Old Missoula

Missoula County 1882 – Entertaining observations of a Montana trip by a revered journalist.

Excerpt from an article by E. V. Smalley[1] in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine[2] October 1882

“I take up the thread of the narrative of north-western travel, which the reader may have followed in previous numbers of this magazine, at Missoula, a little trading town of perhaps eight hundred inhabitants, prettily situated on a plateau facing Hell Gate River, a few miles above its junction with the Bitter Root. South of Missoula, within rifle-shot, is the entrance to the great Hell Gate Canon; westward across the angle formed by the two rivers rises the huge, dark wall of the Bitter Root Mountains, higher here, and more picturesque, than the main range of the Rockies, which are half concealed by the grassy swells of the foot-hills on the east. Lo-Lo Peak, the loftiest and most individual mountain of the Bitter Root chain, is covered with snow all summer; its altitude must be about ten thousand feet. North-west of the town the valley is broad enough for cultivation for a distance of twenty miles, when it closes in at the canon of the Missoula River. A range for which there is not even a local name rims the valley on the north. One summit, called Skotah Peak, is a perfect pyramid in form. This cloud-compassed landmark we shall not lose sight of in three day’s travel.

Up the Bitter Root Valley there are farms scattered for sixty miles. The valley is warmer than any other in Western Montana, and the small fruits and some hardy varieties of apples are grown. Herds of horses and cattle feed on the slopes of the mountains. Grain and potatoes are grown by irrigation, and the valley is a source of food-supply for military posts and mining-camps. Hogs are fattened upon peas and wheat, and the flavor of a Bitter Root ham is something altogether unique and appetizing. In June the bitter-root plant, from which the valley gets its name, covers all the uncultivated ground with its delicate rose-colored stars. The blossom, about as large as a wild rose, lies close upon the earth. The long, pipestem-like root is greatly relished by the Indians for food. When dried it looks like macaroni, and it is by no means unpalatable when cooked with a little salt or butter, or eaten raw. The [Indian women] dig it with long sticks and dry it for winter food. Another root, also a staple in the aboriginal larder, is the camas, which loves moist prairies, where it flaunts its blue flowers in the early summer. In June, when the camas is ready to gather, even the most civilized Indian on the Flathead reservation feels the nomadic impulse too strong to resist. He packs his lodge upon ponies, and starts with his family for some camas prairie, where he is sure to meet a numerous company bent on having a good time.

The picturesque features of life in a Western Montana town like Missoula are best seen as evening approaches. Crowds of roughly clad men gather around the doors of the drinking-saloons. A group of Indians, who have been squatting on the sidewalk for two hours playing some mysterious game of cards of their own invention, breaks up. One of the [Indian women] throws the cards into the street, which is already decorated from end to end with similar relics of other games. Another swings a baby upon her back, ties a shawl around it and herself, secures the child with a strap buckled around her chest, and strides off, her moccasined feet toeing inward in the traditional Indian fashion. She wears a gown of a scarlet calico bed-quilt, with leggings of some blue stuff; but she has somehow managed to get a civilized dress for the child. They all go off to their camp on the hill near by. Some blue-coated soldiers from the neighboring military post, remembering the roll-call at sunset, swing themselves upon their horses and go galloping off, a little the worse for the bad whisky they have been drinking in the saloons. A miner in blue woolen shirt and brown canvas trousers, with a hat of astonishing dimensions and a beard of a year’s growth, trots up the street on a mule, and, with droll oaths and shuffling talk, offers the animal for sale to the crowd of loungers on the hotel piazza. No one wants to buy, and, after provoking a deal of laughter, the miner gives his ultimatum: “I’ll hitch the critter to one of them piazzer posts, and if he don’t pull it down you may have him.” This generous offer is declined by the landlord; and the miner rides off, declaring that he has not a solitary four-bit piece to pay for his supper, and is bound to sell the mule to somebody.

