The Montana Road

By editor

Lima, Beaverhead County, Montana, August 1874

The Earl of Dunraven came through in August of 1874, and he had the honesty to admit that the road disappointed him. "Nothing is more extraordinary and wearisome than the levelness of the road," he wrote. "From Corrine to Virginia City you drive along a series of apparently perfectly flat plains, connected with each other by short canyons and valleys. Occasionally the road ascends, but by very easy gradient. There are no precipices, no torrents, no avalanches, no glaciers, nothing grand, terrible or dangerous. The idea that you are crossing the backbone of the continent, and scaling a vast mountain range, appears preposterous."

The Earl was looking for scenery. The men who built the Montana Road were looking for something else entirely.

The road that runs through the Beaverhead Valley and over Monida Pass into Utah was not built for tourists. It was built for oxen. Specifically, it was built for the kind of ox that could haul nine tons of freight in a linked set of three wagons, a lead wagon and a swing wagon and a trail-end wagon, with as many as twenty-four animals in the team, across six hundred miles of high-altitude grassland at a pace of ten to fifteen miles a day. The men who drove these teams were called bullwhackers, and the Earl of Dunraven, who had an eye for such things, described them as "red-shirted, big-booted, brigand-looking ruffians." He meant it as a compliment.

The road itself was old before the Earl arrived. Mormon settlers had been using the southern portion since the 1840s, moving between their communities in Utah and the Deer Lodge Valley and St. Mary's Mission in what would become Montana. When John White and his party found gold on Grasshopper Creek in 1862 and touched off the rush to Bannack, and when the even richer Alder Gulch strike followed in 1863, the road became the main supply artery for a mining population that needed everything and had nothing. The nearest railhead was in Corinne, Utah, six hundred miles to the south. Everything that the miners of Bannack and Virginia City required, from flour to whiskey to blasting powder to the iron parts of stamp mills, came up this road on ox-drawn freight wagons.

The economics of the trade were straightforward and brutal. A round trip from Corinne to Virginia City took approximately three months. The bullwhackers who made the run were paid in wages that reflected the difficulty of the work and the remoteness of the route. The oxen that pulled the wagons were worth more than the men who drove them, in the sense that a dead ox was a financial catastrophe and a dead bullwhacker was a labor problem. The freight companies that operated on the road were large, well-capitalized enterprises, and they ran their operations with the efficiency that the margins required.

The road itself required almost no engineering. The Earl of Dunraven was right about that. The Beaverhead Valley is a broad, flat-floored basin between mountain ranges, and the pass at Monida sits at 6,823 feet, which sounds impressive until you realize that the valley floor south of Lima is already above 6,000 feet. The grade from the valley to the pass is gentle enough that a loaded freight wagon could make it without doubling the team. This was not an accident. The men who chose this route chose it because it worked, because the grades were manageable and the water was reliable and the grass was good enough to keep the oxen moving.

Lima, the town that stands at the foot of the pass today, did not exist when the freight wagons were running. The town was established in 1880 as a division point on the Utah and Northern Railroad, which was then pushing north through the Beaverhead Valley toward Butte. The railroad arrived with the full complement of facilities that a division point required: a depot, a roundhouse, a machine shop, hotels, restaurants, stores, saloons, and two churches, because a town needed at least two churches if it was going to have any saloons worth mentioning. The Utah and Northern reached Butte in 1881, and when it did, the Montana Road became obsolete almost overnight.

The mathematics of the transition were not complicated. A freight wagon hauling nine tons at fifteen miles a day took weeks to cover the distance that a locomotive could cover in hours. The bullwhackers who had driven the road for twenty years found other work or moved on. The freight companies that had operated the wagon trains shifted their capital to the railroad or dissolved. The road itself did not disappear, but it shrank from a commercial artery to a local track, used by ranchers and homesteaders who had no particular need to hurry.

The Utah and Northern was eventually absorbed into the Oregon Short Line, which was in turn absorbed into the Union Pacific in 1935. The railroad that replaced the Montana Road is still running through the Beaverhead Valley, carrying freight that the bullwhackers of the 1860s could not have imagined in quantities they would have found incomprehensible. The pass at Monida is still there, still gentle, still lacking in precipices and avalanches and everything else that the Earl of Dunraven found so disappointingly absent.

What the Earl missed, in his search for the grand and the terrible, was the thing that made the road worth building in the first place: the fact that it worked. A road that could carry nine tons of freight on ox-drawn wagons across six hundred miles of high country without killing the oxen or breaking the wagons or bankrupting the companies that operated it was not a scenic road. It was a functional one. The men who built it and drove it were not interested in the Earl's opinion of the scenery. They were interested in getting the freight through, and for twenty years, they did.

The marker at Lima stands at the point where the Utah and Northern crossed the old wagon road, the railroad that ended the road's commercial life standing on the same ground where the bullwhackers once camped and cursed and counted their miles to Virginia City. The road is gone. The railroad is still running. The pass is still gentle. And the Earl of Dunraven's complaint about the levelness of the route is still, in its way, the most accurate description of the Montana Road that anyone ever wrote.

See also

• The Montana Road at Lima, Beaverhead County (Montana Department of Transportation, erected 2009)
• Bannack at Dillon, Beaverhead County -- the gold rush town that the Montana Road supplied
• Bannack Historical District at Dillon, Beaverhead County -- the National Historic Landmark at the road's northern terminus