The Mercantile Building ...

In the interest of equal time, here's an early photo of the Mercantile Building at the Montana State Fairgrounds up in Great Falls. A very cool old building -- still there today -- and a fine example of the Art Deco style. It's one of several landmark buildings in the Electric City built during the Depression years by federal public works programs.

Fairgrounds ...

There are state fairs in most American states, I suppose ... but the situation in Montana is a little more complicated: we have two annual events vying for statewide attention. Great Falls has the Montana State Fair, and Billings has something called MontanaFair, which claims to be larger. My vote definitely goes to the event up in Great Falls, partly because I like the city more, and partly because Great Falls has a handsome and classic fairgrounds. The venue in Billings is a nondescript trade-show space, with a thoroughly-ugly arena named for a car dealership.

It wasn't always that way, though ... here's a postcard photo of the Billings fairgrounds back in the 1930s. If only the place still looked like this!

Western Airlines ...

Many of the early airlines in this part of the world used classic western or American Indian images in their logos and advertising, but few did it as well as Western Air Lines in its early years. Starting out as Western Air Express, the company acquired National Parks Airways in 1937 and inherited its north-south route through Montana. They acquired Inland Air Lines in 1944, adding Inland's route from Great Falls to Lewistown, Billings, and beyond.

Whoever designed the old Western Air Lines timetables must have been a fan of the Great Northern Railway, since the Indian Chief artwork is strongly reminiscent of the GN's promotional material of the era. It was much classier than the cartoon bird that Western used in its TV advertisements when I was a kid ... though I have to confess that I quite liked that, too.

National Parks Airways ...

Here's a wonderful old sticker issued by a company called National Parks Airways, probably the first commercial airline to operate in Montana. NPA began carrying passengers and mail between Salt Lake and Great Falls in 1928, stopping in Butte and Helena along the way. For a time in the 1930s, the airline lived up to its name by detouring its flights via West Yellowstone in the summer, landing at a little grassy airstrip right at the edge of town.

The airline's later stickers employed a flying-eagle logo, but the Native American iconography on this one is very cool, I think.

The Great Falls ...

Yesterday's post prompted me to reflect on what Lewis & Clark might have thought of the Great Falls of the Missouri, so I pulled out Bernard DeVoto's compilation of their journals and started to read. Apparently Lewis first saw the falls on June 13, 1805:

I had proceded on this course about two miles with Goodrich at some distance behind me whin my ears were saluted with the agreeable sound of a fall of water and advancing a little further I saw the spray arrise above the plain like a collumn of smoke which would freqently dispear again in an instant caused I presume by the wind which blew pretty hard from the S.W. I did not however loose my direction to this point which soon began to make a roaring too tremendious to be mistaken for any cause short of the great falls of the Missouri.

Lewis then wrote a long and detailed description of the falls, doing his best to record both the physical details of the place and its beauty. And then he wrote this when he was done:

after wrighting this imperfect description I again viewed the falls and was so much disgusted with the imperfect idea which it conveyed of the scene that I determined to draw my pen across it and begin agin, but then reflected that I could not perhaps succeed better than pening the first impressions of the mind;

Though the portage itself was a chore, the falls were an extraordinary and lovely place for the explorers ... and they remained such for another century. It's too bad we've ruined so much of it now with dams and reservoirs.

Aliens ...

Today's photo is a frame from from one of the more notorious bits of twentieth-century Montana film ... at least in the eyes of some people.

It's part of a few seconds of 16mm motion-picture film shot on August 15, 1950 by a man named Nicolas Mariana, who at the time was general manager of the Great Falls "Selectrics," a minor-league baseball franchise. Out at the ball field that morning, Mariana looked up into the sky and saw ... flying saucers! Two of them, supposedly, flying around like crazy.

He was able to shoot about 20 seconds of film, which he eventually sent off to the Air Force along with a report. The government decided that the footage just showed reflected light from a couple of planes from the local Air Force Base, and eventually they returned the film -- but by then, several of the most detailed frames were supposedly missing. This, of course, became prime fodder for conspiracy theorists, and among the UFO faithful the controversy continues to this day. (And there have been a number of other UFO sightings in Great Falls in the years since ... the place isn't quite Roswell, but it's close!)

Here's one of the exposures from the film. The metal thing at the bottom of the image is ventilation equipment atop a nearby roof, and the two bright white dots are -- well, who knows?

History conference ...

I'm heading off to Great Falls again today, this time to attend the annual Montana History Conference. There was a time when I basically lived for events like this, but I confess I'm not really looking forward to it much today ... conference-going historians aren't all that much fun, and I think many of the academic ones have lost sight of what's truly interesting and important in their field.

But regardless, it's an excuse for a roadtrip ... and that's always a good thing. And it also gives me an excuse to post some more Great Falls photos here -- like this rather unusual one. I shot this view of the Missouri River from the tower of the old Milwaukee Road passenger depot, probably my favorite building in the Electric City.

Snowplow art ...

I saw this railway plow last spring, sitting on one of the turntable leads at what remains of the old Great Northern shop complex in Great Falls. Who knew that Great Falls was such an angry place?

The least important things about Great Falls ...

In a post here last Saturday, I evoked the name of the author Richard Brautigan, and mentioned that he had lived for a time in the Paradise Valley south of Livingston. Given that connection, Brautigan sometimes did mention the state in his work -- most notably in a 1980 volume called The Tokyo-Montana Express. Elsewhere, our state appears only peripherally, and in sometimes puzzling ways. Here's a small excerpt from Brautigan's 1967 book Trout Fishing in America ... part of a much longer section that talks about the Electric City and an old Deanna Durbin movie:

I cast out again and continued talking about Great Falls.

Then in correct order I recited the twelve least important things ever said about Great Falls, Montana. For the twelfth and least important thing of all, I said, "Yeah, the telephone would ring in the morning. I'd get out of bed. I didn't have to answer the telephone. That had all been taken care of, years in advance.

. . .

"Fortunately it stopped one day without my having to do anything serious like grow up. We packed our stuff and left town on a bus. That was Great Falls, Montana. You say the Missouri River is still there?"

"Yes, but it doesn't look like Deanna Durbin," Trout Fishing in America said.

Charlie and Monte ...

Since I'm headed up to Great Falls again this morning, I thought I'd post a photo I took in the Electric City a few weeks ago. This is the downtown statue of the famous cowboy artist Charles M. Russell and his horse Monte ... Charlie is the one on the left.

Montana Cowboys Association ...

I'm up in Great Falls this week, doing historic research on a series of old buildings. By far the coolest is a little log structure known locally as the Cowboy Bar. The place was constructed as a public works project right before World War II to be the headquarters of the "Montana Cowboys Association," and to house their museum. And that's what it still is today, although in fine Montana tradition the cowboys added a bar long ago to help pay the bills.

And it's extremely cool ... so the next time you're in Great Falls, be sure to stop by. Join the old cowhands for a bottle of Bud Light and check out the display cases filled with dusty Montana relics. You won't regret it.

This is an historic photo of the building taken soon after it opened. As you might guess, it looks a little more worn today.