North of Great Falls the horizon opens wide as mountain islands fade away and the rolling prairie rambles in all directions. Only one more mountain island (the Bear Paw Mountains) north of the Missouri River stands between the North Pole and the interior of Montana. My original plan was to head due north from Great Falls to the town of Shelby near the Canadian border but the wind had other thoughts in mind. One of the characteristics of Montana east of the Continental Divide is the consistent wind that flows down the Rocky Mountain Front and spreads out across the plains. Particularly strong winds (like the ones forecast for today around 60 miles per hour) are usually a precursor of a storm system coming into Montana from the Pacific Northwest. Wind and the Lunch Box do not mix well, it is a struggle to keep the motorhome on the road as the boxy shape is buffeted by the wind. Thus a last minute decision was made to head northeast to the town of Havre, leaving Great Falls early in the morning before the wind really picks up and hoping that the wind hits the back corner of the Lunch Box rather than the side. Lunch Boxers, as we say in Montana, “this isn’t my first rodeo” and I have had a lot of experience driving the motorhome in the wind!
The highway northeast of Great Falls follows the original Manitoba Railroad, precursor to the Great Northern Railway. In 1887 around 9,000 men built 550 miles of railway across northern Montana between Minot, ND, and Great Falls, giving access to the mining districts of the Butte area. The railway ran from Great Falls across the plains above the western bank of the Missouri for about 60 miles before heading north around the Bear Paw Mountains. North of Fort Benton the tracks crossed the Marias River, flowing from the Rocky Mountains far to the west to join the Missouri near the present day town of Loma.
The Marias was named by Meriwether Lewis when the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped at the mouth of the river in June 1805. Lewis named the river “Maria’s River” after his cousin Maria Wood, but over time the apostrophe was dropped. The confluence of the Marias and Missouri is named “Decision Point” because the expedition stayed in the area for nine days while a consensus was reached on whether to continue south up the Missouri or to turn due west and try to follow the Marias as a more direct route to the Rocky Mountains. The Mandan Indians had warned Lewis and Clark that there were “great falls” on the river that lead to the mountain passes but it wasn’t clear as to which of the rivers (Marias or Missouri) contained the falls. Lewis explored up the Marias, Clark explored up the Missouri. While Clark did not go far enough to find the falls of the Missouri, the two decided to follow the Missouri because it was running fast and clear, characteristic of rivers that have recently emerged from the mountains as opposed to the Marias, which was swollen and muddy from spring runoff. The expedition left Decision Point on June 12 and their judgement was rewarded the very next day when the falls were discovered on the Missouri. This picture was taken from a bluff high above Decision Point. The Marias is the sliver of water on the upper left, the Missouri is flowing around a large island in the center and right.
We leave the Missouri Valley and strike out across the prairie northeast towards the town of Havre and the “Hi-Line” of Montana.
The Great Northern Railroad and US Highway 2 run side by side in essentially a straight line across the prairie of northern Montana from the Rocky Mountains and Glacier National Park in the west to the border with North Dakota to the east. Unimpeded by mountains or any other significant geographic features, this area is known through-out the state as the “Hi-Line.” A land of extreme wind, temperature and weather, it is home to cattle ranchers and grain farmers. Once leaving the Missouri recently harvested fields stretch out towards the last mountain island between Montana and the North Pole, the Bear Paw Mountains, looming to the north east.
The small town of Big Sandy punctuates the land just west of the Bear Paw’s, founded as a stop on the Manitoba Railroad and continuing to provide services to the surrounding farmers and ranchers.
The surrounding fields yield wheat and other grains as well as “pulse” crops. Pulses are beans, lentils and peas that are harvested after they have dried on the stalk. The same type of crops that are harvested green (green beans, peas, etc.) are classified as vegetables rather than pulse. Big Sandy’s most famous pulse farmer is current Montana US Senator John Tester who comes home virtually every weekend to work his farm and was once interviewed live by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC while driving a combine during harvest season. As anyone who has ever been associated with Montana farming knows, NOTHING gets in the way of harvest. The fall weather can change in a moment (as we are about to see…) and crops can be ruined if they are not harvested before the weather turns. Senator Tester is not Big Sandy’s only famous resident, those of you into modern music will recognize the name of Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament, born and raised in Big Sandy and donor of a skate park in the town. Once past Big Sandy our road northeast continues around the Bear Paw Mountains on our right across the rolling prairie. Fort Assiniboine was a major post for the US Military during the last years of the Indian Wars and is currently the site of an agricultural research station. I can’t tour it this trip as the facility is closed due to the corona virus but a few roofs are visible nestled in the surrounding trees.
