Retracing history: Original Mullan Road full of rugged tales
By KIM BRIGGEMAN of the Missoulian
Take a video tour of the Mullan Road near Cyr
View a map of the Mullan Road route.
May 1860.
The Pony Express had just begun its quick gallop across the West. Not a year later, the Civil War broke out back east.
Lt. John Mullan's men had reached a formidable foe on their road-building excursion across the Northern Rockies a few miles west of Alberton: a spur of mountain that blocked easy passage along the north bank of what they called the Bitterroot River.
The choices: Bridge the river, go around “Big Mountain,” or blast a route over the Purple Cliffs and side-hill the south face.
Motorists on Interstate 90 near the Fish Creek exit can look up - way up - and get a notion of Mullan's solution.
He called it the “Big Side Cut,” and it took six weeks to build six miles of road. Six weeks after that, the road was completed all the way to Fort Benton, another 250 miles.
“It was a severe piece of work, and cost us the labor of 150 men,” Mullan later wrote in his official report. “Being rocky in most places, we were compelled to blast when, by a premature explosion, one of our men, (Fred) Sheridan, lost one of his eyes and another, Robert P. Booth, was severely stunned.”
High above the Clark Fork River and Triple Bridges, Chuck Mead stands: along a portion of the Mullan Road that was built in 1860 and connected Fort Walla Walla, Wash., with Fort Benton. “I like Western history to start with, and then you're sitting right in the middle of Western history,” said Mead, whose property contains portions of the historic road.
Photo by LINDA THOMPSON/Missoulian
Floating the Alberton Gorge just got more exciting, knowing the dramas that occurred a few hundred feet overhead 148 years ago.
It's the kind of thing that keeps Mullan's Military Wagon Road alive for folks like Chuck Mead.
Mead pulled his pickup to a halt last week along a private road above the gorge and west of his ranch at Cyr. A small pine tree blocked the way. In a few cuts with a chainsaw Mead, 74, reopened the original route of the Mullan Road - and the irony didn't escape him.
Few things involving Mullan do, especially along this stretch, where later highway and interstate engineers chose the other side of the river. Since his boyhood, Mead has been tromping and tracing Montana's first engineered road (don't call it a trail), which ran from Fort Walla Walla to Fort Benton.
Come Sunday and Monday, Mead will help guide daylong field trips for those signed up for the third annual Mullan Days Conference.
An early stop will be the 1.7-mile hike in the “Point of Rocks,” just east of the Big Side Cut. It's a public hiking and biking trail that's still under development by the Montana Department of Transportation. Mead owned much of the stretch along the abandoned Milwaukee rail bed before transferring it into public use in a three-way land swap with MDT and the state Department of Natural Resources.
The process began in the late 1990s and took six years to complete.
“The whole thought of it was I thought we've got to save the Mullan Road,” Mead said.
Now a couple of interpretive signs direct foot travelers through the nooks, ledges and crannies through which Mullan ran his road.
Mead points to patches of tulips and irises that grow untended near the remains of an old homestead built along the original road.
He'll show the remnant of rusty black powder cans, lying on the ground in a narrow rock cut that even he didn't notice until friend Bill Weikel stumbled on it several years ago.
“I don't think anybody had recognized it for what it was at that time, because it was in the midst of the trees then, before the (2005) fire,” said Weikel, a Missoula land surveyor and history buff. “I just happened on to something that got me down in that direction and tripped on it.”
“I always thought that was the Mullan Road up there until we got to looking at it,” Mead said.
Turns out a more discernible track upslope from the wagon cut was a reroute created by the Milwaukee Railroad in 1906 or 1907.
The fire three years ago revealed another treasure, this one discovered by Jon Axline, author and historian for the Department of Transportation. It's a telegraph pole, slightly charred, that has survived upright since the line went through not many years after the road did.
On Sunday afternoon, Mead will treat conference-goers to a wagon ride, towed by tractor, across the Big Side Cut and Purple Slide, private ground not normally open to the public.
The next day the bus tour moves farther west - to Tarkio, at the western end of the Big Side Cut; to the impressively substantial Mullan Road exhibit at the Mineral County Museum in Superior; over Camel's Hump near St. Regis; and to Cantonment Jordan, Mullan's winter camp in 1859-60.
