Old Missoula

Origin of a Species

 

Like much of the American west’s history, if you want to find the origin of the maple trees in Missoula, Montana, you have to head east, east until you meet town founder Francis Lyman Worden’s ancestors coming west.

 

Ralph Shepard was born in 1603 on the outskirts of London in a slum called Limehouse. Named for the lime kilns that fired pots for trading ships, this port on the river was the first place ships sailing up the Thames docked. Chandlers saw to the ships while the saloon keepers, whores and gamblers worked on the sailors. Pitching ship decks must have made Ralph seasick because instead of heading to sea he headed into the fields northwest of the city.

 

By 1632 he was halfway between Birmingham and London marrying a farm girl named Thankes Ye Lord. Thankes was from Towcester, which you say “toaster,” and is mainly known today as an exit on the A5 motorway and the site of a horsetrack. With a one-year old daughter and pregnant with a son, Thankes Shepard and her husband joined the Great Migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They crossed the Atlantic in 1635 on a ship called the Abigail. Thankes gave birth to 12 children on the new continent, the last at age 41.

 

Her daughter Trial Shepard married Walter Powers, a recent arrival from Essex, England. The Powers family lived perpetually on the western border of New England wilderness, and each generation is buried further west. Trial and Walter lie in Concord, Massachusetts, Walter Jr. and Rebecca in Littleton, Ezikiel and his wife Abigail in Chesterfield, New Hampshire. Within a hundred years the old-growth forests of southern New England had fallen to Puritan work ethic and counterweighted axe blades. Settlers like the Powers recreated the pastoral landscape of their English birthplace. By 1808 when Susan Powers was born, the family had pushed west to Marlborough, Vermont, on the New York border. Susan married Rufus Worden and they soon had a son they named Francis.

 

Somewhere on his western travels Francis met Christopher Powers Higgins, an Irishman. After the two made a killing at their Hellgate Trading Post they began to lay out Missoula. Higgins must not have minded the open Palouse prairie with its bluebunch wheatgrass, prairie smoke, and snowberry. Worden, though, must have missed the maples of Vermont. In 1872, after establishing a sawmill, but before building the town’s first bank, he ordered a load of Norway Maple whips from back East. Like contemporary town founders around the west he decided planting trees, rather than cutting them down, was the mark of civilization.

 

Scott Stringer, Missoula’s City Forester, has an old document that describes the immigration of those first trees. The whips were raised in western New York, and put on a train at Geneva. The train ran west on fresh rails to Bismarck in Dakota Territory. There the bundle of trees was carried down the banks of the Missouri to a wood-fired steamboat. The boat churned upriver for a week, its boilers burning through 30-40 cords of firewood per day. At Fort Benton the maples were loaded onto an ox-drawn freight wagon. The last 200 miles up and over the Continental Divide followed Lt. John Mullan’s rough frontier road towards Walla Walla.

 

The maples, like most of the early Missoulians, were European invasives, and they too thrived in the valley. They are the Vikings of trees, thick-trunked and broad-limbed, they turn yellow-blond in the fall. Norway maples don’t mind dust, exhaust or smoke, and their spreading crowns turn the streets into tunnels.

 

Francis Worden didn’t live long enough to walk Pine Street, shaded by maple leaves. When he died in 1887 his trees would have been spring poles at best. But the residents of Missoula followed his example. They must have liked how the trees broke up the plain, or reminded them of the home. To an easterner the sound of rustling leaves beyond an open window is less lonely than the whistle of wind through sagebrush. Residents continued planting maples through the new century, eleven trees per block, fifteen feet between. By the time the first tree census was done in 1979 there were 2,167 maples in the University District.

 

Somehow McLeod Avenue ended up with sugar maples. No one wrote down how it happened back in 1911. It was a busy year: South 3rd Street became the first paved street in the city, the electric streetcars were only a year old, and the Missoula Lodge (#556, Loyal Order of Moose) was established. No one noticed that a few of the city’s new saplings turned red instead of yellow that fall.

 

From the side of Mt. Sentinel last week McLeod Avenue was a crimson dash dividing the otherwise yellow canopy. Maples live strenuous lives, freezing each winter, releafing each spring, and their life spans are usually human, four score. Many of the trees on University and the streets named for C.P. Higgins’ children (Arthur, Helen, Hilda, Ronald, Gerald and Maurice) are now nearly a century old.

 

Down on the street itself homeowners were out raking their yards. On one lawn a small girl was trying to bury her even smaller terrier in a pile of leaves. Her father leaned on his rake and looked at one of the inevitable blisters that come from vigorous, manly raking. Asked by a passerby if she knew what kind of trees the leaves fell from she replied without hesitation, “The syrup maple.” When her father was asked if he had any idea where the mysterious sugar maples came from she answered for him.

 

“The ground,” she said, with absolute certainty.