Missoula County War Memorial

By editor

Missoula, Missoula County, Montana, 1927

The Missoula County War Memorial was erected in 1927 by the Auxiliary of the American Legion, Hellgate Post No. 27, in honor of the men of Missoula County who made the supreme sacrifice during the World War. Thirty-eight names are inscribed on the original memorial. The names are arranged alphabetically, which is the democratic way of listing the dead. It does not distinguish between officers and enlisted men, between the man who died in the first week of the war and the man who died in the last.

The names on a war memorial are the residue of ordinary lives interrupted. They were farmers and miners, students and shopkeepers, men who had grown up in the Bitterroot Valley and the Clark Fork drainage, who had gone to school in Missoula and worked in the timber mills and the railroad yards. They went to war because they were called. They did not come back.

The World War, as it was called before there was a second one to distinguish it from, killed approximately 117,000 Americans between 1917 and 1918. Montana sent approximately 40,000 men to the war and lost 1,568 of them. Missoula County's thirty-eight dead were a small fraction of that number, and Montana's dead were a small fraction of the total, and the American dead were a small fraction of the war's total dead, which was somewhere between fifteen and twenty million, depending on how you count. The counting is difficult because the records are incomplete and because some of the dead were killed by the influenza pandemic that followed the war, and it is not always clear which cause to assign to which body.

The memorial does not concern itself with these larger numbers. It concerns itself with thirty-eight men from Missoula County. Their names are on the stone. That is the accounting.

A second roll of honor was added later, dedicated to the memory of those who gave their lives in World War II, from December 1941 to September 2, 1945. More than 150 names from Missoula County appear on that list. The second war killed approximately 405,000 Americans, which is a larger number than the first war, though the first war killed a larger proportion of the men who fought in it. These are the kinds of comparisons that statisticians make. The men on the memorial are not statistics.

The American Legion, Hellgate Post No. 27, was organized in Missoula in 1919, the year after the war ended. Hellgate is the name of the canyon through which the Clark Fork River enters the Missoula Valley, a name given by the French-Canadian fur traders who found the canyon dangerous. The post took its name from the canyon, which is the kind of thing that men who have been to war sometimes do: they name their organizations after dangerous places, because they have been to dangerous places and they want to remember that they came back.

The Auxiliary of the American Legion was organized by the wives, mothers, and sisters of the men who had served. They raised money, organized events, and maintained the memorials. The Missoula County War Memorial was their work. They erected it in 1927, nine years after the war ended, when the grief was still fresh enough to require a monument and the money had been raised to build one.

The Daily Missoulian reported on the dedication ceremony in 1927: "The memorial was unveiled before a large crowd of citizens, veterans, and members of the auxiliary, who gathered to honor the memory of those who gave their lives in the service of their country." The paper listed the names of the speakers and described the ceremony in the careful language of civic occasions. The names of the dead were read aloud. The crowd stood in silence.

The memorial stands in Missoula. The names are on the stone. The men are in the ground in France and Belgium and the Argonne Forest and the other places where the war was fought. Some of them are in the ground in Missoula, in the cemeteries where their families buried them when the Army sent them home. The stone does not say where they are buried. It says only that they were from Missoula County, and that they died, and that their names are worth remembering.

See also

• Missoula County War Memorial at Missoula, Missoula County (American Legion, Hellgate Post No. 27, erected 1927)
• Fort Missoula Post Headquarters at Missoula, Missoula County
• The 442nd at Bozeman, Gallatin County