Old Missoula

Crime Smirched Story of Taft

Milwaukee Railroad Town Was Rendezvous of Desperadoes

Former Missoula Lawyer Writes a Book on Wild Life in Montana and the West; Butte and Other Montana Centers Come in for Share of Author’s Attention.

“Thirty Years in Hell” is a recent book written by Colonel D. F. MacMartin, formerly a Missoula lawyer, now of Tulsa, Okla.

The secondary title of the book is “Confessions of a Drug Fiend,” and describing its contents, the author says “Some chapters . . . deal with the grotesque and terrible, blended with the farcical, the ludicrous and the emotional . . . They are episodes that have lived in my mind and incidents of repose that have recurred with no less force through sunshine and sorrow, days of happiness and days of blood.”

The writer has wandered the world over and included among the descriptions and incidents of drug-driven adventure are two or more on Montana, as well many references to MacMartin’s experiences in the west.

One of the most picturesque chapters in the book is a description of Taft in the days when the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul line was being built. Parts of it follow:

Was Wildest Town

“Each in the heyday of its sanguinary career as a western town, Virginia City, Nevada, Dodge City, Kan., Deadwood, Dak., and Creede, Colo., shone as meccas of outlawry and terror.

“Along the streets of these primitive border towns in the salad days ran a crimson tide of sin. Outlaws, fugitives from justice, roughnecks, pluguglies, whitecaps and ‘bad men’ generally composed the shifting population, and a Broadway tenderfoot was as much out of his element there as a bull in a china shop or a patch of ripe tomatoes in a cemetery . . . In these towns mob violence, argumentum baculinum, was substituted for courts, and under such reign of terror lynch law was the single agency that could curb the spirit of unbridled outlawry.

“Since the roly poly days of Creede, Colo, where the slayer of Jesse James ‘bit the dust,’ no town has sprung into existence that could eclipse them except one, and that one for superlative venality, downright cussedness, notorious lasciviousness, general diablerie, etourderie, friponnerie and tracesserie,[1] had then (sic) all skinned. In fact, as a spot which showed the decadence of public morals, this one had Sodom and Gomorrah stopped four ways from the Jack.

“I refer to Taft, Montana, and my purpose is to report a chronique scandaleuse.,

Was Motley Population

“As an ephemeral town it germinated on the line of the Northern Pacific railway during the construction of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railway, and it flourished from 1906 to 1908, furnishing labor to a crazy quilt of cosmopolites in the construction of roadbed, tunnels and trestles along its tortuous and devious geography. The town consisted of but a single street stretching the length of a half mile facing the right-of-way. There were beautiful mountains rising sentinel-like at Taft’s back door, turquoise heights veined with ivory snows, misty, mysterious and enchanting, dwarfing in colossal grandeur the insignificant crazy galvanized shacks. Gullies and abysmal gulches and natural culs-de-sac abounded amid these terra firma ramparts. The whole town was a motley collection of warped frame buildings which had taken root in sandy and inhospitable soil, and these were slammed together without any apparent aim at artistic detail or architectural finesse. There were also tumble down pariahs of shacks. The business of the railway company was transacted in an abandoned box car set alongside the Northern Pacific tracks.

“In the very zenith of its glory as the toughest town on the map, it sported no less than 50 saloons, as many gambling halls and a like number of houses of prostitution. There were many proofs here of the devil’s cloven hoof . . . The town was the jumping-off place of stranded hulks, cut-throats, roughnecks, bull necks, swift fingered tinhorns, men who lived without work, women who lived without shame, ex-convicts, ‘shovers of the queer,’ [counterfeiters] knuckle-dusters, and criminals of varied classifications. These veritable harpies of vice flourished riotously, and plied their sinister designs upon the diverse European operatives of the camp and the unsuspecting in general. Gunman had waiting lists and the fee was any stipulated dollar mark and even went as low as a leather jitney.

Dead Left Unburied

“The commission of the capital crime was rife. The criminal records of the county were littered with prosecutions entailing homicide provoked by robbery, but the major number of these crimes never reached the courts. This was principally due to the fact that the town was not incorporated and hence no public revenue provided for the protection of life and property. These depredations were more frequent, therefore, when the searching gaze of heaven was hid behind the globe and lighted the lower world, although thieves and gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, ranged and stalked forth under the rays of the noonday sun. It would dizzy the arithmetic of memory to speculate upon the number of lives sacrificed with boots on in the indiscriminate pillage and slaughter – human cadavers upon which it would be utterly futile to predicate a corpus delicti; but it is known as an incontrovertible fact that after the winter’s snow had melted in the early spring of the final year of Taft’s carnival of crime and lawlessness, no less than 17 bodies were discovered in the buttes in the immediate rear of the dens of iniquity and sin. In these instances the process of decomposition had advanced to such a degree that identity was abortive.

“Conditions became so notoriously panicky following in the trail of general venality that the edict Delenda est Carthago [Carthage must be destroyed] went forth; the fagot was applied and the town went up in smoke no less than three different times, twice through the orders of the railroad company, and once by heaven’s from upon the revolting wickedness and desperate crime existent there.

“Like a feline dowered with nine lives, Taft rose, phoenix-like each time from its ashes, and its final overthrow was not accomplished until the forest fires of 1910. Like the vermicular creatures whose caudal appendage wriggles until the sun’s descent beyond the horizon, it at last grudgingly gave up the ghost.”

One chapter in the book is devoted to the story of May Durfee and her tragic relations with the many-wived Nat Goodwin. Butte and other places in Montana came in for mention by the writer, who is remembered well by many persons in Missoula.

Of Butte, MacMartin says in one place: “San Francisco, prior to the passage of the anti-drug law, housed more dope fiends than any other community in the U. S. A. Butte, Montana, ranked second.”

The above article appeared in the Fallon County Times on September 29, 1921.

http://montananewspapers.org/lccn/sn84036037/1921-09-29/ed-1/seq-3.pdf