Whew….

This week has been akin to the dust devils that populate Arizona, changing directions many times. Today we are leaving Anaconda, Mt. for Reed Point, Mt., after being schooled on the colorful history of this town of about 9,000 or so. Montana is a treasure, a state where you can easily enjoy being in the mountains or the wonderful high plateaus between ranges where the mountains are a constant vista.

Back to Anaconda. This town was formed by an industrialist as a place to smelt copper ore from mines in Butte, located 14 miles east of here. He constructed a 585’ tall chimney, made of bricks that were molded on site and stacked to make one of the highest masonry stacks in the world. The town grew with “smelters” coming in from all over with their families. We are camped at the foot of this huge operation, which is now an EPA super site, meaning the companies that were operating here have poured billions into reclamation efforts to clean up the arsenic that resulted from the production of copper. The copper produced was good stuff, 99.5% pure, and made Marcus Daly a fabulously rich man. The workers unionized, and the inevitable conflicts began, while Mr. Daly weighed his money. This county has voted for a Democratic candidate in Presidential elections since Calvin Coolidge, a natural occurrence with a union workforce. The town has opulent churches, was strongly Catholic in faith, had 57 bars and one brothel, small in size but apparently very profitable. The churches and main street buildings, to include a theater that will sit nearly 1,000 patrons at a time are, simply put, masterpieces. The town also is home to just under 600 deer that loll about on folks lawns and casually stroll down main street. For reference we are in the Bitterroot Valley. I could ramble on, but by now you get the picture. At one time, money flowed out of here by the rail car load, and Mr. Daly poured millions into the towns infrastructure and it is evident.

Smelters were thirsty. The red brick building was bar, and the hoist and pulley was used to lift giant kegs of beer upstairs

We began the day touring the old Montana Penitentiary, located in Deer Lodge a few miles from here. It closely resembles Missouri’s old prison with high sandstone walls constructed by a workforce of prisoners. The warden, during the early years, was progressive and ran a pretty good prison, as prisons go. It was either brutally hot in the halls or horribly cold, and as mean a place as existed at the time. It was a coed facility at first, but changed to a male only institution soon after, as the he’ing and she’ing got out of hand. Walking this facility reinforced my notion of life on the right side of the law. I am including pictures of a gallows, still standing in its original spot, designed by a prison official to expediently dispatch the only two inmates executed here. It was simple but contrived, designed to “jerk up” up the condemned rather than a fall through a trap door. It was a design failure, resulting in the prisoners taking 10 and12 minutes, respectively, to expire via strangulation rather than a clean neck break. It was still applauded, as the men twisted in the wind, as they had killed a deputy warden during their only riot. In a word, the prison was as depressing as our institution in Missouri, which predates Montana’s by years.

A note. America is rift with a terrific history that you cannot relive in books or stories told by scribes like me. You need to get out, if you are able, and taste the beginnings of the greatest nation on earth to appreciate the toil, suffering and maturation of our Republic. I never gave more than passing thought about Montana, believing it to be a state of harsh winters and big skies. A misconception corrected by a down and dirty dive into its colorful past. Enjoy the pictures, in no particular order.