Bozeman
Building on the MSU Campus
Travel
Montana
Bozeman
Directory Listings
A view from 1939:
BOZEMAN, (4,754 alt., 6,855 pop.) seat
of Gallatin County, is, for Montana, an old and decorous
town. Local ordinances prohibit dancing anywhere after midnight
and in beer halls at any time. It is illegal to drink beer
while standing, so all Bozeman bars are equipped with stools.
On the city's wide streets, shaded by cutleaf birch, there
is little of the restless activity of industrial centers.
Its quiet reflects a sense of security based on the prosperity
of the surrounding farms. Yet its rural characteristics are
modified by the thousands of visitors who every year pass
through Bozeman on their way to Yellowstone Park. An air
of youthful liveliness is contributed by the students of
Montana State College.
The Gallatin Valley extends westward from the town. It is
one of the most productive agricultural and stock-raising
regions in the State. To the south the snow-capped Gallatin
and Madison ranges rim the narrowing valley. On the north
the Bridger and flanking ranges of the Rockies protect it
from severe cold winds.
In 1864 John M. Bozeman, traveling the trail he had blazed
from Wyoming, guided the first train of immigrants
into the Gallatin Valley. Jim Bridger guided another train
in the same year. The passes the leaders used now bear their
names. US 10 follows Bozeman's route. Bridger's trail passes
through the Bridger Canyon and Range to the north.
Trappers of the middle nineteenth century apparently preferred
Bridger's route. Bridger and Bozeman were friends and rivals.
A story often told relates how they once led wagon trains
through their respective passes in a race to Virginia City,
and arrived within a few hours of each other.
Six cabins and a two-story hotel huddled at the eastern end
of Gallatin Valley by the end of 1864. During a flour famine
that winter, the settlers lived on "meat straight." Bozeman
gave his name to the settlement, but for many years it was
known locally as Missouri from the number of Missourians among
the settlers. The city has never depended on mining booms
for its growth, except insofar as the mining
camps provided markets for foodstuffs.
.
In 1867 it became the seat of Gallatin County, one of the
nine Territorial counties of Montana.
MONTANA STATE COLLEGE, Harrison St. and 8th Ave., established
February 16, 1893, is the oldest operating unit of the University
of Montana. It shares its 95-acre campus
and buildings with the U. S. Bureau of Entomology, the Agricultural
Extension Service, and the State Agricultural Experiment
Station. It offers courses leading to the Bachelor of Science
degree, and carries on wide research in agriculture and engineering,
doing agricultural extension work through county agents.
The student enrollment averages 1,200.
The Library of 30,000 volumes (weekdays 9-5) is on the second
floor of Montana Hall, a three-story brick structure of Tudor
design. The Biological Museum (open 8-5 daily) in Lewis Hall
has a collection of 50,000 plant specimens, large groups
of fossils, and many mounted birds and animals. A Greenhouse,
devoted to experimental work with flowers and vegetables,
contains many tropical and subtropical plants. An Outdoor
Museum, in the southwest corner of the campus, has petrified
stumps 4 feet in diameter, and a spring-fed pool stocked
witii mutant rainbow trout.
Beall Park, Bozeman and Villard Sts., a pleasant village
green, has tennis courts and a playground, as well as Millstones
of Bozeman's first flour mill (1865).
The City Hall, Main and Rouse Sts., was once the Opera House,
as the name over the entrance indicates. As such, it opened
in 1890 with the Mendelssohn Quintette of Boston. For years
it was one of a chain operated by John Maguire, pioneer impresario
of Butte. The walls of the stage and auditorium on the second
floor display advertisements, cob-webbed and yellow, and
faded posters announcing Joseph Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle,
Eddie Foy in A Night in Town, Clay Clement in Faust.
The Seed Pea Warehouses, Babcock and Wallace Sts., are among
the largest of their kind in the West. Here seed peas produced
in the Gallatin Valley and elsewhere in Montana and the West,
are sorted for quality and size, packed, and stored to await
shipment.
Right from Bozeman on Rouse Ave., which skirts the Gallatin
County Fair grounds (L), to a Cannery,
1.9 m., where about 250,000 cases of canned goods (mostly peas and string beans from Gallatin Valley farms)
are annually packed.
Right from Bozeman on State 187, which follows Wallace Ave.
and becomes
a dirt road, to a junction with an unimproved road, 2 m.;
R. here 1 m. to the Site
of Fort Ellis. Here William Clark and his party camped on
July 14, 1806; and
here, on August 27, 1867, Fort Ellis, named for Col. Augustus
Van Horn Ellis ofthe 124th New York Volunteers, was established.
For 19 years it played an important part in the taming of
the Gallatin frontier. The Washburn-Langford expedition,
whose report of the geysers, hot springs, terraces, paint
pots, and other marvels of
the Yellowstone region led to the creation of Yellowstone
National Park, outfitted
at Fort Ellis in August 1870.
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
|
