An even older woman sits on the other side of the girl and the Lady Blackrobe. She is probably Pe-na-ma, the girl's Salish mother.
The framed photograph hangs on the Heritage Wall in the cafeteria at St. Patrick Hospital.
Mary of the Infant Jesus, after traveling from Montreal via Panama, arrived at the St. Ignatius mission with three other Catholic nuns in 1864 to found a school for girls. She died at the mission 53 years later, three years after this picture was taken.
The Indian women beside her are not identified, but Troy Felsman knows who they are.
At his home in Arlee, Felsman has other pictures of the younger woman, Sophie Revais. She was his great-great-grandmother.
On a hot day more than 150 years earlier, she camped with her family on a creek we now call Gold, in western Powell County. Her father - Francois Finley, better known as “Benetsee” or “Penetzi” - was sick in camp and sent Sophie on an errand.
“The family story I heard is that Sophie was the one who truly found the first gold while fetching water one morning,” Felsman said earlier this summer. “She put the shiny pieces in her hair bandanna, and when she returned her father asked her where she found it. So the story goes.”
Sophie's find, if it was hers, occurred in either 1850 or 1852. Penetzi Finley would go down in history for it, though his role is overshadowed by later prospectors on the same creek. Word got out, gold seekers trickled in, then flooded the country when larger strikes were made at Bannack, Alder Gulch and Last Chance Gulch in the 1860s.
In less than 15 years, this territory was transformed from an outpost of Oregon Territory, one populated almost solely by Native tribes, into, well, Montana.
“I wish my father could have seen this,” Felsman says. “We've been through Gold Creek I don't know how many times by the exit, but you have no idea really what's back here just by going where I-90 goes through.”
He has brought two of his own sons, 15-year-old Kyle and 10-year-old Zach, to Gold Creek on an early summer day. The stream dances through mostly private property now, past soft meadows and a forest of fir and pine, in and out of sunlight, on its way to the Clark Fork River several miles below.
The Felsman men stand on a U.S. Forest Service bridge and try to imagine their ancestor on a creek bank below, sifting golden glitter from the black sand into her head scarf.
Joe Dog Felsman died last fall. Kyle and Zach's grandfather was a Marine, a former tribal council chairman for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, a chaplain for the Mission Valley Honor Guard. He was schooled in part by Ursuline nuns, who brought a boys' boarding school to the mission to augment the girls' school founded by Mary of the Infant Jesus.
“My dad passed on so many stories over the years about his dad and his mother, and the stories he had heard about the old lady Sophie,” Troy Felsman says.
Penetzi Finley traded horses as far away as California, so he and his family could well have established a camp near where Felsman and his sons stand, just before the canyon opens into broad pastureland.
Troy Felsman and his sons Zach, left, and Kyle pause at a meadow up Gold Creek recently. Felsman is a great-great-grandson of Sophie Revais, and heard stories of her gold find from his father.
TOM BAUER/Missoulian
History is as malleable as gold. Who really first came upon gold in Montana?
Father Pierre DeSmet was said to be aware of its existence in the Bitterroot Valley in the 1840s. Gov. Isaac Stevens and his railroad survey parties that included John Mullan, knew about gold in these hills in 1853 and '54.
An entry in the journals at Fort Owen, present-day Stevensville, on Feb. 15, 1852 read, “Gold hunting found some.” That discovery has been attributed to Samuel Caldwell, on a branch of Burnt Fork Creek. There's the tale of a mountain man, John Silverthorne, showing up at Fort Benton with gold in 1856. He refused to say where he got it, and imaginations ran wild.
Surely over the millennia the Native people who preceded all these in Montana noticed the same kind of glitter in a creek bottom that Sophie did.
Granville Stuart, his brother James, and two other miners were diverted to Montana on their way home from the California gold fields. In 1858, aware of Finley's find several years before, they did a cursory dig on Gold Creek and found promising color.
Three years later, they were back and equipped for some serious digging. Their hand-hewn town of American Fork rose at the crossing of the new Mullan Road. The Stuarts never got rich at Gold Creek, but they kept a journal of those days, later incorporated by Granville in his book “Forty Years on the Frontier.”
A memorial was erected in 1917 at the mouth of the creek, overlooking the Northern Pacific Railroad. It stands today, hidden behind cottonwood trees - two whitewashed side panels, each proclaiming “First Gold Discovery In Montana Made Here.” Arthur Stone, dean of journalism at the University of Montana and past editor of the Missoulian, gave the keynote address at the October dedication ceremony. Stuart, who died the following year, spoke as well.
The inscription on the granite shaft is still visible. It begins, “This monument is erected to permanently identify the gulch in which gold was first discovered in the present state of Montana on the second day of May 1858 by Granville Stuart, James Stuart, Reece Anderson and Thomas Adams, prospectors.”
There is no mention of either Penetzi or Sophie Finley.
“You know it was sort of a cultural thing,” Troy Felsman says. “But it's infuriating when it's part of your own family.”
Penetzi Finley is referred to as “Benetsee” in most history accounts, but Felsman points out there's no equivalent of “B” in the Salish language. Where his name pops up in old mission records, it's spelled with a “P.”
