The Wickedest City
By editor
East Portal / Taft, Mineral County, Montana
Buried under Interstate 90 are the bones of a town the Chicago Tribune called, in 1909, the wickedest city in America. Taft sprouted when the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad began boring the 1.7-mile St. Paul Pass Tunnel. Between 1907 and 1909 the place grew twenty-seven saloons, theaters that were also dance halls that were also saloons, a hospital, a hotel, and a scatter of railroad shops along the tracks. One estimate put the population near a thousand—tunnel men, gamblers, and the “canaries” of the underworld who followed construction paychecks.
Taft survived near-riots, floods, and a 1908 fire that destroyed half its businesses. The 1910 Big Blowup burned nearly everything except the stubborn Taft Hotel. Sixty years later, bulldozers finished what the fire had started, flattening the remains for the interstate.
The wickedness was real enough to make good copy. So was the labor: hundreds of men digging a wet, dark tunnel toward Idaho so a railroad could claim the mountains. The marker’s job is to put both facts in the same sentence—the den of iniquity and the engineering camp—before the freeway traffic erases the last sense that a city ever stood here.
See also
- St. Paul Pass Tunnel at East Portal, Mineral County
- When the Mountains Roared at East Portal, Mineral County
- The Route of the Hiawatha at East Portal, Mineral County
- The Trail Follows the Trains at East Portal, Mineral County
