Wibaux

Harold G. Clark and Orlando Burgess, owners of the Clark Hardware Company, constructed this one-story brick and stucco commercial building in 1916. Representative of the period of Wibaux’s major economic development, it originally housed the hardware store, a funeral parlor, jewelry store, and tailor. Six decorative relief panels ornament the upper portion of the structure. Multicolored brick in a chevron and diamond pattern adorn the space above the center door.

Erected by Montana Historical Society.

Wherever you are in Montana, you stand in the pathway of Lewis and Clark. Their 1804-1806 expedition was a grand adventure to investigate the people and resources of the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase and to seek a navigable passage across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. Like the French and Spanish who made similar voyages across North America, the Corps of Discovery brought back information that would change life in this land forever.

Nations in Transformation

The 19th century brought tumult to North America. Indian nations, recovering from five waves of smallpox, pushed west as Europeans raced to conquer more territories. Though others had explored, traded and trapped in the Northern Plains, Lewis and Clark were the first to come for military, scientific and economic development reasons. Their expedition defined agendas and relationships that people of the West are still sorting out - between different cultures, and between people and the land.

Montana Legacy: Many Cultures, Many Landmarks

The Corps of Discovery included Indians, French, Euro-Americans, men of mixed European and Indian decent, one black, a woman and a baby. Indian people of many nations fed, guided and helped the Corps with few violent altercations. Montana today is a land of many cultures, and its diversity is part of our region's identity.

In what we now call Montana, Lewis and Clark explored 1,900 miles of wilderness, catalogued 63 species of plants and animals new to science, and charted significant geographic features. Seven of these are National Historic Landmarks and Monuments: Pompeys Pillar, the Great Falls Portage, the Three Forks of the Missouri, Lemhi Pass, Lolo Pass, Traveller's Rest, and the Upper Missouri Breaks.

There are still places in Montana where you may see landscape, wildlife and native plants just as the Corps described in their journals: rich, raw and full of possibilities. You can also see evidence of cultural cooperation, conflicts and collisions in values that have defined the West for two centuries.

Discovery, for all travelers, is a deeply personal and universally human experience. In the larger sense, Montana is continually discovered, its cultures are always transforming, and each of us is explorer, witness and storyteller.

Montana welcomes you to make discoveries of your own in this rich landscape. Please respect private property, help preserve our public lands and abundant wildlife and celebrate with us the mix of people who call Montana home.

Erected by Montana Department of Transportation.

In 1876, this was strictly buffalo and Indian country. From 1876 to 1881, the U.S. Army rounded up the Indians and forced them onto reservations while buffalo hunters cleared the range for the cattle boom of the Eighties.

Pierre Wibaux ran one of the biggest cattle spreads around here in the early days. A native of France, he arrived in Montana in 1883 after studying the cattle industry from car to packing house. Within a decade of his arrival, he had amassed a herd of 65,000 cattle and prospered from business investments throughout the region. Wibaux had boundless optimism for his adopted state and once said that "If a man is intelligent, has courage, and can see things clearly, he can make money." Through his guidance, the wide-open cow town of Mingusville was renamed Wibaux and became a significant cattle and sheep shipping point on the Northern Pacific Railway. When he died in 1913, his will provided a fund to erect a statue of himself in the town named for him.

From this end of Montana to the west end is just about the same distance as from New York to Chicago. You have to push a lot of ground behind you to get places in this state.

Erected by Montana Department of Transportation.

Constructed during Wibaux’s transition period from a cattle town into an agricultural center, this Queen Anne commercial style building originally housed the Smith Saloon. Partners William H. Smith, John R. Cornell, and W. H. North built the saloon between 1904 and 1906 and later sold the business to W. H. Rucker, who operated it until 1917 when he sold the property to the State Bank of Yates. Renamed the Wibaux County Bank, it operated out of here until its failure. In 1923, Wibaux County purchased the building for use as the county courthouse and jail. Since 1952, the City Hall and the public library have occupied the space. The Smith Saloon is an excellent example of early-twentieth-century commercial architecture, with front parapet and battlements, corner pilasters, a tiered belt course with modillions, recessed doorway, and a concrete hood with ornamental concrete support brackets. A primary structure in the historic district, the building remains as the best representative of early Wibaux County government.

Dismayed that his son’s adoptive home had no Catholic Church, Frenchman Achille Wibaux instructed Pierre to build one here. The rancher contributed $2,000 for the construction of this wood-frame, vernacular Gothic Revival structure. It was built in 1895 by R. R. Cummings and Eugene Blias of Glendive. The Wibaux congregation being at that time as a mission of Miles City, and Father Van der Broeck of Miles City superintended the church’s construction. In 1938, the church was enlarged and its exterior walls covered with scoria, a lava rock common to the badlands of the area. Father Leahy, pastor of the church beginning in 1931, conceived the idea of a scoria facing, and volunteers from the congregation went rock-picking in wagons and pickup trucks. Father Leahy recorded that “patient men did a beautiful job of laying the rock up to and on the steeple.” The building served as Wibaux’s Catholic Church until 1965, when a new church was built and this building was converted to a catechism school.

