Remembering the Big Burn

The Daily Missoulian, August 22, 1910

The massive forest fires of 1910 were vividly reported in Montana newspapers. The headlines of late August 1910 tell the devastating story of lives lost and towns ruined across Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Gale force winds whipped the fire into a vicious storm on August 20-21, 1910, but blazes continued to do damage through the end of August. In fact, one source notes that “as late as February 1911, a ranger reported finding still-smoking snags sticking up through five feet of snow in the Clearwater country.”* Known as "The Big Blowup,” this series of deadly fires permanently changed the way people viewed forest fires and began a conversation about how they should be fought. The decisions made in the wake of the fire have influenced forest-management policies to the present day.

To read more about the fires of 1910, visit Chronicling America or view a short video on Beartooth NBC. The story is also told in Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.

* The Big Burn: The Northwest's Great Forest Fire of 1910, by Don Miller and Stan Cohen, Pictorial Histories Pub. Co. (Missoula, Mont.), 1993.

"Tough Trip" gets a Translation

by Christine Kirkham, Coordinator, Montana Digital Newspaper Project

While on a 1993 holiday in Yellowstone National Park, Dutch water engineer Jan Timmer grew curious about the Chief Joseph Highway and its namesake, the Nez Perce leader. Back home in the Netherlands, Timmer’s interest grew. During the intervening twenty years, he read more than two dozen books on the Nez Perce, eventually finding his way to the 1944 classic, Yellow Wolf: His Own Story, by L.  V. McWhorter.



Jan Timmer, author of Pittige Trip in
het Paradijs. Photograph by Tom Ferris.

Following a trail of footnotes, Timmer learned of McWhorter’s correspondence with army scout and frontiersman Andrew Garcia (ca 1855-1943). From there, he embarked on his first reading of Tough Trip Through Paradise, published in 1967 by the historian Bennett H. Stein (1915-2001). Instantly, Timmer recognized that the book was special. Finding the story “very funny,” Jan notes that the wry, deadpan style requires the reader to read between the lines for inferences a lesser author might have made explicit.

Both of their squaws were estimable ladies of a build and grace that showed Joe and Pete were shrewd buyers, out to get all the squaw they could for the money, even if they did waive all rights to slimness and beauty.  (Chapter 23: A Ring for In-who-lise)

It was Tough Trip’s colorful prose that inspired Timmer to attempt his first-ever translation. “It’s a puzzle,” Timmer says about finding a Dutch equivalent for a term like caboodle (boedeltje). “But I like to play with language.”

Andrew Garcia, photographer unidentified,
MHS Photograph Archives 942-341.

MONTANA, 1878

Andrew Garcia, a real-life Little Big Man, left the army at 23 and went out with a party of traders to make a living among the Indians in the Montana wilderness. Soon he acquired the name “Squaw Man” and an Indian wife—the first of three. Indians, frontiersmen, traders, trappers and the "Boys in Blue”—all were part of his "paradise" between two worlds and two eras of history in the old West. This is his story, discovered in a dynamite box in the cabin where he died at the age of 88. 

[Inside flap, Tough Trip Through Paradise paperback edition (Comstock Editions: Sausalito, CA), 1979]

With his translation nearly complete, Timmer is visiting the Research Center to examine Stein’s papers, which are held in the Archives [Ben Stein Research Collection 1908-2003]. Timmer hopes to deepen his understanding of Garcia’s life. Describing the archival collection as “amazing,” he is particularly intrigued by a half-inch stack of unpublished notes on the Nez Perce, hand-notated by Garcia himself.

Timmer’s next step is to find a publisher for his book, which he plans to call Pittige Trip in het Paradijs.

Livestock Brands in Historical Montana Newspapers

Many early Montana newspapers included pages of livestock brands. We speculate that the brands were published in the newspaper by the Brands Enforcement Office because registering brands was part of government business. However they were published, these pages are rich in historical information about who owned the brand, where their ranch was located, and where on each type of stock the brand appeared. The pages also included “Estray” notices that reported lost, found, or stolen livestock. 



Yellowstone Monitor, September 10, 1908

 

To see more Montana livestock brands, check out our 43,000-page collection of historical livestock brands or browse more pages of historical Montana newspapers at Chronicling America.