Six miles past Fort Assiniboine we join the Hi-Line and US Highway 2 at the town of Havre, by far the largest town on the Hi-Line and the center of commercial activity in northern Montana (and the nearby area of southern Canada.) The highway drops down into the Milk River Valley and Havre.
Havre was founded in 1893 as a major maintenance center for the Great Northern Railway, located roughly halfway between Seattle, WA, and Minneapolis-St Paul, MN. The stop was originally named “Bullhook Bottoms” but the first group of settlers to arrive in the area were French-Canadians from eastern Canada and thus the name was changed to Havre (pronounced “Have-er.”) Today nearly 10,000 people call Havre home as it serves as the medical, educational and business center of the Hi-Line. A robust city center lies south of the railroad tracks and US Highway 2. It’s cold and windy and the clouds gathering above foretell a change in the weather is near…
A nod to the importance of the local trade with Canadians is a sign seen in almost every business window downtown.
Marking the southern edge between the business and residential districts are three substantial buildings. The first is the 1932 US Post Office and Courthouse, built during the Great Depression to provide a boost to the local area.
The second is the Hill County Courthouse, completed in 1915.
And the third is the 305 Building, constructed in 1916 by the Freemasons as a Masonic temple for the area. The first three floors were used as office and retail space while the top two floors were reserved for the private activities of the Masons. The building is currently undergoing renovation.
The major employer in Havre over the years was the railroad and the railroad yards form the town boundary on the north. There is no architecturally grand train depot, this was a working railroad facility, not a tourist stop, and the depot is a rather non-descript building stretching along the tracks fronted by a statue of James Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railroad.
The other major employer in town is Montana State University-Northern, founded as Northern Montana Agricultural and Manual Training School in 1913 at Fort Assiniboine, six miles south of Havre. Renamed and upgraded to a college as a branch of the University of Montana in 1929, the campus was relocated to the hills at the south end of Havre in 1932. Government programs designed to help employ people during the Great Depression lead to the building of Donaldson Hall in 1936, first used as a girl’s dormitory and currently used as a combination of offices and dorm rooms (left below). An expansion of the college after World War II lead to the building of Cowan Hall, home to offices and classrooms, completed in stages between 1947 and 1953 due to problems with the state financing (right below).
Today around 1,000 students pursue degrees at MSU-Northern, pursuing over 35 majors in Arts and Sciences, Agriculture, Business, Engineering Technology, Education and Nursing in a campus clothed in an ombre of fall color.
The road east of Havre roughly parallels the Milk River and the railroad tracks, a slow, languid stream that meanders across the seemingly limitless prairie.
The Hi-Line is a story of the railroad, the workers who built it and the homesteaders who followed it. Many of the immigrants were from Eastern Europe and the Ukraine and the little towns that one flourished along the railroad reflect that heritage, many named after their home towns in the old county (Zurich, Malta, Kremlin, Harlem, etc.). Once the railroad became more automated most towns withered away, a few continue along as county seats. Substantial county courthouses in Chinook and Malta reflect the optimism and hope that permeated this land prior to World War I.
Blaine County Courthouse in Chinook, completed 1914
Phillips County Courthouse in Malta, built in 1914 and the twin of the Judith Basin County Courthouse in Stanford (built 11 years later from the same plans)
Outside of the county seats the land rolls on for miles and miles.
Jesuit missionaries first came to minister to the Native Americans of western Montana in the 1840’s and in 1877 they arrived on what is now the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation to begin a residency that lasted 128 years. Only in 2015 did the last Jesuit priest leave the reservation. Near the small hamlet of Harlem, a stark reminder of days gone by silhouettes against the horizon. The Sacred Heart Catholic Church, known locally as the “Pink Church”, was built on a hill in 1931 to replace earlier structures frequently flooded by the Milk River. The church closed in 1964.