Toward nightfall the whole male population seems to be in the street, save the busy Chinamen in the laundries, who keep on sprinkling clothes by blowing water out of their mouths. Early or late, you will find these industrious little yellow men at work. One shuffles back and forth from the hydrant, carrying water for the morning wash in old coal-oil cans hung to a stick balanced across his shoulders. More Indians now – a “buck” and two [Indian women], leading ponies heavily laden with tent, clothes, and buffalo robes. A rope tied around a pony’s lower jaw is the ordinary halter and bridle of the Indians. These people want to buy some article at the saddler’s shop. They do not go in, but stare through the windows for five minutes. The saddler, knowing the Indian way of dealing, pays no attention to them. After a while they all sit down on the ground in front of the shop. Perhaps a quarter of an hour passes before the saddler asks what they want. If he had noticed them at first, they would have gone away without buying.

Now the great event of the day is at hand. The cracking of a whip and a rattle of wheels are heard up the street: the stage is coming. Thirty-six hours ago it left the terminus of the railroad one hundred and fifty miles away. It is the connecting link between the little isolated mountain community and the outside world. No handsome Concord coach appears, but only a clumsy “jerky” covered with dust. The “jerky” is a sort of cross between a coach proper and a common wagon. As an instrument of torture this hideous vehicle has no equal in modern times. The passengers emerge from its cavernous interior looking more dead than alive. A hundred able-bodied men, not one of them with a respectable coat or a tolerable hat, save two flashy gamblers, look on at the unloading of the luggage. The stage goes off to a stable, and the crowd disperses, to rally again, largely reinforced, at the word that there is to be a horse-race.

Now the drinking saloons – each one of which runs a faro bank and a table for “stud poker” – are lighted up, and the gaming and guzzling begin. Every third building on the principal business street is a saloon. The gambling goes on until daylight without any effort at concealment. In all the Montana towns keeping gaming-tables is treated as a perfectly legitimate business. Indeed, it is licensed by the Territorial laws. Some of the saloons have music, but this is a rather superfluous attraction. In one a woman sings popular ballads in a cracked voice, to the accompaniment of a banjo. Women of a certain sort mingle with men and try their luck at the tables. Good order usually prevails, less probably from respect for law than from a prudent recognition of the fact that every man carries a pistol in his hip-pocket, and a quarrel means shooting. The games played are faro and “stud poker,” the latter being the favorite. It is a game in which “bluff” goes farther than luck or skill. Few whisky saloons in Montana are without a rude pine table covered with an old blanket, which, with a pack of cards, is all the outfit required for this diversion.

The main street of the frontier town, given up at night to drinking and gambling, by no means typifies the whole life of the place. The current of business and society, on the surface of which surges a deal of mud and drift-wood, is steady and decent. There are churches and schools and a wholesome family life.

From Missoula my route led northward over a range of mountains through the Coriacan defile, and across a forest of firs, pines, and tamaracks, down into the valley of the Jocko River, where the agency of the Flathead Indians is established. These are the Indians with whom General Garfield made a treaty in 1872. A portion of them lived in the Bitter Root Valley, and the negotiations conducted by Garfield were to induce them to remove to the reservation. Most of the chiefs signed the treaty, under the persuasive influence of a promise of five thousand dollars a year for ten years; but Charlo, the head chief, refused. He, with about three hundred followers, still lives on the Bitter Root, subject to no agency and receiving no annuity or other form of government gratuity. These Indians have farms and stock-ranges which they hold separately, not by any legal title, but by agreement among themselves.

