Old Missoula

Last Hard Rock Club Member Recalls Early Days On Eve of Leaving City

Another link between Missoula and its past will be broken next Saturday when the last surviving member of the Hard Rock club pulls up his stakes and leaves for California.

Numbering among its membership pioneers connected with the early history of Montana who were known throughout the Pacific Northwest, the Hard Rock club was an informal organization of forty years ago which used to meet every evening on the old stone steps at the southeast corner of Higgins and Main where the Western Montana National bank was first located. The steps have been gone for many years, and the bank long since was moved to its present location on Higgins and Broadway.

According to an old account in The Missoulian, “A game of sluff played in Judge Woody’s office opened the session directly after the evening meal. The meeting then adjourned to the steps, where with plenty of smoke and no drinks was conducted the business of the evening. This was to relate and regulate world affairs, ranging in magnitude from the seating and unseating of the king abroad to the hiring and firing of the office boy at home. Every known variety of political and religious faith was given its hearing and often received approval for the sake of argument.”

Member of Club

Among the older members of the Hard Rock club who figured prominently in the early annals of western Montana were such pioneers as Judge Frank Woody of the district court, A. J. Thomas, Frank Higgins, P. F. Kline, Michael Flynn, Thomas Hatheway, G. A. Wolf, pioneer banker; Andrew Logan, postmaster; W. C. Murphy; merchant; Major J. F. Thompson, H. C. Myers and W. H. Houston, sheriff.

Later and younger members included E. S. Hatheway, later city engineer; Thomas Kemp, mayor; A. J. Violette, attorney; Dan Ross, postmaster, and W. A. Mayo, city engineer. Not the least in constant attendance, according to the old account, was Mack, an English pointer dog, “known and trusted by every child in Missoula.”

“The history of western Montana owes some of its chapters to the influence of loyal purposes developed in these sessions,” states an early issue of The Missoulian.

Last surviving member of the historic group is W. A. Mayo, who came to Missoula before the turn of the century as maintenance engineer for the Northern Pacific railway. Until his retirement several years ago, he was engaged in the cement contracting business here. During the years 1907 and 1908 he was city engineer, and it was while he held this position that the great flood of 1908 occurred.

Tells of Bridge Going Out

Mr. Mayo recalls that several days before the Higgins avenue bridge was swept away by the flood waters 39 years ago Sunday, the fire department was split as a precautionary measure and part of it stationed on the south side, where it remained several years until motorized equipment was introduced.

First transit across the river after the flood was by means of a basket supported by a quarter inch rope fastened to the two ends of the bridge, Mr. Mayo said. The passenger pulled himself hand over hand across the torrent, and few cared to try this means of transportation, he declared. Later a swinging bridge connected the two remaining ends of the old bridge, constructed of cable borrowed from the Milwaukee railroad.

South Side Cut to Two Phones

The only two telephones in working order on the south side were those in the homes of Mr. Mayo and Fred Miller, chief of police, and both were kept busy with calls between anxious relatives, he remembers. Missoula was without mail in or out for a period of about three weeks. Several passenger trains were stalled in the city by flood waters and the hotels were filled with impatient passengers, anxious to be on their way.

The present Van Buren street bridge was constructed of spans salvaged from the Higgins avenue structure, he said.

Mr. Mayo is not separating himself entirely from his associations here, he explained, and he is retaining property interests in Missoula. He plans first to go to San Diego and then travel until he finds a suitable spot. He has three daughters residing on the coast.

Friends recall that like Sam Magee in Robert Service’s poem, “he was always cold,” and the sunshine of California beckons.

 The above article appeared in the Sunday Missoulian on June 8, 1947.

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 W. A. Mayo and Local History

Old-time residents of Missoula note with regret the death in Long Beach, Calif., of W. A. Mayo. For many years Mr. Mayo was a prominent citizen here and his name is stamped on miles of cement sidewalks he and his men put down in Missoula. And he was otherwise prominent in construction. But his later life here was an anticlimax.

For his big days were at the time of the 1908 floods and immediately after. At that time, with the Higgins Avenue bridge wrecked by the surging waters of the Clarks Fork, which we then called the Missoula river, the community was virtually cut in two. Mr. Mayo, as city engineer, was called upon to do something about this uncomfortable situation. His immediate response was to construct a cable foot-bridge over the southern channel of the river. The north span of the bridge was spared by the flood and the foot bridge that Mr. Mayo built was not very long, but it was narrow and to many a walk over it was something of an adventure. But hundreds used it every day and there is no record of any accident in connection with this “swinging bridge.”

This precarious structure was Mr. Mayo’s first answer to the problem facing him and all other residents of Missoula; there was also need of a bridge that would permit vehicular traffic. So he built a wooden viaduct, low over the water and starting at the north side of the river where the Montana Power substation is. Beyond occasional complications, for it was a one-way structure as far as wagons and buggies were concerned and there is memory of a six-mule outfit from Fort Missoula that had to back across most of the distance from bank to bank, this Mayo bridge was satisfactory and was in use until the “new” Higgins Avenue structure was completed, in 1910.

It solved the problem and, for a time at least, made Mr. Mayo Missoula’s No. 1 citizen.

 The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian on February 11, 1953.

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 W. A. Mayo Dies At Long Beach

The funeral of W. A. Mayo, 77, of Long Beach, a former Missoulian, was conducted there Saturday. He died Thursday.

Mayo was city surveyor at the time the Higgins Avenue bridge was flooded out in 1908 and was a cement contractor in Missoula for years. His name is a familiar one in the Garden City even to people who never saw him because it is imprinted on sidewalks throughout the city. He came to Missoula when the Northern Pacific was being built through this section.

Survivors include his widow, Eleanor, and three daughters, Mrs. W. E. Chapin of Bellingham, Wash., Mrs. Gordon Rockwell of National City, Cal., and Mrs. Walter Taylor of Santa Fe, N. M.

 The above obituary appeared in The Daily Missoulian on February 10, 1953.

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