The Jawbone Railroad

By Editor

Meagher and Fergus Counties, Montana, 1895-1908

The railroad was called the Jawbone, and the name was a compliment.

It was given that name by the people of central Montana who watched its construction proceed, year after year, on the strength of what its promoters said rather than what they had. The Jawbone was a railroad built on talk: on the talk of Richard A. Harlow, a Helena attorney who had the gift of making men believe that a railroad through the Castle Mountains and down the Musselshell River valley was not merely possible but inevitable, and that the men who invested in it now would be glad they did. The talk was so persistent and so confident that the railroad actually got built, which is more than can be said for most talk of that kind.

Harlow had tried this once before. In 1893, he organized the Montana Midland and began construction eastward from Helena toward the mining districts of central Montana. The Panic of 1893 arrived almost simultaneously, which was poor timing, and the Montana Midland ceased to exist before it had built enough track to matter. A lesser man might have taken this as a sign. Harlow took it as a setback.

In 1894, he organized the Montana Railroad.

Construction began in 1895 at Lombard, a station on the Northern Pacific Railway 53 miles east of Helena, where the Sixteen Mile Creek empties into the Missouri River. The route proceeded eastward up Sixteen Mile Canyon, a narrow and dramatic gorge that required considerable engineering, and reached the mining district of the Castle Mountains in November 1896. The Castle Mountain mines were, at that moment, already past their peak. This was the kind of information that a more cautious man might have obtained before building a railroad to reach them, but Harlow was not that kind of man.

He extended the line.

In 1899, construction crews began working eastward down the Musselshell River valley, which was better country for a railroad: flatter, longer, and with agricultural traffic to supplement whatever the mines produced. The Montana Railroad reached the new town of Harlowton in 1900. The town was named after Harlow, which is the kind of honor that a man receives when he has talked a railroad into existence and the people along the route are grateful enough to overlook the financial details. The line reached Lewistown, 157 miles from Lombard, in 1903.

For five years the Montana Railroad operated independently, carrying ore from the Castle Mountains, grain from the Musselshell valley, and passengers between the small towns of central Montana. It connected with the Northern Pacific at Lombard and with nothing else, which limited its usefulness and its revenues. The financial position of the company was, as the nickname suggested, perennially weak. The railroad ran on Harlow's credit, on extensions of credit, on the goodwill of creditors who had heard enough of his talk to believe that the next year would be better.

In 1908, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad bought the Montana Railroad. The Milwaukee Road was building its own transcontinental line across Montana and needed the Lombard-to-Harlowton segment as part of the route. It paid for the railroad, rebuilt most of it to reduce the curvature and raise the Sixteen Mile Canyon trackage above the flood-prone canyon floor, and electrified the line beginning in 1914. The town of Harlowton became the eastern end of the Milwaukee Road's electrified zone, a distinction it held for sixty years.

Harlow got his money, or some of it, and the Jawbone ceased to be the Jawbone and became a segment of a transcontinental railroad, which is a more dignified thing to be but considerably less interesting. The Milwaukee Road abandoned its Montana trackage in 1980, and today only a short segment of the former Montana Railroad near the town of Moore remains in service. The grade through Sixteen Mile Canyon can still be traced, and the canyon is still narrow and dramatic, and the creek still floods in wet years, just as it always did.

The corporate cowshead logo of the Montana Railroad, from an 1899 system map, is the most cheerful artifact of the enterprise: a confident bovine face above the words "Canyon Line," advertising a railroad that was always one bad quarter away from stopping. It is the logo of a man who believed in what he was selling, which is not nothing, and who sold it long enough to get it built, which is more than nothing.

The Jawbone ran 157 miles on talk and nerve, and it got there.

See also

• Montana Railroad, Wikipedia
• Harlowton, Montana, named for Richard Harlow
• Sixteen Mile Creek, Montana, canyon route