Erected by Montana Historical Society.

Montana is famous for its dinosaur fossils. Paleontologists have discovered seventy-five different species of dinosaurs in Montana, more than any other state in America. The oldest dinosaur fossils are found in rocks of the Jurassic Period, which are 155 million years old. They include the gigantic Diplodocus, the plated Stegosaurus, and the fearsome Allosaurus. Most Montana dinosaurs come from the Cretaceous Period rocks, including the "raptor" Deinonychus, made notorious by the 1993 motion picture Jurassic Park, and the burrowing dinosaur Oryctodromeus. About 50-75 million years ago, nesting dinosaurs like Maiasaura and Troodon lived in the coastal plains next to the inland sea. Many millions of years later, Tyrannosaurus rex, vast herds of horned Triceratops and the armored Ankylosaurus all lived in Montana. During the millions of years the dinosaurs ruled this region, the climate and geography were very different from today. Inland bays of the Pacific Ocean during Jurassic times and the Atlantic Ocean during the Cretaceous period provided Montana with a hot and humid sub tropical climate.

Montana's big sky drew tourists even during the darkest days of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Thousands of people came to Montana to enjoy its wide open spaces and experience its Old West heritage. Good roads and cheap gasoline helped make it possible. The Montana Department of Transportation distributed colorful highway maps and brochures at ports of entry stations and information centers. Beginning in 1935, the MDT installed interpretive markers at roadside picnic areas to tell readers about Montana's exciting history. The signs told stories reminiscent of cowboys spinning yarns to a greenhorn. Over 250 roadside signs still introduce visitors and residents to Montana's history and geology.

Paleo-Facts:

• American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Barnum Brown discovered the first Tyrannosaurus rex fossil in eastern Montana in 1903. Since then, at least 24 partial Tyrannosaurus skeletons have been discovered in Montana.

• Discovered near Bridger, Montana in 1964, Deinonychus fossils suggested to paleontologists that some dinosaurs were warm-blooded and are the ancestors of today's birds.

• About 65 million years ago, the Western Interior Seaway receded as the Rocky Moutains rose, pushing the shorelines farther east. Great rivers meandered through the coastal plain in a warm and humid climate, depositing sediment which would later become known as the Hell Creek Formation. Dinosaur fossils are frequently found in the Hell Creek Formation.

Paleo-Activity:

• Imagine eastern Montana 65 million years ago when it was much different. Instead of herds of cattle, enormous herds of Triceratops and hadrosaurs (sic) roamed the area. Pterosaurs soared across the sky instead of birds. What kind of predators searched for prey in those days?

Erected by Montana Department of Transportation.

From its roots as a pre-1900s cattle town to a farming community after the turn of the century, Wibaux well illustrates the transformation borne by many small Montana towns. This historic district reflects the high point of the town’s influence as an agricultural center. The dryland farming movement (1905-1915) brought an influx of settlers which in turn increased the number of farms and eliminated open range cattle ranching. Wibaux experienced a shift from the stockyard industry to agricultural trade. When a devastating fire swept away the principal business blocks in the district in 1906, the frame, false-fronted buildings and board sidewalks became a thing of the past. One- and two-story closely grouped brick buildings constructed between 1905 and 1917 replaced most of the frame structures. Today these give the district its architectural cohesiveness, featuring transitional stylistic elements between Classical Revival and the more modern “Prairie” school of commercial design. In 1910 alone, commercial construction expenditures exceeded $92,000, and Wibaux supported almost 50 businesses. The town had come a long way from its 1880 origins and its lively reputation as one of the “toughest towns north of the Rio Grande.”

Erected by Montana Historical Society.

Pierre Wibaux, scion of a distinguished French textile family, arrived here at the settlement of Mingusville in 1883, establishing a cattle ranch about 12 miles north. His herds fared well during the devastating “Hard Winter of 1886-1887,” after which he borrowed family money to buy out less fortunate ranchers. By the mid-1890s, his ranch was one of the largest cattle operations in the nation, running about 65,000 head of cattle and 300 of horses. He sold from 3,000 to 9,000 cattle each year. Wibaux and others persuaded the Northern Pacific Railroad to build stockyards here in 1883, and to enlarge them in 1894. Wibaux campaigned to have Mingusville platted and renamed for him, both of which occurred in 1894. Two years previously, he and Henry Boice of the Berry- Boice Cattle Company had built this office/residence. Wibaux soon took it over completely, and used it during the week to oversee his business interests. The building faced north until W. A. Orgain, a local merchant, purchased the property in 1903 and moved the building to the rear and facing west. Originally it was surrounded by a lush park of grass and arbored vines tended by a French gardener, the water for irrigation and two artificial ponds supplied by an elevated tank filled by a windmill.

Erected by Montana Historical Society.