spleen.”  The change underscored bitter territorial politics.

The WCTU

The Montana Chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union or WCTU, formed in 1883. The national organization was primarily evangelical and protestant, and helped women become more involved in politics. Its purpose was to create a pure and sober world. Delegates from Butte, White Sulphur Springs, Helena, and Dillon met to organize the Montana chapter. The organization took up a number of causes and current social issues including labor, prostitution, public health, sanitation, and international peace. The organization especially advocated the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco. The Montana WCTU began with a strong leadership, but by 1886 its membership had dwindled. In that year, fifty-year-old Thomas Cruse of Helena married twenty-five-year-old Margaret Carter in the most lavish, extravagant wedding Helena had ever seen. Cruse spent an astronomical sum on the reception which officially took place at Helena’s Cosmopolitan Hotel. But the entire community celebrated the event, and saloons all over town offered free drinks. Thomas Cruse paid all the bar bills to the tune of $30,000. There was so much public drunkenness and so many hung over husbands that it reinvigorated the WCTU. The organization re-emerged. There were thirteen local chapters and departments, or committees. These included Social Purity, Unfermented Wine at Sacrament, and Purity in Literature and Art. By 1910, Montana’s WCTU had over 1,000 members and had taken up the cause of destitute mothers, the opposition to drinking Coca Cola which at that time was made with cocaine, and other causes. In 1913, the Montana WCTU had its own influential lobbyist and was instrumental in getting suffrage and eventually prohibition on the ballot. By 1916, more than 4,000 had joined. The WCTU continued to have substantial influence until the 1950s.

Etta Weatherson, Candace Shaw, Elizabeth Blakeman ride on a WCTU parade float on July 4, 1916, Columbus, Montana.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 951-822

Friday Photo: First Elected Women

On this day in 1919, Montana became the thirteenth state to approve the Nineteenth Amendment.

Not all women favored suffrage. Those against it, called “Antis,” argued that no woman could possibly find time for politics without neglecting her family. Harriet Sanders, wife of pioneer attorney and politician Wilbur Fisk Sanders, countered the opposition, saying that suffrage made women better mothers. Better mothers kept better homes, and their children were better educated. Better homes and educated children in turn improved the nation. Women had much work to do.

Jeannette Rankin speaks in Washington, D.C., just before her election to Congress.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Montana women helped elect Jeannette Rankin to Congress in 1916, four years before women achieved national suffrage. But other equally significant victories were overshadowed by Rankin’s election. Not only did Montanans send the first woman to Congress in that historic election, they also elected the first two women to the Montana House of Representatives and the first woman Superintendent of Public Instruction. The first women legislators, Emma Ingalls of Flathead County and Maggie Smith Hathaway of Ravalli County, both championed the cause of woman suffrage and spoke out for the disenfranchised. As Ingalls and Hathaway took the seats they earned in the Montana House in 1917, they became the voices of many more than the voters who elected them, especially children and their welfare. And Flathead County’s May Trumper defeated three men in the race for school superintendent. Together these women represented the ribbon at the finish line of a long and hard-won race.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

The Discovery at Alder Gulch

May 26, 2013, marks an important anniversary. On that date in 1863, Barney Hughes, Thomas Cover, Henry Rodgers, William Fairweather, Henry Edgar, and Bill Sweeney discovered gold along a stream fringed with alder trees. Word soon leaked out, and two hundred miners trampled the ground to the discovery site; many others quickly followed. Within two weeks, dwellings lined a crude road connecting numerous settlements, dubbed the “Fourteen-mile City.” Of these settlements scattered along the gulch, Virginia City and Nevada City rivaled each other. Virginia City became the largest and most permanent. At the height of this famous gold rush as many as 30,000 people flooded Alder Gulch. The first two hundred miners came from dwindling placers at Bannack. Some 10,000 disappointed miners came from the Salmon River area in present-day Idaho where the gold strikes there could not support so many people.

Scene in Virginia City, 1866. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 956-100

Many of these prospectors were veterans of California and Colorado diggings. Other significant groups included Irish Catholic immigrants who were tied to the Union but supported the Democratic party; Southerners escaping the Iron Clad Oath; Republicans who were vehemently against slavery; and others who were tired of the divisions the Civil War created. These made the early community a place of complicated allegiances. A few weeks after the discovery, the Varina Town Company platted the townsite. Some company members, who supported Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy, intended to name the new town after Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina. But the newly elected miner’s court judge, G. G. Bissell, was an equally stubborn Unionist. When it came time to file the official documents, he submitted the name Virginia instead. Thus Virginia City was born against the backdrop of the Civil War.

Virginia City in 1868 as drawn by A. E. Mathews. Montana Historical Society Research Center

P.S. This weekend, celebrate the anniversary of Montana’s great strike at Alder Gulch by attending the festivities at Virginia and Nevada cities.