The Flathead reservation contains about 1,500,000 acres of land, and is inhabited by less than twelve hundred Indians and half-breeds, belonging to the Flathead, Pend d’Oreille, Nez-Perce, and Kootenay tribes. I traversed it for its entire length of sixty miles along the Jocko and Pend d’Oreille rivers. Allowing only four persons to a family the area of the reservation amounts to five thousand acres for each family living upon it, a pretty liberal allowance when it is remembered that white family can get only one hundred and sixty acres from the Government. Much of the reservation is mountain land of no value save for the timber on it, but there is ten times as much fine valley and grazing land as the Indians can make any use of. As a rule the Indian reservations take the best part of the Western country. They are absurdly large. Nearly half of Montana is Indian territory to-day. Five or six thousand Blackfeet, Gros Ventres and Piegans hold a country north of the Missouri River as large as the State of Pennsylvania; two thousand Crows occupy a region south of the Yellowstone equal in area to the State of Massachusetts, and twelve hundred Flatheads, and people of allied tribes, possess more square miles than are embraced in the State of Connecticut.

The Flathead agency is under the control of the Catholic Church, which supports a Jesuit mission upon it and has converted all of the inhabitants to at least a nominal adhesion to its faith. At the mission are excellent schools for girls and boys, a church, a convent, and a printing-office which has turned out, among other works, a very creditable dictionary of the Kalispel or Flathead language. The agent, Major Ronan, has been in office over five years, and with the aid of the Jesuit fathers has been remarkably successful in educating the Indians up to the point of living in log houses, fencing fields, cultivating little patches of grain and potatoes, and keeping cattle and horses. The Government supplies plows and wagons, and runs a saw-mill, grist-mill, blacksmith shop and threshing machine for their free use. There is no regular issue of food or clothing, but the old and the sick receive blankets, sugar, and flour. Probably nine-tenths of these Indians are self-sustaining. Some persist in leading a vagabond life, wandering about the country; but these manage to pick up a living by hunting, fishing, and digging roots, and sell ponies enough to buy blankets, tobacco, and powder. But even the best civilized, who own comfortable little houses with plank floors and porcelain door-knobs got from the Government, like to keep their canvas lodges pitched, and prefer to sleep in them in summer time. Farming is limited to a few acres for each family, but herding is carried on rather extensively. Thousands of sleek cattle and fine horses feed upon the bunch pastures along the Jocko and the Pend d’Oreille, on the Big Camas Prairie and by the shore of Flathead Lake. Many years ago, at a social gathering in Washington, the late President Garfield, then in the early part of his career in Congress, delivered a little extemporaneous address on the Indian question, in which he argued that the first step from barbarism toward civilization for all wild people was the pastoral life, and said that the Indian should be taught to rear cattle before being told to cultivate the soil. It was afterward a source of much satisfaction to him to learn that the tribe he visited in 1872 had become excellent herdsmen, and had already begun farming operations.

Probably there is no better example of a tribe being brought out of savagery in one generation than is afforded by the Flatheads, and their cousins, the Pend d’Oreilles. Much of the credit for this achievement is no doubt due the Jesuit fathers, who, like all the Catholic religious orders, show a faculty for gaining an ascendency over the minds of savages, partly by winning their confidence by devoting themselves to their interests, and partly, in may be, by offering them a religion that appeals strongly to the senses and superstitions. These Indians boast that their tribe never killed a white man. They are an inoffensive, child-like people, and are easily kept in order by the agent, aided by a few native policemen. Life and property are as secure among them as in most civilized communities. With them the agency system amounts only to a paternal supervision providing implements and machinery for husbandry, and giving aide only when urgently needed. It does not, as upon many reservations, undertake the support of the tribe by issuing rations and clothing. Instead of surrounding the agency with a horde of lazy beggars, it distributes the Indians over the reservation and encourages them to labor. It ought to result in citizenship and separate ownership of the land for the Indians. Many of them would now like deeds to the farms they occupy, but they cannot get them without legislation from Congress changing the present Indian policy. Practically they control their farms and herds as individual property; but they have no sense of secure ownership and no legal rights as against their agent or the chief. Some of them complain of the tyranny of the native police and of the practice of cruelly whipping women when accused by their husbands of a breach of marriage vows, – a practice established, it is charged, by the Jesuits; but in the main they seem to be contented and fairly prosperous. Among them are many half-breeds, who trace their ancestry on one side to Hudson’s Bay Company servants or French Canadians, – fine-looking men and handsome women these, as a rule. They are proud of the white blood in their veins, and appear to be respected in the tribe on account of it; or perhaps it is their superior intelligence which gains for them the influence they enjoy. Shiftless white men, drifting about the country, frequently attempt to settle in the reservation and get a footing there by marrying [Indian women]; but they are not allowed to remain. The Indians do not object to their company so much as the agent.