The undulating prairie has a history peppered with tales of early day outlaws, preying on homesteaders heading west and occasionally holding up a railroad train. In 1901 Kid Curry and Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, held up the Great Northern Railway’s No. 3 passenger train near here and made off with a bag of gold coins and $40,000 of worthless unsigned banknotes. Millions of buffalo once roamed the Hi-Line but most were slaughtered for their hides by the end of the 1800’s. Land along the Hi-Line not suitable for farming now serves cattle well and a weathered sign along the highway commemorates number of the brands used by ranchers to identify their cattle over the years.
As the Milk River finally begins to turn south towards the Missouri River our next stop is one of the largest “ghost towns” in Montana, St. Marie. Surprisingly, this is not a story of the wild, wild west and exhausted gold mines, but rather of what happens when geopolitics leads the government to abandon a town.
St. Marie
The story of the town of St. Marie begins in 1942. Glasgow Army Air Field was established on the prairie about 20 miles north of the town of Glasgow, MT, as a satellite field of the Great Falls Army Air Base during World War II. The field was used for training of bomber squadrons and in 1944 a German POW camp was added. After World War II the field was classified as surplus and was inactive until 1955 when the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union prompted the US government to build a “shield” of air force bases across northern Montana and North Dakota. A Strategic Air Command Base was established at the site in 1960 and the base rapidly expanded. At peak operation over 20,000 people were associated with the base in some way in the Glasgow area, with around 8,000 actually living on the base. The base closed in 1968 and nearly 16,000 people left the area within a couple of years. Today the population of the area is around 4.000. The actual air force base sat empty for years until the Boeing Company purchased the airfield to use for airplane testing and development. Base housing was decommissioned, offered for sale to private parties and is still available to the public for purchase. Around 200 people are now living amongst the abandoned base housing complexes and form the town of St. Marie.
After driving about 20 miles north of Glasgow across the prairie a cluster of trees and housing comes into view east of the highway.
The drive into St. Marie from the highway gives glimpses of the airfield and associated buildings in the distance.
The airfield and military barracks area north and east of the entrance are off-limits, but the base housing for families, etc., is not as it comprises the currently “town” of St. Marie. Pictures from the edges of “off-limits” areas show barracks and office buildings marching off towards the airfield in the distance.
There really are no commercial/retail services currently in St. Marie, residents drive to Glasgow for all of their needs. Pictures are not going to do justice to the sprawling size of the town that once housed 8,000 people but let’s give it a try! The only building other than housing that I could see being currently occupied is the St. Marie town hall and community center.
The town hall building’s original purpose isn’t able to be determined but it stands in the middle of a number of other structures designed for community use, including what looks like a medical clinic, church, park, high school, elementary school and possibly stores.
All of this is spread out over acres and acres of land that at one time must have been landscaped. Southwest of the pubic building cluster is the housing area, a combination of multiple housing units, duplexes and single family homes. As you can see there are people living in some of these structures. I suspect that if you’re looking for inexpensive housing you could pick up something here relatively cheap!
Huddled in the trees under cloudy skies, St. Marie fades in our rearview mirror as we head 20 miles south to the town of Glasgow, commercial and retail center of the eastern Hi-Line.
Glasgow
Glasgow was founded in 1887 as a railroad town on the Great Northern Railway as it made its way across northern Montana. The boom driven by homesteaders arriving in the years prior to World War I lead to the development of a small downtown area south of the railroad tracks. The western edge of the downtown strip is anchored by the 1914 First National Bank of Glasgow Building.
Rather than the classic architecture of the First National Bank building, the Rundle Building, completed in 1916, featured the Spanish mission style popular at the time. The Rundle, standing across from the train station at the eastern edge of the main commercial strip, housed the Glasgow Hotel on the top floors with commercial space on the ground floor. The unique design of the building features colorful terra cotta tiles decorating the façade.
