Butte’s railroad legacies

Posted on March 12, 2016 by carrollvanwest

As the mines at Butte went into larger and larger production in the late 19th century, the railroads soon arrived to cart away the raw materials, and to deliver workers on a daily basis. All three of the famed Montana transcontinentals built facilities in Butte–in a sense 100 years ago all lines led to Butte. Remarkably, all three passenger depots remain today. The Northern Pacific depot is now an events center. The Milwaukee Road station remains a television headquarters. The Great Northern depot has been offices, a warehouse, and a bar. Its historic roundhouse also stands and it too has had many uses.

Milwaukee Road depot, Montana St, best shot

Great Northern Depot, 800 block S. Arizona

Great Northern Roundhouse, Park St, Butte

But in so many ways the real railroad story concerns a much shorter line–about 26 miles in length–but one with a big name, the Butte, Anaconda, and Pacific, designed by its founder Marcus Daly as a connector between his mines in Butte and his huge Washoe smelter in Anaconda. The BAP depot in Butte stood on Utah Street in 1985 but has been

Butte, Anaconda, and Pacific Railroad Depot, Butte, 1985

demolished, a real loss for the city’s historic fabric. Completed in 1894, the BAP connected the two cities, and its historic corridor has been recently transformed into a recreation resource that also unites the two cities and their counties. It is also a physical thread that ties together the Butte-Anaconda National Historic Landmark.

A railroad office building still stands in Anaconda, with its Romanesque arch creating an architectural theme between the office building and the BAP depot that is extant at its commanding position at the end of Main Street. Anaconda’s basic layout was

classic late 19th century railroad town planning: the depot marking the entry from railroad to town and then the long Main Street of commercial businesses culminating in the lot for the county courthouse.

View north to Deer Lodge County Courthouse from BAP depot in Anaconda.

Anaconda is also home to the extant BAP roundhouses and shapes. Like the Great Northern facility in Butte, the BAP roundhouses have had several uses, and there was a short-lived attempt to establish a railroad museum within one of the bays. The future for this important railroad structure is cloudy.

Between Butte and Anaconda two small towns have important extant historic resources. Back in the 1980s I considered Rocker to be a must stop for the It Club Bar–and it is still there, flashy as ever.

Created with GIMP

But now there is another reason for a stop at Rocker–the preservation of the historic frame BAP depot and the creation of the Rocker Park trail along the old railroad right-of-way. Again here in Silver Bow County we see a recreational opportunity established in conjunction with the preservation and interpretation of a key historic property. The trail was just opening when I took these photos in 2012.

Ramsay is another town along the Butte, Anaconda, and Pacific, and served as a company town for the DuPont corporation which built a short-lived munitions plant there during World War I. During the state historic preservation plan work of 1984-1985, historian Janet Ore was preparing a study and survey of the town resources, which was completed in 1986. The town’s historic district was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. Ore noted the division between worker cottages and manager homes, and the general layout in keeping with what DuPont was doing in other states at that time. Although there has been the loss of some contributing resources in the almost 30 years since the National Register listing, Ramsay still conveys its company town feel. Below are some of the extant cottages, different variations of Bungalow style, along Laird and Palmer streets.

The superintendent’s dwelling is a two-story Four-square house, with its size, understated Colonial Revival style, and placement in the town suggesting the importance of the occupant.

A few buildings also exist from the old powder works but most were torn away decades ago. The pride of Ramsay today is its new school building, pointing toward a different future for the town in its second hundred years of existence.

Butte and its wonderful array of domestic architecture

Posted on March 11, 2016 by carrollvanwest

Clark Mansion, 219 W. Granite, by C. H. Brown, 1884-88

In the early 1980s, when we talked about Butte houses, we had two new house museums on our mind: the William Clark Mansion (above), home to one of the city’s three major copper kings, and then the very different abode of his brother Charles, known then as the Arts Chateau (below) for its conversion into the city’s art center.

