The Gates of the Mountains

The Helena tourist train

Back in 1864 Americans other than the Mountain Men were just starting to arrive in Montana Territory.  Four Georgians had come out to seek their fortune and had prospected together all over the Eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains without success and were ready to head home.  They decided to give it one last shot, panning for gold in Prickly Pear Creek in the middle of nowhere.  They agreed that if this did not work out, they would give up and head back to Georgia.  It turned out to be a good decision.  They found gold in the creek, which they renamed Last Chance Gulch.  This placer deposit eventually produced $243,000,000 worth of the yellow metal (3.6 billion in current day dollars) and Last Chance Gulch became the main street of Helena and triggered a major gold rush.  The four Georgians had the good sense to quit panning and go into business supplying necessary goods to other hopeful miners, becoming fabulously wealthy in the process and turning Helena into a territorial business hub which allowed the town to keep going a few years later when the gold started running out instead of just shriveling up like most mining towns.

Victorian Mansions

 

By 1888 there were over 50 millionaires living in Helena, more per capita than any other city on earth.  They built luxurious homes in town that mostly survive to this day.  We decided to take a train tour of the city to see the capitol and a smattering of these fancy mansions, the Cathedral and Last Chance Gulch/downtown. The "train" ran on rubber tires and pulled 4 small, open air cars.  It’s not quite clear to me why they needed to have a “train” engine pulling us through the town.  Maybe it is to keep the little kiddies interested, but I don’t remember any little kiddies on our tour. 

Our favorite bit of information on the tour was concerning the election to pick the capital city of Montana.  Helena had been the capital of the Montana Territory and wanted to keep that distinction after statehood arrived, but so did every other little gimcrack town in the territory.  There were initially 7 towns in the running and an initial ballot narrowed it down to Helena v.s. Anaconda.  In the run off election there was bickering, bribery and double dealing but in the end Helena squeaked by with a margin of 50 some odd votes.  Now there is an old house in the city that was recently renovated and in the basement they discovered a walled up room.  In the room they found the ballots for that election.  When historians counted those ballots, Anaconda rather than Helena actually won the election.  At least that is what the tour guide told us.  An hour of internet research failed to find any corroboration for this version of events, so take it for what it is worth.

Every state seems to have a historical museum in its capital city and Montana is no exception so we thought we’d take a look.  The front door was just in front of us as we got off the train, but it was

Western art and guns.  Fishing gear was popular as well.

disabled when we got to it so we had to go around the building to the back.  Inside we found some western art and an array of guns, but as state museums go it was fairly disappointing. 

Bison skull sculpture outside the state museum

Montana State Capitol building

Across the street was the state capitol building, which looks like a state capitol building.  On top of the dome is a statue that arrived from back east while the building was going up in 1901.  It was a female figure with no explanation.  Any records of the statue being ordered had been lost.  They contacted the

Miss Montana

company in Philadelphia, but its office with all of its records had burned and they didn't know what it was.  The capitol builders shrugged, stuck it on top of the dome and called it "The Spirit of Liberty", which was its name for 100 years.   Then, in 2004, a woman called and asked out of idle curiosity whether her grandfather's statue was still sitting on top of the capitol dome.  It turned out the piece was made by Edward J. Van Landeghem who had actually named the figure "Montana".  Thirteen years later state politicians are still patting themselves on the back over that.

Helena, like much of Montana, is growing which one can see by all the new buildings in the surrounding county of over 70,000 people.  But much of the downtown, like many US cities, is dying.  The local mall is closing and there are lots of empty storefronts.  The towns main business is politics with 6 of 10 jobs in town being related to state, county or city government.  Education, tourism and a little industry follow at a distance.

A peaceful cruise up the Missouri River at Holter Lake

This year part of our historical quest has been to check out the path of Lewis and Clark on their way to the pacific.  It has not been our intent to follow it in order, but to pick up bits of it as we travel in our somewhat irregular path across Montana and the Dakotas. From Helena we visited the Gates of the Mountain, originally named by Meriwether Lewis in 1804. They were canoeing the Missouri River to find the Northwest Passage to the Pacific. The river at this point has been dammed so we

Deer on the river bank

got to go on a gentle boat ride, rather than bumpy rapids, through this lovely canyon, taking pictures of the wildlife and the high canyon walls.  The canyons supported a significant bald eagle population and I got to see my 1st juvenile bald eagle which doesn’t look anything like the mature adult.  We’d seen bald eagle nests before but this one seemed to convey the gigantic size of the nest.

Gates of the Mountain are outcroppings of canyon wall that create an illusion, seemingly closed when 1st approached and then, as one follows the curve of the river upstream, appear to open like a sliding gate.  It must have looked to the Corps like the river was just going to stop and then the walls slowly opened to let them through.

The gates closing

Bald eagle seen along the bank...

... and the juvenile

The eagle's nest