Oct. 4, 1866Green Clay Smith arrives in Virginia City to assume his duties as Montana's second territorial governor.
He succeeds Sidney Edgerton, who had gone east the year before and never returned. Smith was a Kentucky Union Democrat and an officer in both the Mexican and Civil wars. He was elected to Congress in 1862 and resigned his Army commission a year later.
A generally effective administrator, Smith went to Washington, D.C., in 1867 to lobby for Montana causes. He left the reins of government to territorial secretary Thomas Francis Meagher. The resulting chaos included the appropriation of more than
$1 million to put down an overstated Indian uprising that included the death of explorer John Bozeman. Meagher mysteriously died in the Missouri River at Fort Benton on July 1, 1867.
Smith resigned his post in 1869 and turned to the ministry. In 1876, he ran for president on the National Prohibition party ticket. Smith was a pastor in Washington, D.C., when he died in 1895. He's buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Oct. 2, 1884
In the early morning hours, Father Anthony Ravalli dies at St. Mary's Mission in present-day Stevensville.
His death, after 2 1/2 months of intense suffering, is met with widespread sorrow among the Salish Indians he served and befriended at the mission. Many of them are east of the mountains hunting, but those who remain come to the mission to pay homage later in the day.
Ravalli first arrived at St. Mary's in 1845, recruited from his native Italy by Father Pierre DeSmet, who established the mission four years earlier. The mission closed in 1850 but was reopened 16 years later, prompting Ravalli's return. He remained in the Bitterroot Valley the rest of his years.
A skilled architect, the Jesuit priest was Montana's first physician and built its first grist and sawmills. The church he built, as well as his medical shop, remain standing today. He is buried in the mission's cemetery.
Sept. 29, 1887
The town of Fort Benton grandly celebrates the arrival of Jim Hill's Manitoba Railroad, later known as the Great Northern.
Hill arrives by special train from his office in Minneapolis, and he's greeted with parades, banners and speeches. The festivities center around the driving of a silver spike by Hill's wife in the afternoon.
The Manitoba has reached Fort Benton after frenzied construction advanced it from Minot, N.D., starting in April. The ultimate destination is the young town of Great Falls, founded by Hill's friend and business partner Paris Gibson. The Manitoba will reach there a couple of weeks later.
Hill, Gibson and other partners founded the First National Bank in Great Falls in 1886, and Hill is opening a coal mine in nearby Sand Coulee. But plans to run the main line of his Pacific Coast railroad through Great Falls will change dramatically the next winter. One of his engineers discovers Marias Pass, and the Great Northern's path reverts to the Hi-Line and the outskirts of what will become - with ample help from the railroad - Glacier National Park.
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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