Sorted by date Results 26 - 47 of 47
What on earth do you suppose is this giant contraption? What could it have to do with Glacier National Park? To discover the answers, read on. Early railroad travel within the northern U. S. was primarily from the east coast's major cities, such as New York, to as far west as Minneapolis. There was no easy way to reach the west coast. In 1879 the Great Northern Railroad, newly reorganized, decided to extend the line from Minneapolis to Seattle, 1665 miles according to a modern road atlas. It...
If a person tracks our favorite river northwest for a couple hundred miles, he realizes it has a twin sister or brother river, and near the confluence of the north and south siblings is the territory of the original Settle ranch. Over a period of 150 years the definition of "Settle ranch" has changed from time to time via certain land transactions, and the chief produce has varied between sheep and cattle, but there was the headquarters of the enterprise founded in the 1870s by Martin Settle...
HAPPY NEW YEAR Oil on Old Barnwood Q; What's wrong with this Montana New Year's Eve Party? A: It lacks women! Q: Why does it? A: Because there weren't any! Well, at least not so many back in the early 1900s. Not every eastern girl was a Rachel Schroeder that would jump on a train at the drop of a marriage proposal and head out to the rigors of the Wild West to give birth to Fannie Sperry; or the young woman teacher heading to Chester in 1904 that braved a train and stagecoach safari and mud...
In the travel and research to collect the information that led to these articles and paintings we met good people of all sizes, shapes, and backgrounds, but only once were we greeted by a rancher with a firearm in hand. This was in 2006, northwest of Helena along Lincoln Road, and, indeed, he was admittedly suspicious of strangers, who, he said, were stealing things from him. We did our best to explain that theft was not our trade, but that we hoped to learn about the history of his ranch and to...
While talking about the history of her ancestral home, the Petersen Ranch, in Pleasant Valley, west of Kalispell, where Terry Siderius and her husband still live and farm, we looked through old yellowed family photographs from the mid-1920s. This scene of her mom, Betty Petersen, and her uncles, Woodie, Rodney, and Donald touched our hearts. We both knew this photo would become a painting, but it raised many questions. From their snow-covered snow pants and sleds, we knew the children were...
In Miles City Fannie added the Montana State Ladies' Bucking Horse Championship to her laurels, and the Steeles formed their Powder River Wild West Show, with which they barnstormed Montana enroute back to the Sperry ranch. One of the stops in this march was at Roundup in August, 1914. Their lives continued to unfold in small and large rodeos, but in August, 1916, they made their most easterly journey to the New York Stampede, held on Long Island. Fannie took a third in the ladies' relay, but...
When Datus Sperry moved west with his family from New York State to the vicinity of Detroit, he may not have thought of a wife. When Rachel Schroeder had moved west from Germany with her family to the same neighborhood, she certainly had not thought of a husband, for she was just a baby, but Fate already had them cinched. They met there, but the time was not yet right. Datus and brother, Myles, decided that Montana needed their exploring, and it was seven years before he got around to proposing...
Our own little Roundup, which reckons itself a town from 1908, has its own history of both Catholic and public education. The Roundup Museum has an informative map covering the 1920s to the 1950s. In the region of the River's crossing the county, it itemizes 88 public schools, mainly one-room, rural affairs and 66 ranches. Originally, those wishing to attend public high school came to Roundup, exemplified in our last article by the 80-year-old that recounts walking 14 miles home each weekend to...
Almost from the time we became a country, there has been no more significant force in American private education than the Catholic Church, and it has served millions and millions of students, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, from pre-school to the highest levels of university graduate study. By the close of the Civil War, the Catholic Church was well-established on the Montana frontier to assist in schooling both white and Native American children. Picturesquely located near Birdtail Rock, a...
In this subseries of articles we shall depart a little from our usual format of spotlighting a particular ranch, farm, or enterprise and take up, rather, an aspect of Montana's history. One class of institutions persistently ran through the interviews and old photos that contributed to many of these paintings and brief histories. What would you guess it was? Oops! Darned if we didn't give away the answer in the title above. Yes, of course, schools, and small wonder that. In the normal course of...
John Butterfield, won a government contract beginning in 1857 to deliver mail to San Francisco, California from Tipton, Missouri and Memphis, Tennessee within 25 days, which was the beginning of the Butterfield Overland Stage Company. (Lately, when a letter we mailed to Helena arrived there one week later, we decided Mr. Butterfield was considerably ahead of his time.) The two-way, semi-weekly route covered 2800 miles with 139 change stations and a water stop every 30 miles. The engines were...