He was familiar with gold and its allure. A mixed breed of French and Indian descent, he came from the Red River country of Manitoba, probably one of some 18 offspring of legendary Jocko Finley.
Penetzi was in this country by 1829. During the 1840s he is believed to have made trading trips to California, and when gold was found there he joined the rush in 1849.
Finley also helped build Fort Connah in 1846, and is credited with shaping its name. After Angus McDonald took over the British-owned Hudson's Bay Company trading post northeast of St. Ignatius in 1847, he dubbed it “Fort Connen” after a river in his native Scotland. Finley couldn't get his tongue around “Connen,” and McDonald went with “Connah.”
“It sounds like Angus had a sense of humor,” Felsman says.
When the Finleys made their modest find on Gold Creek, they took the gold to Fort Connah. McDonald sent it to another Hudson's Bay post to be evaluated. It proved golden, and though McDonald's business had little use for a gold rush, word of the find got out and eventually reached the Stuarts.
Penetzi Finley's fate is unknown. His name and that of one of his wives, Susanna, appears often as witnesses to baptisms at St. Ignatius mission in the 1850s.
“He was listed as a hunter/trapper as late as the 1860s, but nobody knows the story of how and when he died,” Felsman says.
Sophie Finley was born in 1842 and died at St. Ignatius in 1921. She married Charles Revais (also spelled “Rivet”) in 1860 at the mission. Revais died in 1873 in a logging accident on Ten Mile Creek near Helena.
A cousin of Felsman's, David “Chalk” Courchene, has researched hundreds of limbs of the Jocko Finley family tree. He says Sophie showed up at the St. Ignatius mission with a young daughter in 1865, the year after the Sisters of Providence founded their school.
She probably spent the rest of her life there, serving as an invaluable aid to Mother Mary of the Infant Jesus, translating the Salish language to the French-speaking Sisters. Sophie would have been fluent in both, Felsman says.
The daughter Sophie Revais brought with her to the Mission in 1865 was 3-year-old Theresa Sophia. Theresa married a German immigrant, Henry Felsman, in 1886 and Felsman built an old country-style, three-story ranch house below St. Mary Lake that stands today.
The Felsmans' oldest son, Oswald, was Troy Felsman's grandfather. He didn't get along with his father. In 1914, Henry Felsman went to Missoula and asked the county attorney to be placed in the state insane asylum because, as Troy Felsman puts it, “his kids had gone back to the blanket.”
Among other complaints, Henry said Oswald ran away from school, presumably one for white children, and became a clerk in a reservation store.
“He wants me to sell my place and buy an aut'mobile,” Henry told the court. “He is after me all the time.”
Joseph “Joe Dog” Felsman was born to Oswald and Annie Felsman in 1932. Joe Dog's son, Troy, has committed the family lineage and much of its history to heart. It's a trait, he says, that was passed on by his father.
“He had so much pride in his heritage, in terms of both his dad's side and his mother's side,” says Troy. “He had known about Penetzi. One of his brothers played Penetzi in a school play.”
A memorial erected in 1917 near the mouth of Gold Creek proclaims it to be the gulch where gold was first discovered in Montana by Granville Stuart and others, but makes no mention of Penetzi or Sophie Finley.
TOM BAUER/Missoulian
Troy Felsman's job as a surgical supplier takes him to St. Patrick Hospital often. But he was there every day last fall for another reason. Joe Dog was dying of cancer.
One October day, Felsman noticed people assembling the heritage display in the cafeteria. It commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Sisters of Providence coming west in 1856.
“We took compassion, caring and courage and looked through the pictures of the Sisters to find photos we felt depicted those things,” says Mary Anne Sladich-Lantz, vice president of mission leadership at St. Pat's.
Felsman did a doubletake when he saw the picture of Sophie and Pe-Na-Ma going up. He has a photo of the same two women, taken perhaps 20 years earlier, on his own wall at home.
Troy noticed that while Sister Mary was identified, the other two women weren't. He says he pointed it out to a hospital worker.
“I wanted them to put their names up as well, because I feel sometimes in old photos the Indians are more used for props,” he says.
Still the photograph of his great-great-grandmother and her mother, displayed on the wall of a hospital founded by the Sisters of Providence, took on a special meaning when his father passed away two days later.
“I just thought it was so fitting in a way, losing him but to have part of his family memorialized like that,” Felsman says.
He's proud that Sophie helped the Sisters strengthen Christian ties among the Indians.
“There are people today, tribal members, who try to say the church was bad. I think that Chief Charlo and those chiefs before him asked the Fathers to come here for a reason - and she was trying to honor that,” he says.
Felsman's wife Trina works at the Salish Language Revitalization Institute in Arlee, and his sons go or went to the school. Every day, they benefit from another of the legacies Sophie left, as a translator of her native languages.
“Part of the reason we're able to have dictionaries of the Salish language from back in 1870 is people like her,” Felsman points out.
“I guess the main thing for me, what's important to me, is my dad told me a lot, and I'm passing it on to my kids,” he says. “There's a rich history there, both on the Indian and mixed-blood side and the white side. It all comes together, and we're just trying to preserve that.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at (406) 523-5266 or by e-mail at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
Photographer Tom Bauer can be reached at (406) 523-5270 or at tbauer@missoulian.com.
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