Roundup
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Montana
Roundup
Directory Listings
A view from 1939:
ROUNDUP, (3,184 alt, 2,577 pop.), lies among rolling
hills clad sparsely with yellow pine and dotted with granite
boulders. It is neatly laid out, with well-shaded streets,
and its houses, many of which stand on high terraces, are surrounded
by gardens. At the southern end the main street runs straight
toward a partly bald bluff that forces it to turn L. and down
a hill. It ends at the railroad station.
As seat of Musselshell County, Roundup is the educational,
social, and business center of its region, and the trade center
of the State's leading coal-mining region; mining operations
are seen to the east and west.
As its name suggests, the town was once the gathering point
for great herds that grazed up and down the valley. It remained
a cowtown until 1903, when homesteaders arrived, fenced the
range, and crowded the stockmen behind barbwire. In 1907, when
the Milwaukee Road was built across the State, Roundup began
to develop. The former rough-and-ready town is now so staid
that a sign in front of one of the motion picture houses advises
passers-by: "Go to the movies often; nowhere else can
you get so close to life for so little."
The western tradition of tall yarning long survived here. An
eastern visitor once wrote in a bread-and-butter letter to
a Roundup newspaper editor: "Out there every prairie dog
hole is a gold mine; every hill a mountain; every creek a river;
and everybody you meet is a liar." A still popular local
story declares that sheepherders' dogs, once having known the
lure of Roundup's lampposts, never return to their masters.
Sheep-herders themselves are attracted to Roundup when they
have money, but perhaps for different reasons.
Temperatures in this area vary from —500° in winter to
110° in the shade in summer, with nights usually cool. In winter
the variation is sometimes as much as 70° in a few hours.
A chinook may bring the mercury far up out of subzero, but
in a day or two a northwester may send it plummeting again.
The topsoil, fertile and of good depth, is of the gumbo type;
in rainy weather dirt roads are both sticky and slippery, almost
impassable for cars. There is a local story that after a circus
held on the edge of town during wet weather, two wagonloads
of spectators' rubbers were picked out of the mud.
Source: Montana: A State Guide Book; Compiled and Written
by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration
for the State of Montana; September, 1939.
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