Betters' Station

The 2014 Mullan Road Conference will be held in Missoula May 2-4. Here's what the organizers have to say about the conference: The 2014 Mullan Road Conference is coming to Missoula May 2-4, just in time to help Montana celebrate its 150th year of territoryhood.  Take a step back to the 1860s to hear stories from some of the nation's foremost experts about what happened and what's happening on the road that built Montana. The conference evolved out of the annual Mullan Day celebration that was initiated 25 years ago by the Mineral County Historical Society in Superior, Montana. Since 2006 it has been held each spring along the 624-mile military wagon road that Lieutenant John Mullan and his crews engineered and built in 1859-62 through the Northern Rockies from Walla Walla to Fort Benton.  A Friday night reception hosted by Fort Missoula museums will be followed on Saturday by a day of presentations and an evening banquet at Ruby’s Reserve Street Inn. On Sun...

I was in Missoula for the Montana Masters State Championship Swim Meet this weekend, and was able to snag 55 minutes at the Missoula Public Library before they closed. It was hard to know what to do with such little time. Thankfully, I had previously started a list of things I knew I wanted to search for the next time I was in Missoula, and I was able to access that list on my iPad. I came up empty-handed on the few specific things I was looking for, but then I found one of the books Roberta Carkeek Cheney had listed in the bibliography of Names on the Face of Montana  that I thought might possibly reference Betters' Station:  Missoula Valley History  by Jo Rainbolt and Dorothy Brumback. The book is 500+ pages, and the index and table of contents weren't much help, so I just started flipping and skimming from the beginning. I didn't make it all the way through the book, but I did find a reference to my ancestors' family members (see below). The Mrs. Dan...