Betters' Station

I have a long-overdue update to my January 28, 2024 post about Baker's Station and J.C. Baker : My hunch that the death notice I found for Col. J.C. Baker in the March 27, 1897 edition of The Missoulian  was for a different J.C. Baker was correct. After sharing my post to the  Montana History Consortium Facebook Group , Willis Hintz found the correct notice for me in the May 1, 1895 edition of  The Missoulian . Today, I finally sought out that notice myself and am sharing it with you here: I have not found an obituary for Baker, and  the entry for Warm Springs State Hospital Cemetery at findagrave.com  warns that the cemetery is off-limits to everyone but family members of the deceased. Even family members can only visit with an appointment and when accompanied by a hospital administrator. With the Montana Historical Society reopening, I am going to see if there are any patient records for Baker in their collection of hospital records that can be shared publicly...

Following the lead of some train enthusiasts in a Facebook group I belong to, I decided to poke around on eBay recently to see if I could find any old photos of things and places I've been researching that I haven't been able to find elsewhere online. Unbelievably, one of the very first items I found was a souvenir booklet for Clinton School from the 1906-1907 school year that listed my great-grandpa Phillip Betters among the pupils and his dad, Austin Betters, and brother-in-law, Daniel McQuarrie, as trustees. Unfortunately, no photos of the students are included, but it does feature a photo of the teacher on the cover. The eBay listing called this thing a "cabinet card" (a thin photograph mounted on a card that usually had an embossed design), but this was more of a booklet than a photograph. With only two pages plus a front and back cover, even calling it a "booklet" is generous. I had never seen anything like it. I didn't even know what to call it. W...

Last weekend, I was reviewing and organizing digital copies of newspaper clippings I have acquired through the years and I came across something pretty amazing that I forgot I had discovered. On a trip to the Missoula Public Library on January 18, 2017, I found a newspaper column from September 1932 that gave an account of travelers on the Mullan Road sometime in the early 1880s which included a stop at the Pine Grove House. I found the column, written by  Grace Stone Coates , in The Big Timber Pioneer, but it was published in several Montana newspapers under the headline, "Three English Gentlemen Who Made Overland Journey from Missoula to Helena Fifty Years Ago, Experienced Hardships of Frontier Travel, Their Diaries Revealed." The column was made up almost entirely of excerpts from the travelers' diaries. I'm not sure if I knew what I had at the time. Coates' column wasn't very specific about dates, so I couldn't be sure if the travelers had stopped at t...

I have written previously about my attempts to nail down exactly when the Betters came to Montana and what route they took from Vermont.  In that post, I shared an article about Fannie (Betters) Nettle's 99th birthday, which stated that she came to Montana at age nine. If true, that would mean the Betters came to Montana sometime between May 3, 1879, and May 2, 1880, but I have since discovered that I should be skeptical of any facts sourced from an aged Fannie Nettle . Austin Betters' obituary in the October 9, 1921 edition of The Missoulian states that he came to Montana in 1881. Fannie told Don Omundson the same thing when he interviewed her in 1961. If it was 1881, Fannie would have been 10 or 11 when they took the train to Montana. A few months ago, I came across this notice  in the October 1, 1881 edition of The Butte Miner that included Austin Betters on a list of people with letters waiting for them in the Butte post office. This was a common practice in t...

The oft-repeated history of Clinton, Montana claims it was established in 1883 as a stage stop and post office on the Mullan Road and was initially known as Betters’ Station, named after my great-great-grandfather, Austin Betters. The reality is that Col. J.C. Baker had established a stage station on the Mullan Road in the vicinity of present-day Clinton at least 13 years earlier. Not only that, but the stage stop that became known as Baker's Station was much closer to the Wallace Mining District and the eventual locations of the railway stations for the NPRR and Milwaukee Road than the Betters homestead was. Baker's Station, the Stage Station The earliest mention I have found of Baker's Station in any printed documentation was in the January 20, 1872 edition of The Pioneer , which referred to Col. Baker as "the proprietor of Baker's station on the Deer Lodge road," but it's likely he established his stage station a few years before that. In the 1870 Censu...

In  this 1883 map of the Montana Territory from the Department of the Interior, General Land Office , Pineland is the only city or town between Missoula and Bears Mouth (now called Bearmouth) on the Mullan Road. As a point of reference, Stony Creek is what's known as Rock Creek today. From the November 23, 1882 edition of the Helena Weekly Herald : A new post-office has recently been established some miles below, which is very appropriately called Pine Land. A fine two story public house has been erected, which will be of great convenience to the traveling public. The proprietor, Mr. L. W. Frank, has had much experience as a landlord, and is well adapted for the business. The Pineland post office only existed from July 28, 1882 to April 2, 1883. In the Western Territories in the 1880s, getting the Post Office Department to approve a new post office was easy (Probably too easy) but the Pineland post office made some sense, being halfway between existing post offices in Missoula and ...