Across the street from the Rundle to the east is the Goodkind Block, featuring brilliant green terra cotta tile all over the walls. I don’t know the original purpose of the elegant structure but today it’s one of the ubiquitous “casinos” that dot the Montana landscape.
While currently Glasgow is home to around 4,000 people, the commercial scale of the downtown are reflects a more utilitarian architecture from the early 1960’s when the presence of the air force base north of town meant nearly 20,000 people formed the base of the local economy. Glasgow started as an agricultural town along the railroad and is currently filling that role again, but in between there were two major events that impacted local life. The one already explored was the rise and fall of Glasgow Air Force Base, but earlier in the 1930’s an event that altered the shape of the United States took place 15 miles south of the city along the Missouri River, the construction of one of the wonders of the world, Fort Peck Dam.
Fort Peck Dam
The Fort Peck Dam was a project of the Public Works Administration, a program designed to help the nation dig itself out from the economic depths of the Great Depression. The dam was featured on the debut cover of Life magazine in 1936 and its construction put more than 10,000 people to work during the heights of the depression.
It took seven years to build and is the world’s largest manmade earth-filled dam. Montana law at the time gave preference to men with families so 18 boomtowns grew up overnight in the desolate area as 50,000 people descended on the area. One of those towns remains at the northwestern end of dam, the town of Fort Peck, nestled in the trees at the top of a bluff. The dam is so large that it’s impossible to take a picture that does it justice but in the picture below the dame curves from the bottom left to center right with the town of Fort Peck in a dark, distant cluster of trees center right.
While most commercial and retail needs of Fort Peck residents are met in Glasgow fifteen miles tot he north, there is a small town administration building/post office and the regionally renowned Fort Peck Summer Playhouse at the entrance to the planned community. Every summer community residents and outsiders come together to present plays and musicals at the popular theater. I’m visiting after the season is over (usually Labor Day) so the theater is closed.
An extended oval across the street from the post office building features a veteran’s memorial at the head of a plaza of grass extending a number of blocks from the post office building south to the southern edge of the bluff where the Fort Peck Dam administration offices stand.
On the west side of the plaza stands the Fort Peck Hotel.
The surrounding planned community is NOT a ghost town, but rather a collection of tidy bungalows and homes providing housing to workers at the dam and power house as well as people who commute the 15 miles to Glasgow. These trees are not native to the site but were planted years ago to provide shade from the brutal summer sun as well as wind breaks for the ever-present wind.
The only abandoned building that I saw was the local school. Local children now ride the bus into Glasgow for their education.
The view from the southern edge of town west is across the flats and dam to the power house and cooling towers beyond.
To the east the Missouri river flows around several islands as it continues its’ way towards North Dakota.
The actual dam itself is nearly four miles long from end to end, damming the Missouri River to create Fort Peck Lake which stretches over 130 miles to the west. The shoreline of the enormous reservoir is longer than the coast of California. The highway crests the dam on its way south.
From the top of the dam the Missouri River heads east and the lake fades into the west.
A major disappointment was that the Fort Peck Dam visitor’s center was closed during my visit, open only a couple days a week this time of year and I couldn’t wait another day to see it because the weather was about to change in a VERY big way.
You might recall that I had to change my plans after leaving Great Falls due to the wind and I mentioned that wind is often a precursor to an incoming storm. Such was the case. So far this fall the weather has been unseasonably warm in Montana but in the course of a couple of days it is forecasted to change dramatically from weather in the 60’s to weather in the low 20’s with wind and snow. The Lunch Box can handle a short period of below freezing weather but not an extended period of time due to the possibility of the water pipes freezing, amongst other issues. I stayed two nights at the campground at Fort Peck Dam and on the second night it snowed so I made the decision to head for home. My planned exploration of far-eastern Montana turned into heading up the lower Yellowstone River Valley back to Billings before the weather turned. As it turned out, I made it back to Billings at 1pm on a Friday afternoon, unpacked the RV, winterized the water system and had it in storage by 6pm that same day. That was a good thing because the snow started two hours later and didn’t stop for two days. Joey and I were glad to be home. But, before we go, there’s one more chapter to “The Big Sky Country.”
Next up: The Lower Yellowstone River Valley
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