As a historian and historic preservationist of my generation, it was impossible not to revel in the colorful diversity of Victorian era styles found in Montana’s historic mining cities, places like Butte and Helena in particular. For someone who arrived in Montana from Colonial Williamsburg, the opportunity to finally explore a Victorian era landscape, from the late 1870s–the vernacular Victorian styled Jacobs House below dates c. 1879– to the turn of the century, was a delight.

It also was a responsibility. Even in 1984 it was clear that there would never be adequate public monies for the needs of the town’s domestic architecture. A new sense of stewardship, and the ability to solve preservation issues at the local level, would be required–and the Butte historic district commission is just one of the groups that has helped to fill that gap. Butte CPR–Citizens for Preservation and Revitalization–has made

A Butte CPR project from May 2012

a significant impact through its grant programs for facade improvements and repair. The organization formed in 1994 and has provided vital funds for historic preservation work on both private homes and businesses for over 20 years.

These efforts could come none too soon. In the 1980s it seemed that three generations of historic houses would rot away because no one wanted to live on the hill and had headed to the suburban utopia of the flats. Friends often kidded me about getting my Butte getaway for $25K. Not that the depressed, and depressing, situation was without its temptations. The housing stock is fascinating in its variety, details, historical associations, and sense of time and place.

W. Broadway, Butte

Eugene Carroll House, c. 1880, a bit of late Italianate style in Butte.

Mrs. James McCraig house, c. 1884, 410 W. Granite, Butte

During the boom of the late 19th and early 20 centuries, housing on prominent streets was fitted in wherever possible, as private homes also became rentals for boarders and temporary residents. At the same time, middle-class business owners and mine administrators engaged architects to design their homes, or duplexes, in the fashionable academic styles. In c. 1890 John Patterson was the designer of the McHatton House while Moses Bassett designed the Largely Flats (both below).

These middle-class Victorians are prized today, and Butte has dozens, especially along West Granite and Broadway.

Let there be no doubt, however, Butte’s houses also documented the chasm between labor and capital in the copper city. The small, vernacular-styled dwellings of the working class have disappeared from so much of the city–such places are almost always the first victims of urban renewal–but enough remain, stuck here and there to convey what most laborers had as home back in the boom era.

In the north end, Walkerville still shows this working side of domestic architecture well.

Here are blocks upon blocks of the unpretentious, yet homey, dwellings of those drilling out a life below the ground. And elsewhere in the city you have surviving enclaves of the

plain homes of the era, with some enlivened by glorious combinations of yard art.

Some places speak to larger truths, often hidden in the landscape, of segregated spaces and segregated lives. This corner of Idaho Street (see below) was once home to the local African Methodist Episcopal church, which served a small surrounding neighborhood of black families.

By the turn of the century, the local titans of capital lived in a far different neighborhood, concentrated along North Excelsior and Park Avenue. Here was the Hodgens-Ryan House of 1899, 1906 in flamboyant Colonial Revival style. Nearby on Park was the Hennessy Mansion, c. 1900, with its two-story Colonial Revival-inspired portico providing a sense of the grandiose to what otherwise was just another brick four-square house.

Hodges-Ryan House, c. 1899, 1906

847 Park, Hennessey Mansion, c. 1900, Butte

Hennessy Mansion c. 1900.

In the early 1980s, we were not even thinking about the “contemporary style” homes of the 1950s and 1960s. We saw ourselves as edgy when we even gave bungalows, like these

along Gold Street, a second look. When you come to Butte today, it is impossible to ignore how the city has several outstanding examples of mid-20th century domestic architecture. Ophir Street might be the best destination, but Montrose Street also has its marvels.

This post has focused on detached houses–boarding houses and apartment complexes are also found throughout the city’s residential areas. The Mueller Apartments may have been the most ambitious but many others, like the Scott, have been restored to new lives.

The comeback of Butte’s residential neighborhoods is no miracle–it is the legacy of a generation of long-term and new citizens determined to build the foundation for Butte’s future through homes for their families.

