Vigilante Trail ...

I've promised lots of road photos in this blog, and here's an historic one. This is from 1936, and is looking east at the junction of old US Highway 10 and what is now Montana 41. I know at least one of you has a particular interest in that part of the world.

Notice how the sign still labels route 41 as the "Vigilante Trail." That's a reminder of earlier days when highways were given names, rather than numbers ... a tradition that started dying out in the 1920s and was nearly gone when this photo was taken. There were once a number of well-known named highways in Montana -- much of old US 10, for example, was called the "Yellowstone Trail." My favorite named road in the state was the "Electric Highway," which followed the route of the current US 12 ... it was so named because of the electric locomotives used by the Milwaukee Road, whose main line paralleled the highway.