Jerry Johnson Gets Automobile Ride With Paul Greenough – Is Ashamed – 1907
Jerry Johnson, guide, trapper, prospector and pioneer, has had an automobile ride. He is ashamed of it; but it was not his fault and there is no occasion for his feeling despondent over the matter. For many years Jerry has toured this country. He has ridden in steam cars, he has traveled in wagons, he has ridden horseback and on mules and glory be, he has walked but never, until last night had he ridden in an automobile. And Pat Donovan was to blame for it. Pat was riding with Paul Greenough in the big touring car and he spied his old friend Jerry on the sidewalk. Nothing would do but Jerry must have a ride. The protests of the old trapper were in vain; Donovan of Donovan’s gulch is forceful and in his language he is picturesque. He talked to Jerry in the endearing terms of the bullwhacker crossed with pet phrases of a muleskinner, and, in order to keep Pat from being arrested for the character of his expressions, Jerry weakened. Then Pat and Paul were upon him. They seized him and literally bore him to the car and whirled away with him. “What could I do?” was Jerry’s apologetic inquiry when it was all over. “That Paul is big and Pat he is strong and they took me. That has never happened to any of my family that they ride in an automobile, and I’ll not tell them that it happened to me.”
The above story appeared in The Daily Missoulian on August 11, 1907.
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Paul Greenough was a son of Thomas and Tennie Greenough. The Greenough family lived at the famous Greenough mansion near what is now Greenough Park in Missoula. Paul was a graduate of Yale University in 1910. He played football while at Yale and had played football for Montana prior to that. He came to own and occupy the famous Greenough – Sunset ranch in the Blackfoot area near Missoula as a young man. He died unexpectedly in a Spokane hospital following a brief illness in 1927, at age 40.
Pat Donovan was a picturesque Missoula pioneer who was well known at the time of his death in Missoula in 1909. He came to Montana in the 1860’s and settled east of Missoula at what is now Donovan Creek. He was attacked by thugs in 1903 and somehow managed to survive being shot in the chest. One of the Greenoughs allegedly found him after the incident. The railroads purchased land from him at different times and made him well off.