Butte: A place transformed, and still going

Posted on March 10, 2016 by carrollvanwest

Butte–the copper city that was once the largest urban area in Montana–was a place undergoing tremendous stress at the time of state historic preservation plan work of 1984-1985. The closing of the Berkeley Pit–the most scarred landscape of that time in Montana (the coal pits of Colstrip now surpass it)–shocked so many since Anaconda

The environmental disaster of the Berkeley Pit, as it has filled with water in the last 30 years, seems tranquil, even peaceful today

Copper Company officials had promised that when the town of Meaderville was destroyed for the pit generations of work would ensue. Schools, homes, churches were uprooted, sometimes even buried so the frenzied mining could continue, tearing away half of the town’s built environment. What had been lost to gain so little.

Note the gash of the pit to the left of the highway marker

Then in the early 1980s came the next blow: the Anaconda smelter closed too–an era had passed, with the boom of the 1970s suddenly crashing. What would replace it, what could replace it, was there even hope in Butte? I remember the pessimism of those days.

Overview of Butte, 1985, from Montana Tech

Naturally some immediately said that the past was now in the way, that only massive urban renewal would save butte and create opportunity for the future. Residents combined with professionals and activists to say no: the past was the future for Butte. The state office certainly provided what resources it could. Butte was the largest National Historic Landmark in Montana. We didn’t really have any idea of the number of resources and exactly what the boundaries included but everyone accepted that Butte was a place apart not only for Montana but much of the United States. Really strong preservationists and archivists (I admired what Fred Quivik, Ellen Crain, and Brian Shovers were doing there in the mid-1980s) were already in place, doing everything they could to record, identify, and preserve the stories, places, and individuals who shaped this most unique place. For me, in 1985, Butte was literally a morass: so rich in story, architecture, sense of place, ethnic identity that it was difficult to grasp. And frankly it remained that way until I returned for a serious engagement with this place in 2012. That is when I stood at the Mile High, Mile Deep Mine, now accessible to the public through the marvelous Copper Trail.

From here you understood that Uptown–the state’s most sophisticated urban setting–was little more than a speck within a larger landscape where people lived and toiled, scratching out lives for their families, building communities, providing raw materials to a hungry industrial world. But what seemed to me to be the vastness of Butte was actually a decidedly human response to the far greater vastness of the northern Rockies. Here was a landscape of work like few others in this nation.

There are few better places in the United States to explore the landscape of work, and how opportunity attracted all types of people from all sorts of lands to mine the copper, to house the workers, to feed the families, to provide rest and relaxation, to do all of things big and small it takes to keep a place humming 24 hours a day for decades, taking from the earth materials that made modern suburban America possible.

I cannot touch upon everything or everyone that define the Butte experience today but in the next several posts I want to dig deep into this landscape and discuss how this transformed place is now, for me, the most compelling spot of all in Montana.

The Stack and the City: Anaconda

Posted on February 16, 2016 by carrollvanwest

In my work across Montana in 1984-85 there was no more imposing structure than the smelter stack and works at Anaconda, in Deer Lodge County. The image above was one I used in the 20 plus listening sessions I had across the state in 1984, gathering perspectives and recommended properties for the state historic preservation plan. I used the stack because the smelter had just closed–and how this chapter in the state’s mining history could be preserved was on many minds.

Whenever I visited the western part of the state in subsequent years, a stop in Anaconda was a must, to see if the stack was still there and what maybe was the latest of this modern landmark, this overwhelming symbol of corporate power from the early 20th century. Some might recall the visitor center that existed there in the mid-1980s.

The stack and its fascinating impact on the landscape wasn’t the only reason I often stopped in Anaconda in the 30 years since the survey. There was that far different place, the Club Moderne Tavern.When I traveled the state in 1984-1985 this jewel of mid-1930s modern design was not listed in the National Register of Historic Places–Mike Koop of the state office soon took care of that after I left–and now most of Anaconda is included within a massive National Historic Landmark district about Butte-Anaconda and the copper mine culture of the 20th century. I want to explore the layers of history, and how heritage development have shaped both towns over 30 years, in a series of posts, beginning with my work in Anaconda in 2011-12.

