John Mullan – Roadbuilder For All Seasons by Al Darr
Roadbuilder for All Seasons by Al Darr
John Mullan had youth on his side, plus an enormous sackful of energy that left strong mountain men panting by the trail.
Sober historians in booklined studies might say Lt. Mullan overstepped the bounds of human compassion in his zeal to win the west. Good men did suffer in his command, but they absorbed, too, his vitality and they built themselves a road.
Frank Bush of Milltown is a relative newcomer to Hell Gate Canyon. He has mounted guard on the Blackfoot River bridges only since 1927, but he feels an honest rapport with the Mullan roadbuilders of 1861-62.
“Over there where the Interstate crosses was the Mullan ford,” Bush said the other day. The Bush home sits on the bank of the Blackfoot where the 1921 county bridge crosses.
W. A. Clark’s trolley line still crossed the river when Bush arrived. The Blackfoot rail spur also crossed, and that was three more bridges than Lt. Mullan found when he first hit the country in 1853.
Mullan was 23 then, fresh from West Point, and his mission with Isaac Stevens was to find the best route from Fort Benton to the Bitter Root Valley. He did that and more.
With Mullan’s first year in the still-primitive Rockies, he crossed the Continental Divide six times and trail-packed a distance of more than 1,000 miles. Winter snows on the passes slowed him down a bit but didn’t stop him, and that first successful mission carried Mullan clear to Puget Sound.
Railroads through the Rockies were a sure bet by 1855, not yet a reality. West-seekers almost always used the gentle South Pass through Wyoming, and western Montana was wilderness.
By the spring of 1859, after a tour in Florida and two separate journeys to Washington, D.C. from the West, Lt. Mullan found himself with a federal appropriation of $100,000 and a staggering road project on his hands. Congress wanted a military route from the Upper Missouri River to Ft. Walla Walla, 624 miles of sharply diverse terrain, including what Mullan called “120 miles of densely timbered mountain bottoms.”
Mullan left Ft. Walla Walla July 1, 1859 with 230 men, including 90 hired hands and an escort of 140. In six weeks of generally easy going they had surveyed and lightly improved 200 miles of wagon road, and Mullan aimed to spend the winter in the hospitable Bitter Root Valley.
But winter came early that year. Temperatures reached zero by Nov. 8, and this side of Sohon Pass the party holed up at what Mullan called Cantonment Jordan in the St. Regis Borgia Valley.
Frostbite and scurvy plagued the camp. Animals died from exposure. When spring finally came, however, the undaunted first lieutenant didn’t abandon ship and scamper for refuge. Instead, he sent crews to tidy the trail behind them, sent surveyors ahead to scout the country and blessed the Flathead Indians of the Bitter Root for generously providing 117 pack horses with 20 men to aid the straitened expedition.
That same spring, the road crews literally blasted their way through “the Big Mountain,” 60 miles west of the confluence of the Bitter Root and Hell Gate River (now Clark Fork).
Loose ends needed tying, however, and recruits were waiting at Ft. Benton. Mullan pushed quickly through the “Hell’s Gate,” regrouped on the Missouri, then marched back to Walla Walla in 57 days.
First snow of the winter of 1861-62 discovered a tighter expedition at the mouth of the Blackfoot River, where Frank Bush now spends his retirement. Cantonment Wright was the name Mullan gave the winter camp, sited where Milltown now occupies the east bank.
Lt. Mullan wouldn’t hibernate in any weather, and he strung men all up and down the canyon to work through the winter when they could on side cuts. Mullan wanted every bridge but one eliminated from Hell Gate River.
Meanwhile, one big crew stayed at Cantonment Wright to bridge the Blackfoot. Mullan was “sanguine” that all this backbreaking work could be done by spring, and it was. But the price was high. One axe-wielder from an upriver camp lost both legs above the knees after he stumbled in a stream and his feet froze.[1]
Dr. George Hammond of the army performed the amputation, and, in Mullan’s words, the victim was “left to the kind charity of the fathers at the Pend d’Oreille mission.”
Mullan’s assessment of that fierce winter in Hell Gate Canyon was characteristic.
Cantonment Wright, he later wrote, “though a cold and bleak place, nevertheless proved a suitable point for our purposes.”
“The camp,” he continued “was situated upon the high flat in the forks of the Blackfoot and Hell’s Gate rivers, where timber was abundant and close; but exposed to the bleak winds that at times came down the valley of the Blackfoot, it was found an abode of not overmuch comfort.”
Lt. Mullan’s military road never in his lifetime became a proper wagon thoroughfare. In 1866, a peak year for western emigrants, only 52 lightwagons traveled the road from Walla Walla, and only 31 emigrant wagons came from the states through Hell Gate Canyon.
In the same year, however, an estimated 6,000 pack mules and 5,000 head of cattle were driven from Walla Walla to Montana, and the Mullan Road fully proved itself as an avenue of commerce.
More significant yet, Mullan’s route-finding genius and his astounding attention to topographical detail provided the railroads with all they needed to make firm plans for the transcontinental northern routes.
They made a captain of John Mullan before he resigned his commission in 1863. He earned that much, at the very least.
The above article appeared in The Sunday Missoulian on April 16, 1967.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/349981710/
For more on John Mullan and his road, see the following article (Lost Highway) from Washington State’s – WSU Magazine – by Eric Sorenson – linked below: