Montana Post now in Chronicling America

The Montana Historical Society is pleased to announce that the complete run of the Montana Post (1864-1869) is now available on Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/). Ever wonder what the weather was like in Virginia City in 1865 or what those vigilantes were up to? Dig in!

The Montana Post and other Montana newspapers published prior to 1923 are being digitized as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) which is a partnership between the Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities and state partners. More information about the Montana Historical Societies participation in the NDNP project and titles selected for digitization is available at: http://montanahistorywiki.pbworks.com/Montana-Digital-Newspaper-Project

The Daily Yellowstone Journal and Anaconda Standard should be included in the next Chronicling America update (December).

Caution! Researchers at Work

Summer is a busy time at the Montana Historical Society. The tables in the Research Center are overflowing and the microfilm readers are humming. Each year hundreds of researchers make the trek to Helena to do research. Some of these folks are working on family history, some are discovering the history of their homes, and some are writing dissertations and books. The Research Center promotes research and discovery of Montana history by offering two different research fellowships each year (for more information on these fellowships, please see our website at http://mhs.mt.gov/research/library/bradley.asp).

Bradley Fellow Tashun Wisemiller researching
the history of tourism in Montana
(Photo by Tom Ferris)

This summer there are two James H. Bradley Fellows spending time conducting research in our collections. Tashun A. Wisemiller (pictured here), is a Ph.D. candidate from Arizona State University, originally from White Sulphur Springs. He is researching tourism in the region between Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, from 1900 to 1950. Tash has spent a little more than a week exploring the ephemera and vertical files for information on tourism and promotion. (For a look at a Montana Dept. of Transportation pamphlet Tash examined in his research see "Headin' for the Hills," PAM 3247) Dr. Andrea Radke Moss, a history professor from BYU-Idaho, is our second Bradley Fellow and is digging into materials on Montana's involvement in the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Andrea has spent hours pouring over the records of the Montana Board of World's Fair Managers. She is looking specifically at the women who were involved in planning and implementing the Montana exhibit.

Our patrons, no matter what their topic or how deep they are digging, help to reveal Montana's history. Although we preserve and provide access to the original books, documents and photographs, the reason we are here is to help researchers like our Bradley Fellows discover and explore Montana history.
[written by Molly Kruckenburg]

A Polish aristocrat in Montana

One of the most fun things about being an archivist is the unexpected things you discover. I was cataloging a trivial little item (SC 473) consisting of an 1894 application for a position as City Engineer of Helena by a man named Michael A. Meyendorff. (ho-hum)

Well, I decided I needed a little information about Mr. Meyendorff. Wow! Turns out he was the son of a Polish nobleman, Baron Meyendorff. In the early 1860s the Baron and his sons, including 13 year old Michael, took part in a failed uprising against the Russian occupiers of Poland. They were all arrested and sent to Siberia. When they were released several years later, Michael came to the United States and studied engineering at the University of Michigan. In 1876 he came to Helena and briefly ran a cigar store before being hired by the U. S. Assay Office. In 1894 he was indeed hired as City Engineer (as our little item had indicated). He later went to Denver where he was a fraud investigator for the U.S. General Land Office. He got involved in all sorts of controversy because of his pursuit of fraud among coal operators.

All this because of a silly little item in the archives. Who would have guessed that such an fascinating man lived quietly in Helena in the 1890s?

[Image from Univ. of Montana digital edition of Leeson's History of Montana, p. 745]

The Way Things Work

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those thousand words come much easier if you understand the subject. Describing and providing access to a collection of textual documents is difficult enough. The person processing a manuscript collection has to devise descriptions and subject terms that will enable others to find what they’re looking for. A photograph archivist in some ways has a more difficult task when it comes to crafting useful descriptions. What do you do if you have no idea what’s going on in a photograph, even though it looks very interesting? After all, very few people will be interested in a photograph of an “unidentified man doing something." When processing a new collection, an archivist often has to learn something about what things are and the way things work, and each subject carries with it a specialized vocabulary.

Lately, I have been processing the Mines and Mining photograph collection. My “the way things work” book for this project has been Drills and mills: precious metal mining and milling methods of the frontier West (Will Meyerriecks, 2003). I have learned a smattering of mining terminology, and while I am certainly not an expert, I hope that by learning about windlasses and hoists, sluices and long toms, and drifters and stopers, I will be able to provide better access to the collection.

Who knew comic books were State Documents?

Over the past year I have been working on cataloging all of the items we hold in our State Documents Collection. State Documents encompass a lot of different things, from agency annual reports, to college catalogs, to maps and videos. The collection covers the whole history of Montana, from territorial days to the present.


Interesting items from the collection include:

• Inspector of mines reports (include listings of mine accidents and the names of persons who died in mine accidents)
• State Veterinary Surgeon reports (tracing the history of animal care in Montana from territorial times)
• Various college catalogs (include lists of students and what they were studying)
• Legislative publications (from the first territorial session to the most recent session)
• Agricultural promotional items used to attract people to Montana
• Maps showing land use in Montana
• Water resources survey information for all counties
• State Health Department reports
• Department of Agriculture reports about the Great Depression years
• The Montana Reports (cases argued in the Supreme Court starting in 1891)

This is just a small sampling of all the wonderful documents that are just waiting to be explored.

Now about that comic book. Imagine my surprise when I pulled Sprocket Man out of an envelope. After investigating on-line I found that Sprocket Man was introduced on the Stanford campus in 1975 and was re-introduced in 2002. Our copy was produced in 1982 and was sponsored by the Office of Public Instruction and the Department of Justice to help teach folks about bicycle safety.

You never know what you are going to find when you start working with a collection!