Missoula history

OK, it’s time to play: “Name That Place,” a game show testing your knowledge of local landmarks – but offering absolutely no cash, no prizes, no trips to exotic places, not a thing – except perhaps bragging rights. Here we go!

“There are, I think, undeniably, new winds sweeping across America. They are indeed gusty and changeable, but they are new - and they will alter what happens in Montana ... (either for) better or worse, (depending) on Montanans and how they, or you, read those winds.” The quote is from one of my favorite historians, K. Ross Toole, a Montana rancher who accepted the Hammond Professorship at the University of Montana in 1965 – a post he held until his death in 1981.

A single gun shot dropped the bear, but only momentarily. It quickly rose and charged the hunter. Astonishingly, the hunter dropped his gun and “rushed upon the bear with nothing for protection except a red sash which held up his trousers.”

Flashback to 1934, when The Washington (D.C.) Star newspaper reported the American Automobile Association (AAA) had called on “city authorities throughout the country to outlaw raucous automobile horns in a campaign of noise disarmament.”

With public ownership now in hand and renovations set to begin, city and county leaders announced their intent to rename the sprawling downtown federal building as the John Engen Local Government Building.

They were considered unrepentant and hopeless - absolutely incorrigible. Some had “wayward and vicious” dispositions, and were constantly running away from home. So what did Montana do with its hopeless teenage miscreants a century ago? Sent them to “reform school,” of course.

“The Halloween nuisance annually recurrent in Helena, if known to the people of biblical times doubtless would have been included among the plagues of Egypt!” The editor of the Helena Record Herald had had enough!

Missoula is one of the wickedest, most raucous, meanest towns in America! As I noted in my book, “The Sneakin’est Man That Ever Was/Headline Stories of Montana’s Early Days, Vol. 1,” one local resident shared that view of the Garden City with a newspaper reporter in 1883.

“The thing for the present Congress to do is to adjourn and adjourn quickly. There is no possibility of its accomplishing anything of advantage to the people now, if there ever was.” Sounds like something you could easily read in today’s newspaper accounts. But it’s from a Missoulian newspaper editorial written in April 1894, when Democrats controlled both the White House and the Congress.

In 1881, Missoula was still a fur-trading and agricultural economy, with gold being discovered in the region. “To the looming emigrants this spring,” wrote The Weekly Missoulian, “we would say, Do not condemn Montana until you have seen Missoula County – justly called the ‘garden spot.’ ”