Oct. 12, 1909Montana commemorates Columbus Day for the first time, by decree of the state Legislature. Public offices, schools and banks across the state close their doors for the Tuesday observance, as do many private businesses.
The Billings Gazette urges readers to take advantage of a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored excursion to the Carbon County fair in Red Lodge, where Columbus Day activities include a war dance by Chief Plenty Coups and his Crow tribesmen. Ironically, ancestors of the Crow lived in America centuries before Columbus "discovered" it.
Colorado became the first state to proclaim Columbus Day four years earlier. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed that every Oct. 12th would be Columbus Day. The holiday has been on the second Monday of October since President Richard Nixon proclaimed it as such in 1971.
Oct. 13, 1863
President Abraham Lincoln appoints Gad Eli Upson as agent to the Blackfeet in northern Montana.
Upson succeeds Henry Reed, who earlier in the year accompanied the tribe's annual payment of money and goods up the Missouri River. Indian harassment induced Reed's steamboat to stop for the summer at Fort Union on the Montana-North Dakota border. Reed returned home to Iowa, where he was relieved of his post. Washington would send nine more agents to the Blackfeet reserve in the next 13 years.
Upson arrives at the agency in Fort Benton in December, the first government presence in 18 months.
"I found the affairs of the agency in a most deplorable condition, and the feelings of the Indians inclined to war and open hostilities - actual war existing among a portion of them," Upson write in his first report.
His two-year stint will do little to improve things. A trader says later: "He knew as much about Indians as I did about the inhabitants of Jupiter."
In 1865, Upson will be an unsuccessful Republican candidate for territorial delegate to Congress. He'll die en route to Washington, D.C. the following year.
Oct. 17, 1855
Indian leaders and Isaac Stevens, governor of Washington Territory, sign the Lame Bull (Blackfeet) treaty at Judith Landing, near the mouth of the Judith River. The pact establishes Indian hunting grounds east of the mountains.
The gathering was slated for Fort Benton, but when river traffic could not make it that far up the Missouri, the site was changed to a spot some 90 miles downstream. Stevens had just come from Council Grove in the Missoula area, where in July he had reached an agreement that established the Flathead reservation.
Thousands of people from the Flathead, Pend d'Oreille, Kootenai and Nez Perce tribes traveled from west of the mountains to the treaty site, joining the Blackfeet and their Gros Ventres allies.
During two days of meetings in a grove of cottonwoods, Stevens has convinced the Blackfeet to share their hunting grounds in southwestern Montana for 99 years in exchange for annual government payments. Their hunting grounds encompassing most of northern Montana were to remain their own.
Gold rushes and government malfeasance will severely test the treaty and lead to a series of shrinkages of Blackfeet lands. Lame Bull is a Blackfeet chief and first to sign the treaty below the names of Stevens and Indian commissioner Aflred Cumming.
Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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