In 1908 the Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad laid track and began service to Roundup and beyond. About 17 miles east of Roundup the company bridged the Musselshell River and contracted with the Globe Elevator Company of Lewistown to construct an elevator for neighboring ranchers to store their grain for shipment on the line. Thus, started Delphia, so that steam engines could have water and load up with grain, and one wonders if passengers may have worried about going back East when...
Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR (4!) ranches this week, all in the vicinity of Cohagen, MT. Quiz Question 1: Where is Cohagen? All true Montanans should know. Answer: Southeast of Jordan on Highway 59 and near Little Dry Creek, a queer name for a body of water. Quiz Question 2: How did Cohagen get its name? Unless you do some web cheating, this will stump you, for sure. Answer: (We cheated) In 1905 the settlement had no name but somehow had a post office. Before zip codes began, July 1,...
A little east of the Grass Range area is perhaps the most variously owned and used land and buildings in our entire series. Long before homesteads, in the 1880s, when stops were about 15 miles apart, the distance covered in one day, it was a stagecoach stop on the Ft. Benton – Billings line. Coaches carried passengers, gold-mining equipment, and supplies for places like Gilt Edge, Flat Willow, and Musselshell. In the picture, "The Stage Station," the foreground building was the hotel, with s...
Tucker Homestead There is little pictorial evidence to display this week, because traces of the two homesteads have all but vanished, but the stories are interesting and enlightening, and we feel close to them, because we are physically near them; both intersected our little corner of Musselshell County. From Ohio, William Tucker was awarded his first homestead in South Dakota, but when minerals were discovered on it, the government promptly reneged, confiscated it, and sent the Tuckers packing....
Publisher Note: Due to an editorial oversight, the Beckman Ranch story is being rerun in its entirety. Not all our early ranchers were homesteaders. Born in Minnesota, Albert Beckman came to Roundup to work as a carpenter, found all the homestead land claimed, and bought a section from the Northern Pacific Railroad for $9.00 per acre. In 1917, when he was 30, he married Cora Strike, 18, who lived around Devil's Lake. For a couple of years, they camped in a tent, until Albert hauled lumber 100...
Known locally as Nigger Bertie, by all reports she generally was regarded with affection, respect, and, for some of her works, downright admiration. She was a jolly, good-natured soul, rather short and heavy-set, but what endeared her most to the citizens was not her kindness, it was her booze. People claimed hers was the absolute best produced anywhere in the U.S. of A. Since it was the good ole days of Prohibition, when clandestine distilleries were producing moonshine everywhere across our...
When reminiscing about the Matson's, we brushed across the Lackey family, for William and his wife were homesteaders on what later became Emil Matson's ranch. William insisted that his family live in his backyard, as he expressed it, so when their son, Burley, married Esther, they bought a place a few miles – even backyards are large in Montana – from his parents. Driving a mile west on Big Wall Road from its intersection with North Gage, one finds a gumbo track heading north to a cluster of...
The history of Matson family ranches in Musselshell County has two roots, one bound up with the Lackey’s, which will take the next place in our series. The senior Matson was an immigrant, German homesteader, whose property passed into the hands of his son, Emil. The original Lackey homestead was just adjacent to this, and when the Lackey’s passed away, Emil’s brother, Alfred, bought that land in order to be near his brother. For some reason it was advantageous for tax purposes that the broth...
When homesteaders abandoned their claims and moved on, it was common for them to turn loose their horses, and, at the time Charlie Hall came to North Gage Road, 50-60 wild horses roamed his property. At first, he worked to run them away but finally turned his rodeo talents to advantage. He rounded up a number of the animals, trained them, and kept one for himself. He also sold horse hair for stuffing furniture, and given his frugal, enterprising nature, who knows but that some local sausage was...
A good portion of our state’s history is recorded in the homesteads, ranch and farm buildings raised on the blood, sweat, and tears of early residents. When artist, Jane Stanfel, moved to the Roundup area in 2002, she noticed quickly that this tablet is being erased by weather, fire, neglect, and later development. Just as swiftly she resolved to do her part for preservation and commenced what she titled her Ghost Ranch series of oil paintings of homesteads, abandoned ranches, and the people and their work from those times. To accompany t...
To begin, Hall was not the first landowner; it was a Mr. Tupper of Chicago, reportedly a Mafia figure seeking to elude the FBI. If this is true, he was successful, and, along with a ranch, he also managed to find a much younger bride, a local schoolteacher. Even today, standing on a wind-whipped hill in the midst of a summer day, one feels lonely out there – imagine a winter night! – and it's an unlikely place for a woman alone. Therefore, in 1938 the widow Tupper sold the ranch, and Cha...
