Southwest Montana Blog
History

Bannack. The once-bright star of Montana, now a ruin. A town in arrested decay. The sun glints blindly off of the few remaining storefronts, stores with neither wares nor customers. The saloons do not hum with music, mule trains no longer clog main street, and the town’s five thousand plus residents no longer...

The sun-bleached frames of countless tipis lie scattered across the landscape of a broad river bottom valley high in Southwest Montana’s Beaverhead Mountains. The winding Big Hole River and quiet beauty of the site attract both picnickers and anglers, however, the primary draw of the park is the history...

Montana is a place of craggy peaks, tough, towering pines, and windswept plains. In such a landscape, the pointed neo-gothic arches and tracery windows of St. Helena’s Cathedral might seem out of place, but, inconceivably, they don’t. Instead, the at once rugged-yet-intricate gothic stonework of the Cathedral...

  The Montana Historical Society predates the state by over 20 years. Which is probably a good thing, considering how much history happened in those years. The territorial legislature created the Society in February of 1865, less than a year after the creation of the Montana Territory. Its establishment...

For a few days every February, the valleys and mountains around Helena resound with the yips and howls of impatient dogs, just as they would have done seventy-odd years ago. Between 1942 and 1944, roughly one thousand sled and pack dogs called the Helena area home. The dogs were housed and trained at Camp...

While Montana has never been struck by an earthquake as large as the 7.8 that struck New Zealand recently, the state has experienced its fair share of earth-rattling shakes. In fact, Montana is the 8th most earthquake-prone state in the union, and experiences between 7 to 10 quakes a day. Many of those quakes...

The gold fields of Alder Gulch and Last Chance Gulch were two of the biggest placer gold deposits in the world. Placer deposits consist of loose particles of gold mixed into topsoil, sand, and gravel. Placer gold is near the surface. The easiest way to get placer gold is to wash loads of sand/gravel/etc., the...

The fact that no robbers ever roosted at the old stage stop between Virginia City and Sheridan has never stymied the legends of secret assignations and bloody murders that haunt the old inn.  In 1863-64, Henry Plummer and his murderous band of road-agents known as the ‘Innocents’ did terrorize the Bannack to...

Many feet of water should cover St. Joseph’s church. Built in 1875, on the banks of the Missouri River in the town of Canton, Montana, St. Joseph’s is Montana’s seventh oldest church, and was the first built by community members, rather than a religious order. The rich ranchland around...

Brian Dunning aired a piece on his blog Skeptoid discussing the Montana symbol 3-7-77. In it, Dunning covered much the same ground as anyone else who writes on the topic: the fact that the Montana Highway Patrol and other Montana institutions use the numbers in their logos, the five or so main theories, and...

If I’m not careful, my mind will relegate Montana’s gold rush days to a dusty haze of saloon brawls and hangings, populated by a pungent assortment of what Laura Ingalls Wilder might call “rough men” using “rough language” (yes, a twenty three year old guy did just quote By...

Here’s a tale that has all the trappings of a good Montana yarn. Legend has it that some time in 1945, a military fighter plane roared through Helena and flew sideways between the twin spires of the Helena Cathedral before disappearing over the mountains to the north. I first heard the story as a kid, &...