The Washoe Stack is one of the state’s most dominant man-made environments. For like the massive dams and reservoirs at Hungry Horse, Canyon Creek, and Fort Peck, there is the massiveness of the structure itself, and the thousands of surrounding acres impacted by the property. Unlike the lakes created by the dams of the first half of the 20th century, however, the stack left devastation in its wake, not recreation, not rebirth.

The old gateway to the smelter introduces you to one lasting legacy of the stack–the tons of slag located along the highway leading in and out of Anaconda. The huge pile of

seems like some sort of black sand that has washed up on a beach rather the environmental spoils left by 100 years or production.

The Washoe Smelter almost 100 years ago was considered an engineering marvel. In my last piece of published Montana research, for the Drumlummon Institute’s special book on Butte and Anaconda, I wrote: “The Alphonis Chimney Construction Company built the Washoe Stock for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1918. The stack is 585 feet high, 60 feet wide at the top with an interior diameter of 75 feet. Few industrial structures anywhere compare to it. The stack loomed over the company, its workers, its region, and its state.”

Historian Laurie Mercier’s book on Anaconda has many valuable insights from local residents on what the stack means. Bob Vine believed that the Company and God were all the same in Anaconda: “Everybody would get up in the morning and they look and see if there was smoke coming out of that stack and if there was, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world, and we knew we were going to have a paycheck.” (Mercier, Anaconda, p. 1)

In the 1980s, the Atlantic Richfield Corporation, a later owner of the Washoe works, announced the stack’s closing and possible demolition. A community-wide effort to save the stack was launched because, in the poetic words of local union activist Tom Dickson:
ARCO save that stack, touch not a single brick
Signify the livelihood that made Anaconda tick.
Still let it stand there stark against the sky,
Like a somewhat obscene gesture catching every eye. (Mercier, Anaconda, p. 217)

The toxic fumes from the stack infected thousands of acres, with the ironically named community of Opportunity, just north of the smelter works, bearing the brunt of the waste. Community members continue to fight back for better cleanup of their damaged parks, yards, and businesses. Indeed, it is still a moonscape around most of the smelter, and one wonders when that ever changes.

Club Moderne was an oasis for me in Anaconda–an architectural landmark from the 1930s that still felt like stepping back in time, especially with a bartender so knowledgeable of the classic cocktails of mid-century.

That the place remained so intact in the early 1980s was impressive to me–that it remains that way 30 years later is a testament to local stewardship, and continued good times. The interior design of Art Deco details also remain to treat the eye and tempt

the drinking hand. The place might not be as packed as in the heydays. Anaconda’s population stood at just about 12,500 in 1930–just over 9,000 called Anaconda home in 2010. But it, and the long lamented Copper Club (closed for years now) was why you came to Anaconda 30 years ago and spent a night–good food, good drink, and a chance

to experience one of the state’s most architecturally distinctive places.

Montana’s Three Forks: Crossroads of Rivers and Rails

Posted on February 1, 2016 by carrollvanwest

The Missouri River headwaters, located just north of the town of Three Forks, is one of the most important places in all of the United States. Here, within the boundaries of a state park that has improved its public interpretation significantly in the last 30 years, was one of the primary goals that President Thomas Jefferson gave the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803–to find the headwaters of the Missouri River. When the expedition

traversed this land in 1805, they followed the footsteps of Bannock, Shoshoni, and Flathead Indians who had found this place and hunted the abundant game along the rivers long before the “explorers” arrived. Nevertheless, it was the Corps of Discovery that named the place. They found three sources–that they named the Jefferson, the Madison, and the Gallatin after the president and two of his cabinet officers–creating the Missouri River.

While fur trappers such as John Colter, who was an expedition member, soon returned to this site, and in the 1860s the settlement of Gallatin City was established, but only the

historic log Gallatin City Hotel of 1868 remains to mark a place where early Montana settlers thought an important town along the rivers would develop.