The Kootenays (was the name originally Court-nez?), of whom there are a few lodges on the Flathead reservation, have strayed over the line from the British territory. They do not take to the civilizing processes in force around them, and are great vagabonds and beggars, frequently wandering off with their dogs, ponies, [Indian women], and lodges to camp near some town and subsist on what they can pick up. They are as eloquent in begging as Italian lazzaroni. One of them expressed his feelings to the agent’s wife the other day by saying plaintively: “My throat is thirsty for sugar, and my heart is hungry for fifty cents.”

The Jocko Valley is one of the prettiest of the minor valleys of the Rocky Mountain system. It was all a green, flowery meadow when I traversed it in the month of June. Its width is about ten miles and its length perhaps thirty. Low, wooded mountain ranges surround it. That on the east is broken by the main branch of the stream, and through the rift can be seen the main chain of the Rockies – a mighty mass of crags and cliffs and snow-fields thrust up among the clouds. For thirty miles after the Jocko joins the Clark’s Fork of the Columbia, called by most people in this region the Pend d’Oreille River, the main river is bordered by narrow green bottoms and broad stretches of grassy uplands rising to the steeper inclines of fir-clad mountains. Herds of horses are occasionally seen, and now and then the log hut of some thrifty Indian or half-breed, or the canvas lodge of a family that prefers the discomforts and freedom of savage life to the comforts and restraints of a local habitation. The first night out from the agency was spent at the hut of one of the queer characters that hang about Indian reservations, – a shiftless white man, who pays for the privilege of ferrying travelers across the river by taking the Indians over free. He lives in a dirty one-room hut. In response to a suggestion about supper, he declared that he would not cook for the Apostle Paul himself, but added that we were welcome to use his stove, and could take anything eatable to be found on the premises. His bill next morning was seven dollars – one dollar, he explained, for victuals for the party, and six for ferriage. A wagon-box offered a more inviting place for a bed that night than the floor of the ferryman’s cabin. In the evening, after the old man had put a party of strolling Flatheads across the river, grumbling all the while because they paid no toll, he sat on a log, and, encouraged by the gift of a cigar and a cup of whisky, told of his adventures in the Far North-west when he was a Hudson’s Bay Company’s man, and had an [Indian woman] wife in every tribe he visited.

Another day’s travel brought us out of the Flathead Reservation, and at the same time to the end of the wagon road and of the open country. The road did not, like one of those western highways described by Longfellow, end in a squirrel track and run up a tree, but it stopped short at a saw-mill on the river’s edge, where a hundred men were at work cutting logs and sawing bridge timber for the railroad advancing up the gorge eighty miles below.

In that day’s journey we passed the Big Camas Prairie – not the one Chief Joseph fought for; that lies to the west, in Idaho, across the Bitter Root Mountains. There are many camas prairies, big and little, in Montana and Idaho, and they all resemble each other in being fertile green basins among the mountains, in whose moist soil the camas plant flourishes. This was, perhaps, fifteen miles broad by twenty-five long – all magnificent grazing land. We passed an Indian village of a dozen lodges, the doors of the tents shaded by arbors of green boughs, under which sat the [Indian women] in their red, green, and white blankets. On the plain fed herds of horses, and among them Indian riders galloped about seeking the animals they wanted to lariat for the next day’s hunting expedition.

