Harmon’s Histories: Rocky Mountain Labs saves lives, weathers controversies for century
By Jim Harmon
By now you’ve probably heard that the newly minted National Institutes of Health Director, Jayanta Bhattacharya, visited Rocky Mountain Labs in Hamilton last Wednesday.
Outside, protesters rallied against layoffs at the labs, part of President Trump’s and Elon Musk’s DOGE effort to cut 20,000 jobs from the Department of Health and Human Services.
For more than 100 years, the Rocky Mountain Labs have conducted lifesaving research into deadly diseases, including COVID-19, SARS-1, MERS, Lyme disease and Ebola.
As I wrote in 2020, the Bio-safety Level 4 Labs have a colorful and controversial history, dating back more than a century to the initial reason for their existence: Black Measles, known today as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
Most of us have heard about the tick-borne disease and early researchers like Howard Taylor Rickets (who discovered the source: ticks, and the bacteria which caused the disease) and Clarence Birdseye (who collected thousands of specimens of small animals and ticks, and later created a giant frozen food company).
But somewhere along the line, I had either never known or had long forgotten the original controversy surrounding the Labs – and it is quite a story.
In the spring of 1913, the “War On Wood-ticks” began. The federal government appropriated $15,000 to investigate and exterminate the offending bugs. The state added $5,000.
Montana’s State Entomologist, Professor R.A. Cooley, and his federal counterpart, Dr. W.D. Hunter, led the effort, putting entomologist H.P. Weed in charge of experiments to be conducted in the Bitter Root valley. (An aside: “Bitter Root,” two words, was the common reference to the area until relatively recent years, when the two words were combined into a single word, “Bitterroot.”)
Among the most urgent work was rodent warfare, brush burning, and construction of dipping vats for cattle and other livestock. At first, officials reported local ranchers were enthusiastic about the enterprise.
On April 9, 1913, state and local officials readied the vats with an arsenic solution, “worked out by Lt. Col. Watkins-Pitchford in the Union of South Africa,” made up of “8 or 8½ pounds of arsenite of soda (80% arsenious acid); 5½ pounds soft soap; 2 gallons paraffin (kerosene); 400 (Imp.) gallons of water (480 U.S. gal.).”
But then the Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) effect overshadowed reason. The Montana State Board of Epidemiology reported, “The feeling aroused in the Florence district (was that) almost no one was willing to have (a vat) located on his property. The chief reasons advanced for this were that ticks would be brought to their land by the stock and that the neighbors would object to having it located there.”
Sometime during the night of June 10, 1913, “person or persons unknown” smashed the concrete vat on James Dunbar’s west-side ranch near Hamilton, rendering it useless. Seven nights later, the dipping vat at Florence was blown apart by dynamite.
Ravalli County Attorney James D. Taylor headed up the investigations. Within a few days, Dunbar was arrested and charged with malicious mischief. He at first refused to post bond, but changed his mind after a day behind bars.
Dunbar’s case finally went to trial on July, 27, 1913. He was quickly acquitted, then immediately turned around to sue officials in charge of the dipping program, Drs. Fricks and Cogswell, as well as Professor R.A. Cooley for $10,000 in damages. Dunbar claimed his reputation had been damaged and he had been humiliated by the arrest.
By the time the case went to trial in December, 1913, though, Dunbar had already agreed to drop his complaint against Cogswell and Cooley, leaving Dr. L.D. Fricks of the U.S. Public Health Service the only defendant. After hearing the evidence, the court ordered the jury to return a verdict in favor of Fricks.
No arrest(s) were ever made in the Florence dynamiting case.
Meantime, a warrant was sworn out for a Stevensville cattleman, John Jacobson, for breaking quarantine after not having his livestock dipped in either of the two non-damaged vats. The case was settled just prior to trial, when Jacobson agreed to have his stock dipped.
By 1914, with rancor ebbing, Dr. Fricks reported the remaining dipping vats operating near Victor and Hamilton as well as a new one at Gold Creek, accommodated thousands of sheep, horses, goats and cattle.
Fricks noted in his year-end report to the State Board of Epidemiology that “some objections were raised by (stock) owners” at the new Gold Creek station, but “it is expected that they will co-operate more willingly hereafter (so) drastic measures were not pushed the first year.”
Despite the bumpy start, Rocky Mountain Labs continued to “work on spotted fever...on several fronts. Within a few years doctors Roscoe Spencer and Ralph Parker produced the first effective vaccine.
“Parker for a time conducted his studies in a woodshed (and later in) an abandoned schoolhouse on the west side of the valley” that became known as the “Schoolhouse Lab."
In the late 1920s, the state appropriated $60,000 to build a permanent facility in Hamilton – something that again caused angst among local citizens. A half-dozen lab workers had died over the preceding decade, and there were still “pockets of fear and distrust.”
Homeowners near the proposed site sued to stop construction, but lost. RML, on its website, says, “In an effort to alleviate town fears, a small moat was built around the perimeter of the facility to be filled with water. Ticks, it was supposed, could not swim the moat.”
Today, Rocky Mountain Labs have morphed from tick research into a state-of-the-art biomedical research facility, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We all wait to see how the Trump administration’s attempts at cuts will play out.