The south end fell early Sunday morning, bashed by a toll bridge floating down from Hellgate Canyon.
A six-room house slid into Rattlesnake Creek at the east end of Pine Street, followed by O.B.S. Orr's large home where Cedar - East Broadway today - crossed the creek.
Missoulians and hundreds of stranded railroad travelers watched the dramas unfold in those rain-drenched days a century ago. They were all but shut off from the rest of the world as telegraph, telephone, road and rail lines were damaged or destroyed by the unrelenting rain.
“At an early hour this morning the flood situation in Western Montana had reached a stage unparalleled in the history of the state,” proclaimed the June 6 Missoulian, Arthur L. Stone editor.
It might have been an overstatement. Towns to the east no doubt begged to differ. The same day the river port of Fort Benton saw its own lifeline bridge disappear around a bend in the Missouri. Five people drowned in the Great Falls area, which had already been deluged in April when Hauser Dam upstream collapsed from bedrock leakage.
The streets of Helena were under water and the Capital City, a hub of rail traffic, sat isolated, with reports of up to 12 people drowned. A power plant dam burst and plunged Butte into darkness. The Northern Pacific line from Deer Lodge west resembled “one long sea.”
But for Missoula, at least, the Missoulian's alarmed pronouncement rang true. One hundred years later, it still does. The flood of 1908 is still the greatest natural disaster in the city's history.
The rains began May 7, after a light winter and a dry April. They pit-patted on thirsty farmlands and unpaved city streets, drumming on for a week.
Missoula's prayers were answered in mid-May when the skies cleared and brilliant sunshine greeted Interscholastic weekend. Three days of track and baseball were so blessed. Sunday was nice, too.
Then the imp gods of precipitation got serious. For the next three weeks, there was barely a respite from the downpour. The water level at a gauge near the Higgins Avenue Bridge rose from below 4 feet to well above 5 on the last day of May.
A puzzled reporter wrote, “This is as high as the river rose last season, and comes as a surprise, for the dearth of snow on the mountains was expected to presage low water this summer.”
So began the week the rivers roared.
Newspapers of the day are almost the only chroniclers of the Great Flood of 1908.As May turned to June, the Missoulian reported the Hell Gate and Missoula rivers were yet “far below the danger point,” but the Big Blackfoot was higher than it had been since 1892.
“It looks a little ugly to the tenderfoot, but the old-timer sneers at the suggestion that there is high water,” wrote Stone on June 1, in his popular column “Caught On the Run About Town.”
But this was a cold, raw, driving rain, with heavy snow in the mountains. And it was relentless. Precipitation on June 4-5 is still the greatest ever recorded in a 24-hour period since the weather bureau was established. Finally, the rivers rose in anger.
Commencement exercises at the University of Montana were postponed indefinitely when President Oscar Craig couldn't get home from Helena.
What Stone called “the big advertising sign that has for so long disfigured the upper end of the island above the Higgins avenue bridge” was swept away. A worker on the new Milwaukee Railroad at St. Regis watched it sail by, still intact.
“This much of the flood was highly gratifying,” Stone wrote.
Automobile travel was in its infant stage, and the railroad was the vehicle of choice for intercity and interstate travel. Not this week.
Some 1,000 people were stranded at the Livingston station, including Gov. Edwin Norris, on his way home from a conference in Washington, D.C. When it became clear the NP tracks west would not be operable any time soon, Norris walked 25 miles over Bozeman Hill and caught a train to Helena.
Stations at Nimrod and Bonita east of Missoula, as well as Haskell near Drummond, were literally swept away.
Among the 325 passengers on an eastbound train marooned at Clinton were the “anarchist orator” Emma Goldman, as well as the Butte-bound Tacoma Tigers, a professional baseball team and leader of the Northwest League.
They were among the 200 who walked three miles around a break at Turah and caught the Copper City local to Missoula to wait out the flood.
Not until June 5 did the crisis receive top billing on the front page of the Missoulian.
“Flood Situation in State Reaches a Serious Stage,” the headline said.
There was, the Missoulian said, the matter of two dams upstream. William Clark's power plant at Milltown had started electrifying Missoula five months earlier. It replaced the old steam plant at the north end of the Higgins bridge, though that was now back in commission after water flooded the powerhouse in Milltown.
The pool behind the older mill dam on the Big Blackfoot, a mile or so above Clark's dam, was bursting with logs from the spring river drive.
“The most dangerous phase of the situation at Bonner, to both the Clark dam and all the bridges along the Missoula river, is the log jam above the old dam, where (40 million) feet of logs are being held in check by the piers and booms which usually serve the purpose,” the newspaper reported. “Behind the logs is a big head of water, and it is feared that if the jam is once broken the whole mass of timber will sweep down the stream, carrying everything before it.
“To help relieve the head of water back of the jam a part of the old Bonner dam was blown away with dynamite last night. This resulted in the water lowering 13 inches.”
Meanwhile, Clark's dam stood “firm as a mountain,” assured a June 7 headline, and “solid as a rock” (June 8). Sheets of water a dozen feet deep and more poured over the 250-foot spillway, and 1,000 men rushed to shore up the dam's breakwater. They toiled in mud and water up to their knees to remove loose machinery and two dynamos stored in the powerhouse.
Charles Marsh, a city alderman, took a hand car to Bonner on Saturday, at the height of the flood, and reported back that the dam would stand.
“I learn that there is a report in town that the south end of the dam was successfully dynamited; this is not so,” Marsh said. “An attempt was made to shoot the top off the south end of the dam in order to divert the current, but it made no impression. Four shots were fired, but they didn't loosen a hatful of the dam. It is as solid as a rock.”
“Shortly before 6 o'clock last evening the sun broke through the clouds after 33 days of rain,” the Sunday morning Missoulian reported. “There is strong hope the worst is over.”
The scene, even in the sunshine, must have been devastating. Vast stretches of the valley up and down the river were under water. Greenough Park was flooded and the stately Greenough Mansion was surrounded by the overgrown Rattlesnake Creek. All but one bridge across the creek were gone. The Orchard Homes area looked like Lake Michigan, one wag said.Eyes rested on the remnants of the old wooden Higgins Avenue Bridge, the connection between old, bustling downtown Missoula and its growing south side. Indeed, progress had been a byword in the valley before the flood hit. Clark's new dam meant, among other things, the electric streetcar was coming to town. Missoula was getting a second railroad (the Milwaukee) on its south bank.
A nationwide “good roads” movement was under way. There was talk of paving the principal avenues of town. Within a few years, Missoula would catch a glimpse of the flying machines that everyone back East was talking about.
A new city-county bridge, located where the California Street pedestrian bridge is today, had been damaged by the flood but not wiped out. It was soon operable, if not handy.
North and south were connected by a swinging footbridge in ensuing months, but this was no time for makeshift. Even before the south section washed away on Sunday, Mayor J.M. Keith initiated a call for a wider concrete-and-steel expanse that could handle a burgeoning town and its recalcitrant river. It could cost, he warned, $100,000.
How's that for sticker shock in the midst of a flood?
The expensive bridge was completed in 1909, and lasted for more than half a century before it was replaced by the current one in 1962. The new span stood solid through two world wars and a Great Depression, hundreds of parades and at least a dozen river uprisings. But none held a candle to the Flood of '08.
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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