With the end of the wagon road came the question of further transportation. Between North-western Montana and the settlements of Northern Idaho and Washington Territory there is but one road – the old Mullan road – and that is impassable before the middle of July, because of the high water in the mountain streams. The most practicable way of getting to the other side of the huge wall of the Bitter Root Mountains and the Coeur d’Alenes, their northern extension, is to go around them by following Clark’s Fork down to Pend d’Oreille Lake. This is the route surveyed for the Northern Pacific Railroad, whose engineers sought in vain for a pass that could be surmounted, and reluctantly turned the line northward, making a considerable detour. A trail runs through the dense forest along the river from the little saw-mill town of Weeksville to the end of the railroad, working southward up the valley from Pend d’Oreille Lake; and getting over it is only a matter of rough riding with a pack-train and three nights’ camping in the solitudes of the woods. In some places the mountains, walling in the swift river, are too precipitous for even a bridle-path to cling to their sides. Then you scramble up to their summits, dragging your beast after you; but the climb is rewarded by magnificent views of the snowy ranges to the westward, the somber forest of pines, firs, and larches filling all the narrow valley, and the winding river far below looking like a canal, so regular is the outline of its banks.

The great Pend d’Oreille forest stretching across the north-west corner of Montana and the pan-handle of Idaho into Eastern Washington is by no means forbidding and melancholy, when once you are in its depths. It is all a vast flower-garden. There is scarcely a square foot of the ground, save in the dark recesses along the courses of the small streams, which does not bear a blossom. You can gather handfuls of wild roses, without dismounting, almost anywhere along the trail; the white three-leaved Mariposa flower abounds; the quaint moccasin flower displays its clusters of dainty white slippers; there are patches of wild sunflowers, and a dozen other varieties; the service-berry bushes bear blossoms like the English hawthorn; festoons of light green moss hang from the branches of the trees; white clover makes the air fragrant, and scores of unnamed flowers brighten the glades. The woods are a pasture-field as well as a garden. Rich grasses grow luxuriantly. Our horses, turned loose every evening, found feed enough to keep in good condition for the hard work of the journey. Deer were seen every morning among the horses; fresh tracks of cinnamon and black bears were often found on the trail, and one day a wolf trotted across the path. The country abounds in game, and will one day, when the railroad makes it accessible, be a favorite resort for hunters, who will take home as trophies of their prowess, antlers of elk and deer, heads of the white mountain sheep, and skins of bears, wolves, foxes and badgers. There are plenty of speckled trout in the swift, cold streams that dash down from the mountain gorges to the river, and the least experienced fisherman has no difficulty in catching them with any sort of bait, so ignorant are they of the tricks of the angler.

Nor is the forest altogether lonely. Occasionally a pack-train is met, or a party of pedestrians, tramping with blankets, provisions, and frying-pans from the settlements or railroad camps west of the mountains to those in the mountain valleys, and sleeping al fresco wherever night overtakes them. Rough fellows these, but good-humored, and in no way dangerous. Indeed, there is no danger in any of the country I traversed on my north-western pilgrimage, to a traveler who minds his own business and keeps out of drinking dens. Almost everybody I met had a big pistol strapped to him; but I carried no weapon of any kind, and never once felt the need of one.

In Montana every traveler carries his bed, whether he depends upon hoofs or wheels for locomotion, or on his own legs. Even the tramp who foots it over the prairies and through the mountains, pretending to look for work, but really on a summer pleasure tour, subsisting upon the country, has a pair of dirty blankets or an old quilt slung by a rope across his shoulders. The sleeping equipment of a traveler who can afford to pay some attention to comfort, consists of a buffalo robe and two pairs of blankets. With these, and perhaps a rubber poncho, he is prepared to stop wherever night overtakes him, fortunate if he has a roof over his head, and a pine floor to spread his buffalo upon, but ready to camp out under the stars. Along the stage roads one is rarely more than twenty miles from a house of some kind, but no one expects beds. The ranchman does not ask his guests if they would like to go to bed; he says: “Well gents, are you ready to spread your blankets?”

