Before there’s a Missoula or a Montana, there’ll be Missoula County. That’s assured today when the government of Washington Territory in Tacoma creates the sprawling county in the territory’s easternmost region.
It will consist of all the land west of the Continental Divide in what a few years later is to become to Montana. Earlier this year 77 men petitioned for the new county. More than half of them belonged to Lt. John Mullan’s crew of road builders who spent the winter camped above St. Regis. Twenty-nine others came from the Jocko and Bitterroot valleys.
The county seat is located at the trading post of Hellgate on the Mullan Road, a few miles west of what will become the town of Missoula. Christopher Higgins and Francis Worden established the post in August, months after the petition to create the county was filed. Worden, Higgins and Thomas Harris are appointed the first county commissioners.
Dec. 15, 1890
Sitting Bull breathes his last breath, not far from the spot where he was born.
Forty-three reservation officers surround the cabin of the great Hunkpapa Lakota leader at daybreak on the Standing Rock Reservation in northern South Dakota. They’ve come to arrest Sitting Bull, fearing he leads or at least condones the Ghost Dance movement that is sweeping Sioux country.
Supporters of Sitting Bull, many of them Ghost Dancers, try to stop the policemen. One of them, Catch the Bear, wounds the leader of the reservation police. Red Tomahawk, another officer, fires his rifle at the same time, killing Sitting Bull instantly. Eleven others die in the skirmish.
In two weeks, on Dec. 19, nearly 300 Lakota men, women children will die at the hands of the U.S. Army at Wounded Knee Creek in southern South Dakota.
Dec. 20, 1955
It’s “time in” for the Missoula County courthouse clock, which as of 3:40 p.m. is working again. It had stalled in the midst of a massive snow fall four nights earlier at 11:30 p.m.
Courthouse janitors climb up to the clock and clear the snow from the face and ledges. The big counterweight is wound, the balance wheel given a shove and the ticking resumes.
Missoula is recovering from a week of icy temperatures and the heaviest December snowfall in the city’s history.
“It looks like an old fashioned winter,” remarked a Weather Bureau spokesman. Some 11 1/2 inches fell in less than 24 hours at the Missoula County Airport starting at midnight on Thursday, Dec. 15. Subzero temperatures and death-dealing blizzards across Montana followed Saturday night as a huge cold air mass roared out of Canada, through Montana and off to the Midwest and East Coast.
Santa Claus trains, laden with record numbers of letters, are delayed or don’t arrive at all. West Yellowstone recorded temperatures of 48 below over the weekend. The snow will turn to rain for Christmas, ruining ice skating prospects around the state.
Still, the courthouse clock in Missoula isn’t out of the woods. On duty since the courthouse opened in 1909, it freezes up at least once a winter and, as janitors point out, winter hasn’t started yet.
Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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Judy Minteer wrote on Dec 19, 2008 1:20 PM: