Old Missoula

Milwaukee Completion in 1909 Precedes State Banking Boom

The Milwaukee Road reached Missoula Oct. 20, 1908, carrying with it a future boom in banking in Montana. The completion of the transcontinental railway in 1909 opened vast new sections of Montana to settlement.

Many midwestern farmers came to Montana as a result and the banks sprang up along the line to accommodate the homesteaders. The great electrified line cutting straight across the Continental Divide and Cascade Mountains was opened for transportation July 1, 1909, and stands as a record for speed in railroad construction.

Machine Draws Crowds

The speed of construction was due largely to the use of a track-laying machine. Missoulians flocked to watch the machine operate. They noted that the machine would lay a pair of rails in “mere moments.” They said the machine would then proceed forward “and another pair would be down and spiked in an incredibly short space of time.”

The Milwaukee was then known as the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. When the track-laying machine with several carloads of steel and a construction crew of 160 men reached the fill near the south end of Higgins Avenue Bridge the grade was lined with a throng of men, women, and children. The crowd watched the operation and the St. Paul engine No. 118 which pushed the track outfit until dark.

On Oct. 22 the track-laying in Missoula ceased from the east and the crew returned to the Coeur d’Alene line to continue westward. The crew had come to Missoula from Huson. Construction had been moving westward from Garrison until the grade at the Big Bend district was washed out by the floods of 1908.

In western Montana the road followed the Mullan Road across the steep Camel’s Hump Pass to reach the Mullan-Wallace-Kellogg mining district. When the road was completed a Gold Spike ceremony was held May 19, 1909 at Gold Creek near the site of the Northern Pacific ceremony in 1883.

The Milwaukee system began when the Milwaukee & Waukesha Railroad blazed a line into Wisconsin. Branches reached Madison in 1854. Two years after the Civil War the line was extended to St. Paul and in 1875 the Milwaukee was connected with Chicago and the name was changed to “Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. By 1890 the Milwaukee had 5,600 miles of track and was playing a prominent role in the development of the northwest. The Dakota line was extended to Rapid City in the Black Hills and in 1907, taking advantage of low prices, the Milwaukee started its Puget Sound extension from Mobridge, S. D., to Seattle and Tacoma.

The Milwaukee Railroad did a great deal to advertise Yellowstone National Park. In later years the valuable branch and belt line properties of the Chicago, Terre Haute and Southeastern Railway and the Chicago, Milwaukee and Gary Railway companies were brought into the system.

Steam locomotives were used for power on the Milwaukee until Dec. 30, 1915, when electrification of the line from Harlowton to Avery, Idaho, was completed.