Yucca Theater

An optimistic, cheerful nature and a keen sense of humor helped make Treasure County legislator David Manning instrumental in getting Montana “out of the mud.” An engineer and contractor, Manning did much for Montana’s rural communities, initiating improvements such as electricity, paved roads, dams, and irrigation systems in sparsely populated areas. Known for his clever solutions to difficult problems, Manning was fair and patient and often crossed political party lines when others could not. Upon his retirement, Manning had served in the Montana House and Senate from 1932 to 1985, longer than any other legislator in the nation. Just before he entered politics, Manning and his brother, Jim, designed and built the Yucca Theater in Hysham.

Photo courtesy Montana State Historic Preservation Office

The landmark theater well represents the huge popularity of talking pictures. Typical of Manning’s visionary intuition, its construction in 1931 raised community morale, assuring the community of Hysham’s survival during the Great Depression. Attached living quarters served as Manning’s family home during his long political service. In 1992, the Manning heirs donated the facility to the Treasure County ’89ers. It is now a fantastic museum.

P.S. Remember this renowned theater?

Bryan for President 1896

Did your candidate win yesterday's election? Here's a look back at the 1896 presidential election, which disappointed four out of five Montana voters.

The Populist Party was one of the most significant third political parties in the history of the United States. In the 1890s, Populism grew among Midwestern and southern farmers who believed that the free coinage of silver would cause inflation, which would raise farm prices and thus benefit the depressed agricultural economy. The populist platform also advocated nationalization of railroads, a graduated income tax, and more direct citizen participation in government. In Montana, where silver mining was an important industry, miners backed the Populist Party, especially after the collapse of the silver market in 1893. William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech countered the Republicans’ backing of the gold standard.


A button from William Jennings Bryan's 1896 campaign

Montana elected three Populists to the state senate and thirteen to the house. Populism in Montana reached its peak in the presidential election of 1896 when Populists joined Democrats to back William Jennings Bryan for president. Bryan was an advocate of free silver coinage and spokesman for the cause of the poor man. Marcus Daly reportedly gave $50,000 to Bryan’s campaign and was its largest contributor. Butte and Anaconda especially embraced Bryan as a champion of the working man, the antithesis of wealth and power, and thus one of their own.


Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, cph 3f06263
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3f06263

Bryan carried Montana four to one in the election, but he lost to William McKinley. On the heels of his defeat, Bryan visited Montana the following August of 1897. Butte is famous for its hospitality, but Bryan received the greatest welcome Butte has ever bestowed on any visitor, and a poem, “When Bryan Came to Butte,” received national press. By 1906, Populism had faded and its free silver platform failed, but it left an important legacy. This included the eight-hour workday, direct election of senators by the people, the process of referendum and initiative, and a solid foundation for the Progressive era that followed.

P.S. I'll be signing books at the Montana Historical Society tomorrow (November 8) from 11:00 until 1:00. Plus there will be tea and cookies. Hope to see you there!

Election Day Special: Woman Suffrage

Women voters have been assiduously courted in this election, and they're likely to sway the outcome. Here's a look back at the history of women's right to vote in Montana.

When miners discovered gold at Grasshopper Creek in 1862, women in the United States could not vote, could not work in most professions, and could not attend most colleges. The road to woman suffrage was very long. Between 1869 and 1871, seven western legislatures considered giving women the vote. Montana was not one of them. Men dominated Montana Territory seven to one. There were a few small steps. In 1887, an amendment to Montana’s territorial constitution gave women the right to vote in school elections and the right to hold elected positions as school trustees and county superintendents. Equality stopped there. The authors of Montana’s first state constitution—all men—considered granting women the right to vote in 1889. But the idea met defeat forty-three to twenty-five. Montana women, however, organized in the 1890s, founding the Montana Woman Suffrage Association and the Women’s Protective Union in Butte, which was the first all-female union in the West.


It's possible that the woman standing in the car is Jeannette Rankin.
Postcard courtesy of Debbie Little Wilson. http://dlcowgirl.wordpress.com/

Woman suffrage repeatedly came before the Montana legislature and failed. And surprisingly, not all women favored suffrage. Those against it, called “Antis,” argued that no woman could possibly find time for politics without neglecting her family. Harriett Sanders, wife of pioneer attorney and politician Wilbur Fisk Sanders, countered the opposition, saying that suffrage made women better mothers. Better mothers kept better homes, and their children were better educated. Better homes and educated children in turn improved the nation. In 1913, Governor Samuel Stewart took up the cause of woman suffrage, and the amendment finally passed with only two dissenting votes in each house of the legislature. In 1914, women won the right to vote in Montana, six years before it became the national standard. In 1916, Montana women went to the polls for the first time.

