Brave New World

By editor

Missoula, Missoula County

Captain John Mullan was not a man given to romantic descriptions of the landscape. He was a road-builder, and he looked at the country the way a road-builder looks at it: as a problem to be solved. When he established Cantonment Wright in the autumn of 1861, just beyond the Blackfoot River, he described the place as a "cold and bleak place" and his quarters as an "abode of not over much comfort." This was not a man who would have written a poem about the mountains.

What he did instead was build a bridge. Six log cabins went up first, housing his men through the winter while he planned the following year's construction on the Mullan Road. Then, through the biting cold, his crew spanned the Blackfoot with a 235-foot crossing that was finished by March. It was described at the time as a "picturesque piece of architecture," which is the kind of compliment a bridge gets when the man paying for it is not the one who built it. The bridge lasted a few years before high water took it. Cantonment Wright was abandoned two months after the bridge was finished. The whole enterprise had the character of a military operation: arrive, build, move on.

Hell Gate was already there when Mullan arrived. Frank Worden and Christopher Higgins had established the trading post a year earlier, in 1860, and it had developed a reputation proportionate to its name. In four years of existence, with a permanent population that never exceeded twenty souls, nine men died violently there. Mullan set up camp nearby and apparently found this unremarkable, or at least unworthy of comment.

The crossing at the Blackfoot confluence proved more durable than any of these early structures. By 1896, Missoula County had built the Black Bridge across the Blackfoot, near the site of Mullan's original span. It served for over a decade before a flood in 1908 damaged it badly enough to require repairs. The repaired bridge held until 1919, when the Montana State Highway Commission and Missoula County together funded a replacement. The Security Bridge Company of Billings finished the new Black Bridge in 1922, at a cost of nearly $110,000, making it the most expensive bridge built in Montana to that point. It carried U.S. Highway 10 traffic for thirty years.

By 1950, engineers had declared it "quite dangerous," and a new crossing was built downstream. The old bridge sat unused for decades. Then, in a display of civic determination that Mullan would probably have approved of, Missoula County and a local Save Our Bridge committee raised the funds to rehabilitate it. In 2008, the two original spans were combined into a single longer crossing, eliminating the need for a pier in the river. The rehabilitated Black Bridge is now more than 56 feet longer than the original, and it still carries traffic across the Blackfoot.

Mullan's road is a highway now. His "cold and bleak place" is a city. The bridge he built in the winter of 1861 is gone, but the crossing it established is not.