Welcome to Old Missoula History
Main Street & Higgins Avenue in “old” Missoula, Montana
Missoula has a very rich history which is surprisingly unexplored. Other than the book “Missoula The Way It Was” by Lenora Koelbel, no attempt was ever made to publish a book that tried to examine the complete story of Missoula. In her book’s preface, Historian K. Ross Toole praised Koelbel, writing, “Missoulians themselves will simply find a great deal in it that will surprise them and inform them and they will gain an insight into the community in which they live available nowhere else.” Access to her book, as well as many other sources, is available on this website. Hopefully, anyone interested in Missoula will find something new and surprising here as well.
Missoula County Courthouse & Jail
Contents of this Website
This site contains over 2,000 articles about the history of Missoula, Montana. We have tried to organize articles into meaningful categories, as listed in the sidebar. Note also the search field located at the top of the sidebar. This allows you to enter a key word to generate a list of relevant articles.
Recently Added
The latest article posted to Old Missoula is an article from The Missoulian in 1894, entitled “Daly’s Chinaman.” The acerbic editor of The Missoulian, Lambert Molinelli, slammed Marcus Daly for his fickle politics and apparently got away with it.
A recent article posted to Old Missoula is a sleeper story that occurred in Missoula in 1923. The story was generated by a short article that appeared in The Missoulian, revealing very little of what was really going on with the Anaconda Company.
A recent article posted to Old Missoula is a story from The Missoulian titled “Klondike Calls Missoulians“, about Missoula men who followed their gold fever to Alaska in the late 1890’s. Joe Deschamps was one of them.