Walter Marshall Remembers John F. Kennedy’s Montana Visits

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

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


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

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

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

Thomas Walsh’s Mysterious Death

U.S. Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana became prominent as head of the senate committee exposing fraudulent oil leases in the 1920s. Walsh exposed the Teapot Dome scandals of President Warren G. Harding’s administration and sent Secretary of Interior Albert B. Fall to the penitentiary. In 1933, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt appointed Senator Walsh Attorney General. Just before the inauguration, on February 25, 1933, in Cuba, Senator Walsh married Mina Perez Chaumont de Truffin, widow of a wealthy Cuban sugar grower.

Photo by Harris & Ewing from www.old-picture.com

Cuba at this time was in political turmoil and Mina’s family was embroiled in dangerous diplomatics. Members of her family had even been assassinated. The marriage raised eyebrows. As the newlyweds traveled to Washington for Roosevelt’s inauguration and Walsh’s swearing in, Senator Walsh suddenly died of a heart attack. The press pronounced Walsh’s death a national misfortune, but his son-in-law, U.S. Navy Captain Emmit C. Gudger, believed that his father-in-law had been poisoned. Julio Morales, a successful Helena lawyer who fled Cuba with the advent of Castro, wrote that “...rumors were started by both parties, alleging that Senator Walsh had been poisoned.” It was no secret that Roosevelt opposed Cuba’s government. Walsh’s widow was very upset to learn that her half of the inheritance consisted of the senator’s Washington D.C. town house. She traded the property for other items, including a prized painting by C. M. Russell. The painting’s whereabouts today is unknown. Walsh’s longtime trusted employees had packed his files for delivery to his new office.  Among them were files in progress investigating the Harding administration and the American aluminum industry, against whom Walsh intended to proceed. These files disappeared and were never seen again.

Sedman House

One of Montana’s best-kept secrets is the Sedman House, a beautifully furnished territorial period home in Nevada City, now under state ownership and maintained by the Montana Heritage Commission. It originally stood in nearby Junction City where it was one of the first large homes built in the region in 1873. Its builder, Madison County rancher and territorial legislator Oscar Sedman, met an unfortunate end. In 1881 during the legislative session in Helena, he suddenly took ill and died of “black measles,” the tick-born disease we know today as Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Sedman was the first Montana legislator to die during a session. He left a wife and four small children. His colleagues paid him tribute by draping his official chair in black crepe, turning it backwards to face the wall. After Oscar’s death, two of the Sedmans’ four children died. Mrs. Sedman remarried and moved to Missoula.

Sedman House, June 12, 2009
Photo by E.L. Malvaney via Flickr

The Sedmans’ lovely home later became the Junction Hotel. After that, it served as a stable. Charles Bovey disassembled the badly deteriorated building and moved it a mile and a half to Nevada City where he put it back together. The home today is a focal point. The period furnishings include the desk of vigilante prosecutor Wilbur Fisk Sanders and Colonel Charles Broadwater’s personal gold-trimmed bathtub from his private suite at the far-famed Broadwater Hotel. A visit to the Sedman House in Nevada City is well worth it.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. This weekend would be an especially good opportunity to visit the Sedman House.

Speed Skating

Speed skaters Sylvia White and Judy Martz both competed in the 1964 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Norway, but it is Judy Martz whom most Montanans remember. The two future teammates met in Butte when Sylvia was a national champion and Judy was just a kid who loved to compete and had not been training. Sylvia challenged Judy to an informal race, and Judy lost by a narrow margin of only two yards. So Judy began to set her sights on real competition. She won a spot in the nationals at St. Paul, and in 1963 she was a member of the U.S. World Speed Skating Team. Later that year, both she and Sylvia White made the U. S. Olympic Speed Skating Team. They were the first Montana women ever to make an Olympic team. Judy skated only once during the games at Innsbruck. She believes that she peaked too early during practice races. When she skated the 1500 meter race, she lost focus, fell and slid, and was too fatigued to gain ground. Even so, she was proud to finish 15th. Today Judy says that competing in that race was a golden experience. Although she doesn’t have a medal that she has to lock in a safety deposit box, she feels as if she has a gold medal tucked in her heart. But competing as one of the first two Montana women at the Olympics was not Judy’s only first. She went on to serve as Montana’s first female lieutenant governor under Mark Racicot from 1997 to 2001. She then won her bid as governor in 2001 and served one term, the first woman to take the helm of Montana’s ship of state.

The 1964 Olympic Speed Skating team, including Judy Martz (bottom row, far left) and Sylvia White (bottom row, second from right). Image from National Speed Skating Museum.

