Trego's Mountain Ear

There are many spots in history where you can start Montana’s story – I’m looking for the spot where the Montana Attitude starts. Leslie Fiedler, in his 1949 essay about the Montana Face touched around it – but missed the moment and the incident.

Our origin includes Meriwether Lewis (whose Apron reside with Montana’s Grand Lodge in Helena) and Colter’s Run – John Colter, who mustered out from the Corps of Discovery early, who stayed in the mountains to begin the beaver trade, and who left Montana in 1810 and died a couple of years after returning to civilization (well, St. Louis, Missouri).

Even in grade school, I learned that the Custer legend didn’t pan out – but Custer barely made it into Montana before screwing up at the Little Big Horn. But his poor decision occurred after the Montana perspective began to develop.

Go back in history – and remember that Lewis and Clark passed through, Colter expanded on what they had mapped, but in the middle of the War Between the States, men from both North and South moved to Montana. And, in 1863, men from both sides came together for the funeral of William Bell. Bell, dying of natural causes, asked that he might receive a Masonic funeral. Seventy-six of his lodge brothers showed up for that funeral, and the realization hit, that while the criminals held the Sheriff’s office, they had the organization with a group of fraternity brothers that they could trust. (The seventy-six attending the funeral, plus the deceased William Bell totaled 77 – the final number of the Vigilantes 3-7-77. The blending of North and South wasn’t free of strain – Bozeman still has two separate Masonic Lodges, one originally formed of Confederates, the second Unionists.)

At any rate, the Montana Attitude begins with the organization of the Vigilantes – who, in a couple of months, organized, hanged the crooked sheriff, and restored law and order. With an origin like that, a fundamental mistrust of government – as personified by Sheriff Henry Plummer – and the willingness to confront that government, is kind of engrained in the collective psyche of Montana.

The next incident occur with Montana’s Acting Territorial Governor – Thomas Francis Meagher. Before President Andrew Johnson sent him to Montana, Meagher had used a horsewhip on an editor who criticized him (in New York, as I recall). As Montana’s acting governor, he threatened to repeat that behavior on the editor of the Virginia City paper. The editor responded with the invitation “Pistols for two and coffee for one?” I’m not real certain as to the date, but obviously it was before July 1, 1867, when Meagher disappeared from the deck of a steamboat at Fort Benton.

While Meagher, who was appointed Territorial Secretary, filled the position of Governor, he also ran up the territory’s debt to pay the militia – I recall reading of that debt being recently paid off shortly before I graduated grade school (though I may have been reading an old book).

In those three formative years, Henry Plummer set an example that made Montanans skeptical about trusting local government, while Governor Meagher showed us that state government was willing to incur a debt that would take most of the next century to pay off, as well as attempting to censor the press. I still kind of like Meagher, but if he was pushed off the steamboat, the perp may have had the idea that he deserved it. There’s a reason why Montanans tend to mistrust government – though I’m not sure today’s journalists would be ready to send the “Pistols for two and coffee for one?” response to the governor.