Betters' Station

During my last visit to the Mansfield Library Archives and Special Collections, I discovered a newspaper clipping that offered greater clarity on how and when the Betters arrived in Montana from Vermont. The article, from the March 8, 1966 edition of The Missoulian , was primarily about 95-year-old Fannie (Betters) Nettle and her 72-year-old son, Ernest Terry, signing up for the newly created Medicare program and their daily habit of drinking mineral-rich water from Ern's mine in the Wallace Mining District. But this is the part that interested me: With this information, we can eliminate my previous theory that the Betters came to Montana on the Utah & Northern (U&N) Railway. Knowing that Austin came to Montana first, and his family joined him later explains some previously incongruous information. As I noted before , Austin's obituary stated that he came to Montana in 1881, and Fannie said the same thing when Don Omundson interviewed her in 1961. The fact that a letter...

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 ...

I wasn't planning on posting today, but I accidentally happened upon a May 1903 USGS topographic map of Clinton tonight, so I decided to take a closer look at it and see if I could see the spur track mentioned in the Mickelsen papers . Lo and behold, the map shows one! The track wasn't very long at all (See blue arrow below). It definitely didn't reach the mining camps -- It didn't even reach Wallace Creek -- but there must have been enough activity from mining and logging that it was needed. The map, which is based on surveys from 1900, also shows the Betters/McQuarrie home (See green arrow). There are lots of other fun things to see on the full map, which you can access yourself at the USGS website .

I haven't yet been able to return to the Mansfield Library in Missoula, but a helpful employee in Archives and Special Collections saved me a trip. She took a look through the Northern Pacific Railway Company records I mentioned in a previous post and reported that she did not find any references to Wallace, Blossburg, Clinton, or McQuarrie within. She referred me to the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), which was next on my list anyway. MNHS will digitize records in their collection upon request for a small fee, so last month I ordered the scan of two folders listed in their finding aid as "Origins of names of stations and townsites." My order was delivered digitally today and I am going to share with you what I found. First, an attribution: Most of the pages appear to be part of a typewritten document titled: Northern Pacific Railway The Origin and Historic Significance of the Names of Towns and Stations Located on the Lines of the Railway A Record Compiled by John ...

I visited the Lewis and Clark Library in Helena earlier this month. While there, I decided to see if they had anything in their collection that would be useful for my research. They did! The book, Tough, Willing, and Able by Lois Flansburg Haaglund "tells the story of the Flansburgs, a logging family in Clinton, Montana, whose combined courage sustains them through the hardships of the Great Depression and beyond." Not only did the library have this book in its collection, it was in circulation and it was on the shelf, so I checked it out. I'm pretty sure I had heard about this book before, but even when I had a copy of it in my hands at the Lewis & Clark Library, I didn't fully understand its potential relevance to my family history research. The Flansburg name was familiar to me, though, and since the book was about a logging family in Clinton, I figured it was worth a read, in case there was some useful information in it. I realized later why the Flansburg name...

I came across this August 17, 1964 photo of the then-newly-constructed interstate highway near Clinton at the Montana History Portal . I have been hoping to find construction photos of the interstate where it passes through the Betters homestead, but this is the closest I have come. This is west-northwest of Clinton, where the interstate crosses over the railroad. The view is looking west-northwest (towards Missoula). I have labeled notable landmarks. One thing I haven't yet delved into in my research is the McQuarrie siding. If you have driven past Clinton on the interstate, you may have seen sign(s) for it. I have included a photo I took in 2013 below. At first, I thought McQuarrie had been a station on the NPRR, but it's too close to Clinton for that to make any sense. Dan McQuarrie was heavily involved in logging, so my current theory is that the siding was where he loaded his logs onto railcars. Ironically, there is an old rock quarry in the vicinity. I don't know when...

In  Don Bert Omundson's 1961 thesis "Study of place names in Missoula County, Montana,"  his entry for Wallace simply said, "(See Clinton)." However, he did include an entry for Wallace Creek: T12N Rl7W. Empties into the Clark Fork River from the e. near Clinton. Named for Lieutenant Wallace who captured some warring Blackfeet Indians there in 1878. (L. Custer Keim) Previous Names: Camas Trail Creek. This name existed as late as 1886, the year in which water rights were taken out on this stream. At that time this name was in concurrent usage with the name which later succeeded it, Wallace Creek. (Forest Swartz) Omundson's source, Lawrence Custer Keim, misidentified the tribe but correctly identified the origin of the place name Wallace. And he should know. His father, Frank M. Keim, was one of the three men who founded the Wallace Mining District. It looks like Omundson was well on his way to finding the truth. His thesis included a three-page supplement/app...