Recreational and interpretive features are now much more plentiful than 30 years ago but the park still exudes that feeling of openness and wildness that attracted that only the

Gallatin Co Missouri Headwaters confluence 4

Native Americans but later waves of 19th century trappers and settlers. It is a very special place within Montana and certainly earns its National Historic Landmark designation many times over.

As you leave the Missouri Headwaters State Park access road (Montana 286) and return south to old U.S. Highway 10, you encounter a plaintive sign hoping to attract the thousands of heritage tourists who come to the state park–go a bit farther south and west and find the town of Three Forks.

The story of Three Forks, on the western edge of Gallatin County, is not of rivers but of railroads, of how both the Northern Pacific and the Milwaukee Road corridors shaped this part of the state at the end of the first decade of the 20th century.

The Milwaukee Road came first, with Milwaukee Land Company agent John Q. Adams establishing the townsite in 1908, and later contributing its first landmark building, the two-story Colonial Revival-styled Sacajawea Hotel in 1910. Adams began the hotel in true Montana vernacular fashion, having contractors tack together existing moved buildings

into some type of lodging for railroad workers. Bozeman architect Fred Willson finished the building with a new facade along with various additions, leaving housing for railroad employees along with providing services for travelers. Heritage tourists were part of that mix, especially once the Montana Daughters of the American Revolution in 1914 placed a large boulder with a bronze plaque in honor of Sacajawea across the street from the hotel. Here was one of the state’s early examples of public interpretation of the Sacajawea story. In 2005, as part of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Three Forks Area Historical Society commissioned artist Mary Michael to add a stylized statue of Sacajawea and her baby Pomp, turning the spot into a 21st century memorial to the Shoshoni woman.

Thirty years ago, the hotel was a renovation project we all at the Montana Historical Society wanted to happen. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, it was a proud relic of that railroad that had just closed but also of the early automobile age when travelers could stop here, spend the night, and then travel by car to Yellowstone National Park far to the south. I would stay here when working in the region, reveling in

Sacajawea Hotel, 1990

the feel, the look, the sounds of a historic railroad hotel. Unfortunately the restart only lasted about 20 years. The hotel closed in 2001, and looked to have a bleak future in the new century. From 2009-2010 new owners, however, took this historic hulk and have

polished back into a jewel, better suited for more upscale travelers than in the past. It is the center point of a renewal of Three Forks, and part of a minor population boom that has seen the town, which basically had a flat population of 1100 to 1200 from 1950 to 1990 reach a population of almost 2000 in 2015. More on Three Forks in the next post

Great Falls Heritage Area, Part 6: the cultural side

Posted on December 17, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Few American cities are as obviously in love with a 20th century artist as Great Falls is with Charles M. Russell, often called the “cowboy artist.” Russell became an icon in American western art by the mid-20th century, and Great Falls is home to multiple shrines, from the 1986 statue downtown of “Kid Russell and Monte,” the centerpiece of what was then a new downtown renewal project, and Bob Scriver’s earlier statue of “C.M. Russell: Cowboy Artist” outside of the C. M. Russell Museum, located adjacent to his historic home and studio in an unassuming Great Falls neighborhood.

Western art is a significant cultural phenomenon of the 20th century, no matter how one views it today. And Russell, as the statues suggest, is a giant within the field, one of the handful whose work is still admired by devotees and critics today.

Russell’s Victorian cottage home and adjacent log cabin studio were really nothing out of the ordinary in Great Falls in the early 20th century while vernacular still easily stood side-by-side more identified forms of domestic architecture. But his achievement rates these properties among the few 20th century National Historic Landmarks in the state, and they have been so recognized for many years now.

But there is much more to the cultural side of Great Falls that the looming presence of Charles M. Russell. The city has an impressive range of architectural statements from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, with the Art Deco-styled New Deal-funded buildings of the county fairgrounds shown above falling in the middle of this architectural timeline. Many of these are listed in the National Register of Historic Places as individual properties or as historic districts. The historic neighborhoods have scores of worthy Victorian-style homes. There are

Cascade Co Great Falls 1200 block 4th Ave N

then gargantuan statements of style and purpose constructed by the town’s Catholic community in the early twentieth century, from the Ursuline School to the massive Columbus Hospital, once of the city’s most important landmarks of its progressive era.

