Harmon’s Histories: Sentinel Pine bears witness to Missoula’s stories

By Jim Harmon

About one hundred years ago (Sunday, April 26, 1925 to be exact) Arthur L. Stone, the famed newspaper man and founding father of UM’s journalism school, penned a love letter to a pine tree.

“High on the hip of Mount Jumbo stands ‘Sentinel Pine.’ Remote from its kind, this yellow pine overlooks the Hell Gate and the Missoula valley with a view unobstructed.”

“Lonely it keeps its vigil, exposed to sun and storm ... the pine’s own story, told in the succession of year-lines which constitute its autobiography, tells of a growth of more than 350 years.”

A.L. Stone considered all the human history that lonely pine had observed.

“Three hundred and fifty years ago – three centuries and a half – that takes us to 1575. Elizabeth was England’s queen and the struggle for religious freedom had but just begun, which was to culminate in the emigration of the settlers to New England.”

The tree would have been 45 years old when the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, and about 200 years old “when New England’s farmers fired ‘the shot heard round the world.’ ”

Stone asked his readers to travel with him back 350 years to “review the panorama of life which the Sentinel Pine had witnessed.”

For its first 230 years or so, the tree “knew only its Indian friends and the animals whose home was in the valley. It was in 1805 that the change in the valley began. In that year the Sentinel Pine beheld a strange caravan turn out of the valley into the Lolo pass.”

“What manner of men they were the tree knew not, but they were different from the Selish (sic).” A year later the caravan returned. “Into Hell Gate’s shadow they moved and the tree saw that they were of white skin. Lewis and Clark had come and gone. The valley of the Sentinel Pine had been discovered by the white man.”

In 1835 and again in 1839, the venerable tree saw the arrival of the Black Robes on their mission to “teach these people (natives) the Truth.”

A few years later, in 1842, the Sentinel Pine witnessed a young priest, Father Peter DeSmet, emerge from the Hell Gate canyon – here, to establish a permanent mission. Stone wrote of DeSmet, “Of all the figures which have passed the gaze of the sentinel, none was more striking than this.

Then in the 1860s, the Sentinel Pine observed the landscape change from the “tan tepees of the Selish to the log cabins of white settlers,” the first being Bill Hamilton’s place “near the mouth of the Rattlesnake.”

Soon after that, gold was discovered at Cedar Creek, and the Pine had a prominent view of miners and merchants flooding westward through the Hell Gate canyon. In 1858, just west of the canyon, a small trading post was set up and - as they say - the rest is history.

Stone wrote, “There is excitement in the little town.” The Pine “observed the valley’s first trial by jury, the first marriage of white people upon what is now Montana soil, a new home built along the trail, and from another cabin farther down the valley,” the Pine “hears the lusty wail of the first white child born in this region.”

In January 1863, “the Sentinel Pine hears the stamping of horses’ hoofs in the mouth of the pass, the murmurs of men’s voices, low-toned, and then at midnight sees dimly the forms of riders galloping at top speed down upon the town below.”

“By noon the next day, four bodies swing from a corral gate and the last vigilante court has executed its sentence.”

Two years later, in 1865, Montana became “an organized territory, the town of Hell Gate was abandoned, and The Sentinel hears the “strange rumble of grinding grain and the startling buzz of sawing timber, and a city has begun its existence; so Missoula is born.”

My search for any further reference to the “Sentinel Pine” in following years has proven fruitless. Did the tree fall in a windstorm, was it burned in a fire, was it felled for timber?

No matter, I guess. Perhaps its whole purpose was to inspire the likes of A.L. Stone to write about Missoula’s history. To that, I say, “Thank you, Sentinel Pine. We’re grateful for that, alone."