Maggie Hathaway

Acclaimed for translating ethics into action, Maggie Hathaway blazed a long and noteworthy trail as one of the first two women elected to the Montana Legislature in 1917. Hathaway campaigned vigorously for woman suffrage before the 1914 election, traveling just as many thousands of miles as Jeannette Rankin. She did the same for Prohibition in 1916, speaking in every neighborhood in Ravalli County. During her two legislative terms, Hathaway’s fellow male legislators affectionately called her “Mrs. Has-Her-Way.” Hathaway drafted the Montana’s Mother’s Pension Bill, allowing women compensation when their spouses failed to support their children. She fought to create the Child Welfare Division and made the impassioned speech that won the eight-hour workday for women. In 1918, with nearly 10 percent of Montana’s men serving in World War I, Hathaway spoke on behalf of grain farmers, offering women’s services to harvest their crops. She employed women only on her “manless” ranch so more men could join the armed services.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

She gathered apples as well as ballots, hitched up her own plow, and turned furrows as straight as any man. A male legislator said of the diminutive redhead, “She is the biggest man in the House.” Hathaway served three terms in the legislature and, like her colleague Emma Ingalls, earned the respect of, and courtesy from, her male colleagues.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Emma Ingalls

The newspaper Emma Ingalls and her husband founded, the Kalispell Inter Lake, allowed her to editorialize for civic reform. A rival editor said she was a “clever and interesting writer who occasionally wielded a caustic pen.” Ingalls was also a pioneer homesteader, the first to irrigate in the Flathead Valley, and managed by herself when her husband’s health failed. One of the first two women elected to the Montana Legislature in 1917, Ingalls introduced the national suffrage amendment when it came before the Montana House for ratification.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Returning for a second term, Ingalls sponsored the bill establishing Mountain View Vocational School for Girls. Until that time, courts remanded both boys and girls to the state reform school at Miles City. Separation of boys and girls was an important step in the care of delinquent juveniles. Ingalls was the first woman to work with the Bureau of Child and Animal Protection, chairing the northwest district under Governor Joseph Dixon. Despite her accomplishments, Ingalls believed her life was unremarkable. “God put me on his anvil and hammered me into shape,” she once said. “The things that seemed so hard to bear at the time have proven to be the stepping stones to a larger, richer life.”

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Placer Hotel

Artist C. M. Russell illustrated the program for the formal ball, held April 12, 1913, inaugurating the largest hotel between the Twin Cities and the Coast. Built almost entirely with donations as a public enterprise, Helena felt real pride of ownership, and the Placer Hotel quickly became the center of civic activity. Its name derives from the placer gold washed from the gravel during the excavation of its foundation. As the foundation was being dug, an oldtimer prospector was called in to demonstrate the art of panning. Soon he had a crowd fascinated with the lesson. Legend has it that in digging the basement, workers found enough gold to pay for the building and then some.  Architect George H. Carsley designed the grand hotel in consultation with Cass Gilbert, architect of New York’s famed Woolworth Building. The Placer’s wrought iron balconies, overhanging eaves, and wide cornice are reminiscent of the nearby Montana Club, designed by Gilbert in 1905. The seven-story hotel was constructed of reinforced concrete and brick from the Western Clay Manufacturing Company which is now the Archie Bray Foundation. Each of its 172 guest rooms, arranged around a U-shape, opened onto the outside. Custom-made china, cutlery, and bed linens—supplied by Helena’s New York Store—all bore the hotel’s prospector insignia. The hotel featured a carriage entrance, a lobby fireplace built to burn seven-foot logs, and a state-of-the-art kitchen with an automatic dishwasher and central refrigeration system. In June of 1960, a campaigning John F. Kennedy visited Helena during the Montana State Democratic Convention and stayed at the Placer as a guest. The former hotel is now divided into condominiums.


Kennedy mingled and spoke at the Marlow Theatre. Images from Helena As She Was

Ella Knowles Haskell

Ella Knowles faced formidable obstacles in pursuing a career in law. Upon statehood in 1889, a statute prohibited women from passing the bar. After much debate, Montana lawmakers amended the statute, thinking a woman could never pass anyhow. Knowles astounded them and passed with flying colors.

Ella Knowles Haskell, engraving from Progressive Men of the State of Montana, 1902

She became the first woman licensed to practice law in Montana. But acquiring clients was another matter. She tried in vain to convince Helena merchants to hire her as their bill collector. Finally, one merchant challenged her to retrieve all the umbrellas his rich customers had borrowed on rainy days. She returned every one. The merchant paid her two quarters, her first fee; she kept them for the rest of her life. Knowles practiced law until 1892, and then she ran on the Populist ticket for attorney general, the second woman in the nation to run for that office. She didn’t win—likely because women couldn’t vote. But her opponent, Henri Haskell, appointed her assistant attorney general after he won the election. Later they married and then divorced. Knowles practiced law in Butte until she died in 1911. In 1997, Ella Knowles Haskell was inducted into the Capitol’s Gallery of Outstanding Montanans.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go