Cascade Co Great Falls Columbus Hospital 3

Cascade Co Great Falls Columbus Hospital 2

The town’s soaring Arts and Crafts styled Masonic Temple has recently found new investors willing to tackle this early 20th century landmark and find a new future for it some 100 years later.

Great Falls residents know such conversions can work, since when I first visited the city in 1982, everyone wanted to go and appreciate the conversion of the Dichardsonian Romanesque styled high school into the Paris Gibson Center, a new focal point for the arts in the city.

Paris Gibson Center was just the start of 30 plus years of successful historic preservation and adaptive reuse projects, keeping such mid-century modern landmarks as the Whittier School, another New Deal

project, and the Art Moderne landmark Intermountain bus station–once so proudly featured in the Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges movie, “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,” part of that decade from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s when Montana was suddenly in the lens of Hollywood.

All of these buildings and places help to give Great Falls its unique sense of self, and its sense of achievement and promise. And that is not to even mention the fun, funky stuff, such as the Polar Bears and having the

supper club experience of 50 years ago at Borrie’s in Black Eagle. Stepping back into time, or looking into a future where heritage stands next to the

atomic age, Great Falls and its environs–from Fort Benton to the northeast to Fort Shaw to the southwest–can give you that memorable heritage area experience.

Great Falls Heritage Area, part two: First Nations Buffalo Jump

Posted on November 22, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Successful heritage areas have chronological depth to their history, and places that are of national, if not international, significance. To begin that part of the story, let’s shift to the other side of Cascade County from Belt and explore the landscape and significance of the First Nations Buffalo Jump State Park. When I visited the site in 1984 there was not much to it but the landscape: no interpretive center existed and there were only a few markers. To give the state its due, it then only owned a portion of the site, with the first land acquisition dating to the New Deal. Listed in the National Register in 1974, the site only had opened as a state park a few years earlier, and no one seemed to know much about it or even how to get to it. But as this photograph from “A Traveler’s Companion to Montana History” shows, wow, what a view: it was totally impressive, and had a big story obviously to convey.

Buffalo jumps were ways that the first nations in Montana could effectively kill large number of bisons–by planning, gathering and then stampeding a herd over a steep cliff. Native Americans used this site for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The cliff is hundreds of yards long and kill sites are throughout the property.

State park officials, working with local residents and ranchers, have significantly enhanced the public interpretation at the park since the late 1990s. Hundreds of additional acres have been acquired, better access roads have been installed. and new interpretive features, such as these reproduction sweat lodges on the top of the cliff, have been added to the landscape to physically enhance the Native American feel to the park.

The interpretive center is a model of 21st century Native American-focus history. It provides facilities and exhibits for visitors, and encourages a longer stay and exploration of the site.

Park managers understood that this site had special significance to all Native Americans thus they included capsule history displays about all Montana tribes of today along with displays that emphasize the Native American dominance of the landscape when the jump was in use.

As the park was being expanded and improved into an effective heritage asset, both in its public interpretation and visitor facilities, research on the property continued. The buffalo jump is now considered the largest in the United States, and quite likely the world. In the summer of 2015, the site was designated as a National Historic Landmark as one of the nationally significant archaeological and Native American properties in America. The bone deposits remain deep and rich in artifacts, still awaiting further exploration despite being mined for a brief time during World War II for phosphorus production. Indeed the entire site is one of reflection and respect for the cultural contributions made by the First Nations long before the arrival of Lewis and Clark just over 200 years ago.

Here is a property that today tells us how the earliest Montanans used their wits and understanding of nature and landscape to enrich their diet and to make their world, one far from that of our own, and one still difficult for those of us in the 21st century to grasp.