Camping and traveling in the forest was a delightful experience, spite of rain and fatigue; but no one of our party was sorry one morning to be met on the river’s bank by an engineer, who brought a package of letters, and the information that the camps of the Chinese graders on the railroad were just across the river, that there was a wagon-road to the end of the track, and that he had a skiff and two rowers to set us across the turbulent current. We had traversed the whole distance (six hundred miles) between the ends of the railroad, which are advancing to meet next year on the summit of the Rocky Mountains. The news that we should see a locomotive that very day was received with enthusiasm. It meant beds, baths, clean clothes, newspapers, telegrams, napkins, silver forks, and a hundred other things never noticed or appreciated until out of reach. We rearranged our luggage, bestowed our bedding upon the half-breed Indian, the Kentucky negro, and the white lad, who jointly managed the pack-train, got over the river, and were soon driving through the camps of three thousand Chinese laborers. It was Sunday, and work on the grade was suspended. The canvas town swarmed with men. Some were having their heads shaved, others were combing or winding their pig-tails; others, stripped to their waist, were enjoying a sponge bath. One man was on his knees going through some religious ceremony over a chicken before dissecting it for the pot. There were Chinese stores, Chinese restaurants, and Chinese gambling tents. For fifteen miles the woods were literally full of Mongolians. Not a feature of their Asiatic life do they abandon, save that, from the necessity of working in mud and dust, they wear American boots. Their basket hats, blue blouses, and loose trousers are supplied by Chinese merchants, and a large portion of their food – their rice and dried fish, and all their sweetmeats and dainties – comes across the Pacific. The road was lined with Chinamen driving fat hogs to the camps to be slaughtered for the Sunday dinner, or carrying bundles and boxes, and boards for tent-flooring, suspended to bamboo poles, balanced on the shoulders in the exact style of the pictures on the tea-chests.

The Chinese laborers on the railroad earn one dollar and sixteen cents a day, and are hired by gangs of forty from agents of the Six Companies in San Francisco. The usual estimate of the effectiveness of their labor is that three Chinamen are equal to two white men; but the superintendent of construction on the railroad asserts that he prefers the Chinese, man for man, to such white labor as can be had on the Pacific coast.

The railroad operations have caused to grow up at Cabinet Landing, a grotesque and hideous town of tents and shanties clinging to the hill-side, among the pines, – a town subsisting on the wants and weaknesses of the working men, and flaunting in their faces facilities for all the coarser forms of vice. Across the river from this pandemonium of frontier dirt, drunkenness, and debauchery, is another transient railroad town, where the engineers and overseers live, with their wives and children in clean tents, prettily embowered with evergreens. A swift ride of six miles down the rapid stream, in a yawl pulled by two stout oarsmen, brought us to a waiting train, and twenty miles by rail around the shores of Lake Pend d’Oreille, to the raw pine village of Sand Point, standing with its feet in the swollen waters of the lake, completed the day’s journey. Lake Pend d’Oreille is of such irregular shape that I will not attempt to guess at its length or breadth. Perhaps it is three or four times as large as Lake George. It is surrounded by high mountains, and is in the heart of a vast forest. A foreign comparison for its bold, rocky precipices and snow-flecked peaks would best be found in the Konigsee of the Bavarian Alps; but no comparison could do justice to the mosquitoes that dispute the occupancy of its shores with the railroad workmen. These pests have their one virtue, however. They draw off their forces at dark, and do not resume their attacks until daybreak.

Out of the woods next day, leaving the lake and the mountains behind and running across green plains past a few feeble beginnings of villages, with here and there a potato-patch or a wheat-field; past herds of horses fattening on the tall bunch-grass, past pine-clad hills and swift, cold trout streams, to Spokane Falls, a budding town that hopes to grind the product of the new wheat region of Eastern Washington, and thus become the Minneapolis of the Pacific Coast. Its ambition in this direction rests upon the falls of the Spokane River, a superb water-power and a superb picture too.

[From here Smalley’s article continues to follow his travels throughout mid-Washington and parts of Idaho, describing the early towns of Lewiston and Walla Walla.]