Everybody knows the Mullan Road.
It's the one that runs past Super Wal-Mart in Missoula, to the “pulp mill” and on to Frenchtown. Other sections of the road - not to mention an Idaho town, a couple of mountain passes and seven granite monuments dedicated in 1916 and 1917 - bear the name of the dogged man who first explored this area for Isaac Stevens' railroad survey in 1853-54.
The Mullan Road entered Montana at Sohon Pass, also called St. Regis Pass, just west and south of today's interstate crossing at Lookout Pass.
The road, and all public roads since, followed the St. Regis River bottom until it reached Henderson, eight miles west of St. Regis. At that point the Mullan Road, and the Yellowstone Trail and U.S. Highway 10, left the river and the interstate route to venture over the Camel's Hump before descending to what we call the Clark Fork River.
It crossed, via ford and ferry, just north of St. Regis, and remained north of the river all the way to Missoula, and some 35 miles beyond.
“My interpretation is that basically they wanted to stay on south-facing slopes that would be drier and had less timber,” Weikel said.
The original intent of the road was military and utilitarian, to transport Army troops into the Northwest. Congress appropriated funds for the original 624-mile sweep in 1859-60, and for a second expedition in 1861-62 that improved and, in a few cases, changed the route.
The Army used the road just twice, the first soon after it was completed in 1860, when Mullan escorted Major George Blacke and 292 soldiers back across it to Fort Walla Walla. But miners began trickling, then flooding, over the road within months - upward of 20,000 of them in the first few years, populating gold camps in Idaho and Montana.
Even as Mullan's men were blasting through the Big Side Cut and Point of Rocks in June 1860, Frank Worden and Christopher Higgins were pulling out of Walla Walla on the new road, bound for the Missoula Valley to establish a trading post among the Flatheads. The two men are recognized as the founders of Missoula.
The Mullan Road itself cost $230,000 to build, money Stevens and Mullan helped squeeze from Congress just before and during the Civil War. Parts of it almost immediately deteriorated in the harsh mountain conditions, and few ever traveled the entire course.
Much, but thankfully not all, the road was covered by later paths. Those that weren't, on accessible stretches such as Camel's Hump and Points of the Rock, lend an air of Old West romance.
Why does it matter any more?
For Mead, it's personal.
The road runs right through the ranch where he grew up, between the Big Side Cut and Point of Rocks.
“I like Western history to start with, and then you're sitting right in the middle of Western history,” he said.
“Why does anybody care where Lewis and Clark went?” posed Weikel. “Why do they have a plaque in the middle of a street in Boston that says site of the Boston Massacre, with 20-story buildings all around it?
“People become infatuated with a point in history, any point in history, any event in history, and if they read about it in a book, that's good. But if they can go out and feel like they are probably where somebody traveled 200 years ago or whatever, it gives them a warm fuzzy.”
The Mineral County Historical Society, host of this week's Mullan Days Conference, has thrown an annual Mullan Days party of its own since 1989. The concept gained wider acceptance a couple of years ago, as the 150th anniversary of the road's construction approached.
The first conferences on a larger scale were in Helena in 2006 and in Spokane last year. The next two are slated for Walla Walla, Wash., in 2009 and Fort Benton in 2010.
“People are interested in all the different aspects of the Mullan Road,” said Kay Strombo, curator of the historical museum in Mineral County. “It could be cartography, it could be engineering, it could be people interested in the weather. We have some people who are interested because of the family history.”
Strombo said 75 people signed up for the Missoula conference, from as far away as Maryland, Wisconsin and Colorado. Most, however, will come from Montana, to experience their own piece of the road.
“It's an integral part of the history of western Montana,” Strombo said.
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
Point of Rocks
You can best experience the original Mullan Road in western Montana on a 1.7-mile hiking trail at the Point of Rocks segment west of Alberton. From I-90 Exit 75, follow the North Frontage Road two miles and cross the bridge over Mountain Creek. Park in a gravel pit on your left and walk through the gate along the old Milwaukee Railroad grade. A new interpretive sign on your right will point to the trail.