This buffalo jump remains a place of mystery and meaning, and when you look to the south and see the shadow of Crown Butte you glimpse into that world of the deep past in Montana,. If you look in an opposite direction you find the patterns of settlement that surround this sacred place. And that is where we go next to St. Peter’s Mission and the Sun River Valley.

The Warrior Trail of U.S. Highway 212

Posted on November 10, 2015 by carrollvanwest

U.S. Highway 212, as it heads west out of the high prairies of southeast Montana, becomes known as the Warriors Trail, an appropriate description because the road provides various access points to some of the most important battlefields associated with the Great Sioux War of 1876-1877. At Busby, immediately south of the highway, stands a monument and grave of one of the most prominent Northern Cheyenne warriors, Two Moons (1847-1917),

who fought in all three major battles (Rosebud, Little Big Horn, and Wolf Mountains) of the campaign in southeast Montana . After surrendering at Fort Keogh in Miles City in April 1877, Two Moons joined the U.S. Army as a scout. He later became a recognized reservation leader and made Busby his home; his monument along the highway became a landmark. Since my last visit to the grave, a new security fence had been installed around the monument and nearby too were numerous other Cheyenne warriors, followers of Dull

Knife, who died in 1879 trying to escape confinement at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Their remains were kept in a museum until they were interred here in 1993, a result of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.

South of Busby is the Rosebud Battlefield State Park, a place barely on anyone’s radar (except for the Northern Cheyenne) when I carried out the 1984 fieldwork. A local rancher had preserved the battlefield and donated some of its land to the state, and a basic park,

Interpretive markers in 2007 at Rosebud Battlefield.

with basic public interpretation, had been installed. In the last ten years, however, due to threats from energy development in the area and the leadership of local ranchers, concerned Native Americans, tribal preservation officers, non-profit groups such as the Montana Preservation Alliance, land conservation groups, and the American Battlefield

Protection Program, and state parks, this important battlefield has been enhanced with new interpretation and a new commitment to protect the battlefield’s view sheds. The battlefield commemorates the June 17, 1876 fight between U.S. Gen. George Crook and his Crow and Shoshoni Indian allies who were advancing up Rosebud Creek as part of a

pincher movement to find and defeat a combined Lakota-Cheyenne force led by Crazy Horse. The Lakota and Cheyenne carried the day and would have surprised Crook’s troops if not for their Native American allies. Crook claimed victory but returned to his base near Sheridan, Wyoming Territory, for weeks. He was nowhere near when the Lakota and Cheyenne crushed the 7th cavalry of George A. Custer just days later. The Battle of Rosebud Creek is the army’s name for the fight; the Cheyenne call it the Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother. The last battle of the Great Sioux War in Montana took place in early 1877 at Wolf Mountains, in the Tongue River Valley, south of the village of Birney. Like Rosebud, the battlefield is designated a National Historic Landmark but is largely on a private ranch.

The Tongue River near Ashland, Montana.

A last look at Carbon County, and a visit into the Crow Nation

Posted on October 22, 2015 by carrollvanwest

In the northern reaches of Carbon County are two additional towns on U.S. 212 I would like to review before I turn into a far different landscape in neighboring Big Horn County. I looked earlier at the Boyd store, and its changes over 30 years, briefly in passing on to other railroad towns in the Clark’s Fork Valley.

But Boyd is worth a second look if for nothing more than its rambling vernacular design post office since so many of those buildings have been replaced in the last 30 years by standardized USPS designs. The same can be said of the Boyd School, a frame building now encased in vinyl that has layers of history in it as the community made additions as necessary over the decades.Continuing north on U.S. Highway 212 is the much larger, prosperous town of Joliet. Joliet is an anomaly–its population now is larger than it has ever been since census data has been recorded. So many eastern Montana towns steadily lost population to where they are mere skeletons of themselves today. Joliet has avoided that fate; in fact its population in 2010 was slightly more than when I first visited in 1984.

The Joliet Community Center symbolizes the town’s stability and sense of itself.

