A wonderful Piece of Engineering: The Mullan Road

By editor

Saltese, Mineral County, Montana

Before the Northern Pacific and the Milwaukee Road cut steel through the mountains of western Montana, there was a wagon road with a soldier’s name on it. Lieutenant John Mullan spent the years 1859 to 1862 building a military supply route from Fort Benton on the Missouri to Fort Walla Walla on the Columbia—roughly 624 miles of clearing, grading, bridging, and fording across country that did not want a road.

The engineering was not elegant. It was stubborn. Crews cut timber, laid corduroy over swamps, and crossed the same rivers again and again—dozens of fords on the St. Regis and Coeur d’Alene alone. Passes had to be found and then improved enough for wagons. Floods in 1862 wrecked bridges almost as soon as they were finished. The road was usable, then damaged, then repaired, which is the biography of most frontier infrastructure.

For Montana, the Mullan Road mattered because it stitched the Missouri and Columbia drainages together before railroads made the stitch permanent. It moved troops, freight, and emigrants. It also rerouted commerce in ways that hurt older posts: Fort Owen, once a Bitterroot hub, lost through traffic when the road bypassed it. The corridor Mullan pioneered later guided rail alignments and, eventually, the interstate logic of the northern Rockies.

The marker near Saltese asks travelers on a modern highway to notice an older line in the same mountains—a “wonderful piece of engineering” that was wonderful mainly because it existed at all. The snags and cuts of later railroads get more photographs. The Mullan Road gets the quieter credit of having gone first.

See also

• A Lost World at Saltese, Mineral County
• The Route of the Hiawatha at East Portal, Mineral County
• St. Paul Pass Tunnel at East Portal, Mineral County