Curious about how to read these mysterious and varied symbols? Read a short article about  livestock brands here.

The Spirit of Sam Bond

By Maegen Cook, Digital Collections Assistant
 
We see it today—people gathered together, telling stories around a campfire on a warm summer night. Exciting stories. Funny stories. Ghost stories. While working on the Montana Digital Newspaper Project, I came across the following piece in an 1893 issue of The Anaconda Standard.



Anaconda Standard, November 27, 1893, page 4.

Six men gathered in a saloon, trading stories from the old days of mining. The last one to speak, Bill, shared a tale dating back to 1883, when he encountered a "ghost." Some years earlier, a man named Sam Bond had been blown up in Butte's Magna Charta silver mine. Ever since, the dead man's spirit was said to haunt the drifts, but Bill paid no attention to these silly superstitions.
One day, Bill’s boss sent him to work in "the Mag.” Inside, he found himself alone in the area where Bond had died. He worked steadily until the afternoon, when his candle went out. Heading into the drift to relight the candle, he paused. Were those footsteps ahead of him? Hearing nothing more, he moved on. Suddenly he was assaulted by “the most awful cry that it had ever been [his] misfortune to listen to.” After composing himself, Bill gathered his courage and decided to investigate. Cautiously, he stepped further into the tunnel. As he looked up, he saw a sight that made his blood run cold. With his hat "raised fully two inches by [his] hair,” he spotted a pair of green eyes floating in the blackness. Terrified, Bill turned and ran. Approaching the mouth of the tunnel, he was sure he heard footsteps behind him. Then he felt the ghost touch his legs! In his panic, Bill grabbed a rock and threw it hard. The ghostly eyes disappeared, and Bill was able to return to work.

Back in the saloon, Bill's pals gawked and demanded to know what the ghost looked like. Bill gazed at them casually, winked, and said, “Well, it looked like a big...black....cat.”

Hundreds of stories like these can be found on the Library of Congress web site Chronicling America, where over 75,000 pages of historical Montana newspapers are available for searching and viewing.

 

How Charlie Russell Took Over Washington D.C.

by Matthew M. Peek
Photograph archivist Matthew Peek works on the Lee Metcalf Photograph and Film Collection, a project funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources.

 

On a cold St. Patrick’s Day in 1959, a “cowboy caravan” paraded through Washington D.C. The occasion was the permanent relocation of John B. Weaver's statue of Charlie Russell from the Smithsonian Institution to the U.S. Capitol Building. To commemorate the move, the Montana congressional delegation arranged an elaborate parade through the capital.
 

Mike Mansfield, James Murray, Lee Metcalf, and an unidentified belle oversee
the "cowboy caravan" through Washington, D.C. [PAc 2008-27]

"A stagecoach, carrying shotgun guards and girls in Gay Nineties costumes” towed the truck hauling the upright Russell statue, accompanied by a contingent of Blackfeet Indians in native dress. The 456th Army band followed the parade playing western tunes.

On the steps of the Senate Office Building, Senators Mike Mansfield and James Murray, along with Representative Lee Metcalf, stood watching as the coach passed by. It was driven by fellow representative Leroy Anderson, decked out in full Western attire. 


Charlie Russell in his place in Statuary Hall.

Metcalf had planned to accompany Anderson on the horsedrawn coach (hence, his cowboy duds), however, at the last minute, the vehicle's insurers refused. Evidently the risk to such a highly visible Congressman was too high. Metcalf retreated to the viewing stand instead.

As the parade concluded, a D.C. police officer was heard to remark:

“It says here that after we get to this point, the riders will 'turn and gallop off into the sunset...' It’s now 10:30 a.m. How we gonna arrange it?”

 

 

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“Russell Statue Paraded in D.C.,” The Montana Standard (Butte, Montana), Vol. 83, No. 230, Wednesday (March 18, 1959): pp. 1.
“Tribute to Cowboy Artist Makes It a 21-Horse Town,” Greenberg Daily News (Greenberg, Indiana), Wednesday (March 18, 1959): pp. 4.