The Rock Creek State Bank, now the Rebakah Lodge Building, anchors one of the town’s most prominent commercial corners. It is one of several buildings in Joliet listed in the National Register of Historic Places, including a large historic residential district, in the last 30 years. Joliet had nothing designated in the National Register when I visited in 1984.

While there is a bright new sheen to a good bit of Joliet, the downtown still has that classic mix of vernacular frame and brick one-story commercial buildings typical of the turn of the century railroad/homestead boom towns. And like most, a tavern, in this case the Frontier Bar, is a permanent fixture in the town.

Outside of town is a wonderful array of roadside public sculpture, courtesy of long-time Joliet resident Charles Ringer. Ringer moved to town, purchasing an old junk yard and part of a WPA granary, in 1971. His works have become landmarks for travelers along U.S. Highway 212. Ringer runs a studio shop out of an old ranch-style house.

Known to many winter travelers as “The Snow God” but named “The Creature” by its creator Charles Ringer, this huge metal sculpture is roadside art at its best in Montana.

Ringer is also known for his various kinetic sculptures, and the entire property becomes a way for travelers to interact with, or just enjoy, the general wackiness of his creations.

From Joliet you can strike out east on an improved gravel road, passing through the town of Edgar, and then climbing up out of the Clark’s Fork Valley and into the land of the Apsaalooke, or the Crow Indian Tribe. Traveling west in the Crow reservation, you encounter two instant landmarks, one much more recent than the other but both are tightly intertwined. A compelling metal sculpture of a warrior announces the entrance to the Plenty Coups High School, shrouded on the morning I went there in 2015 by an early morning fog.

Across the road is the Plenty Coups State Park, a fascinating memorial to the former Crow chief Plenty Coups, who the Crow Indian Tribe has designated as its last traditional tribal

chief. Plenty Coups had been among the first Crow Indians to take up a homestead, 320 acres along Pryor Creek, in 1884. His succession of dwellings, using locally available

materials to build a log house, help to tell his story as well as how some Crows became ranchers. The park has erected a modern tipi to show earlier Crow dwelling types; the rambling nature of the log house, is both typical and spectacular. Typical in that

it is a three-bay house with a centered front door, but actually quite spectacular in its interior feel of open space, and that its very size would have spoken to the family’s prominence and achievements. The park also interprets a traditional sweat lodge, adding to the understanding of tradition and new ways that blended to create the homestead.

When Plenty Coups died in 1932 he was 84. He and his wife Strikes the Iron left 195 acres of their property to be a public park. Later the National Park Service designated the site as a National Historic Landmark. Since my first visit in 1982 a new museum building had been added to the park, significantly enhancing the public interpretation of the site; you left with the feeling that this was just not a static installation and memorial (as it was in the 1980s) but a true museum and park which will continue to grow and adapt to the needs of the Crown Indian Tribe and the park’s visitors.

To the east of Pryor, on Pryor Creek Road, was another historical place associated with the Apsaalooke–the Pryor Creek Battlefield. Where in the low creek bluffs and the narrow

valley created by the water, a major battle between the Apsaalooke and their enemies the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho took place c. 1861–just at the time the Civil War was beginning in the United States far to the east.

The Crows had worked with federal officials to build a road turn-off and place interpretive markers about this key battle for the control of the Yellowstone Country c. 1861, just before the time that the first permanent white settlers entered what would become Montana Territory. Thirty years ago, I knew from Crow historian Joe Medicine Crow that this famous battle, where the Apsaalooke secured control of the region in what Medicine Crow called a “glorious victory,” took place along Pryor Creek Road. But the markers now pinpoint the battlefield and interpret what happened plus the significance of the fight.

Here was suddenly a place that I had truly never “seen” before–and an indication of how good interpretive markers can make a desolate place come alive with historical meaning. Kudos to all for bringing forth this forgotten battlefield and a site of a famous Crow victory.

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Montana's Historic Landscapes

35 Years in the Big Sky Country

Tag Archives: National Historic Landmark