Harmon’s Histories: Whoa! Montana’s speed limit hard to catch!

By Jim Harmon

Ah, the good old days!

Remember when you could drive Montana roads and highways with no need to look at the speedometer?

Well, that’s not entirely true. There was that thing called “reasonable and prudent,” but my interpretation of the phrase might not be your interpretation. Who was to say what it meant?

Such was the law when I was a kid back in the 1950s. The state tried “reasonable and prudent” again in the latter 1990s.

A retrospective article in Car & Driver magazine in 2017 called Montana the “Autobahn of America: Once the last bastion of hot, nasty, bad-ass speed.”

Even in the 1970s, with President Richard Nixon’s national 55 mph fuel-saving speed limit, the Montana Highway Patrol tended to hand out $5 tickets, so many folks just loaded up the glove-box with $5 bills and drove any speed they wanted.

In the late 1990s, the Montana Supreme Court finally threw out the “reasonable and prudent” wording, citing its vagueness.

Anyway, as my wife will attest, I don’t want the hassle of being pulled over – much less a fine or a court date – so I tend to drive a few, teensie-weensie miles per hour over the posted limit, but never more than eight or nine. So far, so good.

From what I read (since I haven’t actually been pulled over), driving 1 to 10 mph over the highway limit might result in a fine ranging from $20 to $40 and typically does not result in points assessed to your driving record.

Driving 11 to 20 mph over the limit could bring a fine of $70, but if points are assigned it would affect your insurance rates. I suspect that could be very costly.

But this is a column about history – so let’s travel back in time. Speed limits have been around since the 1800s. If you drove your horse and wagon too fast, you could be hauled into court. The same for bicyclists!

Pedestrians, proclaimed the 1895 Weekly Missoulian, have been compelled to “meekly suffer inconvenience and undergo dangers at the hands of both evils!”

In fact, the editor called wheelmen (the term then used for bicyclists) “more dangerous to the pedestrian than other vehicles ... because they run so noiselessly and give so little warning of their approach.”

In 1903, the Missoula City Council passed an ordinance setting “the speed of all autos, bicycles, carriages, horses and all other modes of conveyance at 8 mph within the city limits.”

“The speed of any vehicle drawn by horses, mules or other animals, or the speed of any animals across the Higgins avenue bridge was set at four miles per hour.”

Missoula wasn’t alone. Butte enacted a long list of driving ordinances in 1932, addressing speeds in residential, business and school areas, as well as approaching grade crossings,

“Outing” magazine, a prominent outdoors publication in the late 1800s through the 1920s, published a score of automobile sayings in 1905, including such cautions as, “an auto at speed is a fiend indeed” (and) “in thy speed, mock not the gentle cow – the cowcatcher may catch thee.”

I leave you to ponder their “maxims” (a word dating back to the 1500s, meaning a general
truth or proverb):