Date: 30 July 2001 (Monday)

Start:

End: Havre RV Park, Havre Mt (0 miles)

The temperature was 63f when we got up, and cloudy.

We slept in a little, ate a light breakfast and hopped in the truck to see what we could see.

The first stop was the Railroad Museum and Havre Underground – they’re run out of the same building. The tour of Havre Underground was ready, so we joined another couple and took it.

In late 1904, downtown Havre suffered a major fire that destroyed the whole business district. In order to continue any sort of business at all in a place that has no lumber to begin with, they took drastic measures.

They cleaned out their basements, roofed them over if the floor of the building hadn’t survived, and knocked down walls between basements downtown. They also dug tunnels underground from one block to the next. This created the first "mall", underground.

People came to downtown, went downstairs at one of several locations, and walked around underground in comfort, doing their necessary business. The businesses underground included groceries, butcher’s shop, post office, auto repair (they drove the car down into the underground facility to work on it), bar with card room, a bordello, the dentist, and several offices. There's also a mortuary, complete with wicker hand-baskets that were used prior to body bags to transport the remains. This was the source of the term "going to hell in a hand-basket".

This continued into the next summer. Some of the buildings were reconstructed (of brick or stone, this time), but many were left underground. In fact, the underground was improved with lighting from above through glass blocks installed in the sidewalks. The underground functioned for a couple more years. It gradually fell into disuse and became a place where merchants threw discards into, and filled with trash.

Some bright person recalled this in later years. The Lions got behind it, got some contributions, and reconstructed one short block of it. They used the same stores, but the new street out front had destroyed the underground "sidewalk", so they had to move that in and create new front walls. The stores were restored using original items if possible, otherwise equivalent items (like radios of the times) were substituted.

It’s quite a sight, and really illustrates the ingenuity people have in tough times.

We came out from underground at the opposite end of the block, having passed under several operating stores and the bar with the oldest back-bar in Montana. Then we went into the Railroad Museum.

This place has a lot of posted pictures and articles about the Great Northern, and has a large HO gage model railroad with models of Great Northern engines, cars, and buildings.

There are gifts available here, but nothing appealed to us at the time, so we went on.

We had intended to do the local historic center, but that was closed. The tour of Fort Assiniboine, usually given daily, was fully taken up by an elderhostel group today, so that was out.

We drove 20 miles east to Chinook and entered the Blaine County museum. We were just in time for a multi-media presentation on the Bear Paw Mountains Battlefield of the US Army and the Nez Perce Indians. Then the museum shut down for lunchtime, so we went to the battlefield, 15 miles south of Chinook, and walked the annotated trail with a small printed guide leaflet.

This battlefield was the end of the trail for the Nez Perce. In 1877, one year after the Custer battle, the Nez Perce were on the reservation in Eastern Oregon and Washington and western Idaho. Then their treaty was re-written, and the size of their reservation was decreased and relocated into Idaho. While being taken there, some of the tribe rebelled and drove off their escort. Some 2,000 Nez Perce decided to make a break for freedom and to join Sitting Bull in Canada.

They went over into Idaho, then the Bitterroot part of Montana, then into southern Idaho and east into what is now Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. Along the route, they had skirmishes and minor battles with the trailing soldiers, losing people (both warriors, and women/children) in each. They turned north and reached the Bear Paw mountains with 750 remaining.

Here, Colonel Miles caught up with them with 400 soldiers, coming from what is now Miles City, Montana. In late September, he attacked the Nez Perce as they were huddled in the bottoms of Snake Creek, shielding themselves from a cold north wind and rain.

The attack captured or killed many of the Nez Perce, most as they were trying to prevent their horses being taken by the soldiers (the soldiers got them). The remainder fought hard, and put the soldiers back onto the high ground with loss of life. Then they scrambled into a compact but poor defensive position in the bottoms.

The battle devolved into a siege, which went on into October. On October 1, Miles asked for a talk with a chief. Chief Joseph, one of the main chiefs, came under flag of truce. Miles put him under arrest despite the flag of truce, whereupon the Indians captured a lieutenant and held him. The two were exchanged the next day.

In the night of October 4/5, five inches of snow fell. Chief Joseph came to a talk with Miles and surrendered his rifle and people. His speech on surrendering included the phrase, "from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever".

The battlefield shows that the Nez Perce were really trapped. They couldn’t possibly have escaped. The sad part is that they were only 40 miles from the Canadian border, and freedom. The markers denoting historic events are decorated with tokens left by those in sympathy with their cause.

As we were leaving the battlefield, we observed for a while a ground squirrel (D thinks it was a prairie dog, but I don’t – we’ll have to analyze the video tape later). Then a harrier hawk flew by as we were getting into the truck.

We returned to Chinook from the battlefield; on the way, we saw first three antelope, then a pair of antelope, grazing near the road.

Jean’s bakery was our lunch spot today. The room was big and bright and the portions were large. D had beef noodle soup and a french dip, I had potato soup and a ham & cheese sandwich. My sandwich came on a large hoagy-size roll of black bread. Then dessert (included) of pumpkin pudding. This bill read $12.50, including coffee for me.

We toured the Blaine County museum, a really nice facility for a county museum. It has lots of well-explained artifacts from the community and surrounding area. One setting that impressed us was the exhibit on area churches, with lots of pictures, and the full altar from a mission Catholic church, augmented by donations from other churches.

Then we headed back to Havre. On the way, we saw a small, flat, animal cross the road in front of us that had a really weird gait, sort of a series of jumps where each jump was only about the length of the animal. I couldn’t recall ever seeing such a thing, so I jumped on the brakes and was nearly at a stop when it turned and looked back at us. When it did, Dolores recognized it immediately as a badger. I could see how this thing would be a terrible threat to a dog.

At Havre, we went to the railroad depot and took pictures of an old steam engine on exhibit there. We looked at the site of the Buffalo Jump from above and below without taking part in the formal tour.

Then we went to old Fort Assiniboine, six miles south of Havre. Access is limited to organized tours by Northern Montana University. NMU now owns 2,000 acres of the old fort and uses it for agricultural research. Even so, we could see several of the old buildings at the main part of the fort from the public roads. This fort was established about 1880 to counter the threat Sitting Bull and others posed from Canada. It was abandoned in the early 1900’s.

We wandered around downtown for a bit, then returned to the little house in the RV park.

There, I managed to get up on some structure and took pictures of the Great Northern’s big rotary snowplow, which includes two old "F" unit diesel engines that are attached to the plow only to power the big wheel that throws snow 100 feet or more. This whole assembly of plow-and-F-units is pushed by other engines into the snowdrifts. It must be spectacular in operation, but I’m not going to come back out here in the winter to watch it.

Dolores went to the small shop here and came back rubbing her arms with a lilac skin lotion, saying it was so dry she had to try it. I like lilac, so that’s no problem. I just asked her not to rub it in at bedtime, since I might think I fell asleep in a bush.

We ate a light dinner (we didn’t need much after that lunch) then did some planning for the next few days.

Dolores found a program she could watch on the only TV channel, so she did that while I did small chores and these notes.

We’re very happy that we stayed here for the day. We learned a lot about this place and its history.

Tomorrow, we go on to Wolf Point, MT. (Ed. Note: We skipped Wolf Point and went through to Williston, ND).