1881: "Surveys in the Land of the Lost Buffaloes"
Tom Cooney studied engineering and helped to survey routes for the Northern Pacific Railroad. He later served as a lieutenant of engineers during the Spanish American War, then returned to railroad work and farming in Montana. This excerpt come from a book called "Meet Tom Cooney," published in 1945 and based on his reminscences of surveying land in Wyoming and Montana in the early 1880's.
Medora was only a stop-off. We trekked across to Miles City by ox train, a distance of fifty miles, to survey the upper part of the Yellowstone River. There we outfitted ourselves with equipment and provisions for camp. The crew of fifteen men began work two hundred miles west of Miles City on the site of what is now Livingston, Montana.
The country when I first saw it was an unbroken wilderness. Below Livingston we did not see a single man except an occasional trapper or buffalo hunter.
On one of the tributaries of the Yellowstone had occurred the great buffalo kill of 1881. For miles along our route westward nothing was to be seen but the carcasses of these animals — to the south, west, and east. The estimate of a hundred thousands slain buffalo is probably conservative. The hides went down to St. Louis after navigation opened on the Yellowstone and Missouri. Only choice bits of the meat were used for food, such as the tongue, the chief profit being in the hides....
Since our teams moved slowly, I was always traveling on foot several miles ahead of the oufit. Deviating from the main trail, I would often come upon from a dozen to several hundred carcasses. This sight always made me very sad. I had gone to the University partly to learn how to conserve wild life and here before me I saw the aftermath of wanton destruction....
In Montana are thousands of acres of poor grazing land, fit only for buffalo. In many parts of the badlands along the Little Missouri I saw much land that was a perfect network of crevases, frequenlty from fifty to a hundred feet in depth, the sides oftentimes as smooth as though they had been plasterd. Such country is fit only for native wild creatures who know how to care for themselves, not for domestic-bred stock.
On this first great adventure into the West I was aware of many differences in the problems of the pioneer plainsman as compared with ours back in Minnesota. The scattered ranchers between Miles City and Livingston aroused my deep admiration for their courage in trying to make a living in this new country. There was something heartening in their log houses, very becoming to the prairie. I recall a typial one of plastered logs and sod roof. A dirt floor, of course. That sod roof, of wild hay and sprinkled with gravel — sodded on top of that — was a most satisfactory covering. In the two years since it had been made, the grass and weeds had cemented it together. Such a roof seldom leaked. It made the house cool in summer and warm in winter.
Very few of the ranchers had artificial irrigation. They trusted to occasional showers to grow oats for their saddle horses and wild hay for winter feed. Most of the ranchers were, in greater or less degreee, stockmen, and they looked askance at anyone who talked of farming....
These early settlers in Montana, far from railways, often had to pay exorbitant prices for mere necessities.
A typical tale is that a miner who went to town to buy a spool of thread and a needle. He paid the requied twenty-five cents for the thread but objected to twenty-five cents for a needle.
"Why should needles cost so much?" he demanded.
The dealer was not the least abashed.
"Think of the freight charges!" he said
The railroad people had faith in the development of the dry-farming country. They sold land that reverted to them to the tune of five million dollars. Why didn't dry farming become successful? Because of one thing — lack of rain. Rain fell where and when it pleased. Plowing under the good sod exposed the soil to dry winds. The protective covering was gone. But not only did the exposed dirt surface dry in the hot sun: in place of the fine grasses that had blown in the prairie winds, there grew Russian thistles. Nothing but thistles! The attempt at dry farming was a claamity to Montana, to say nothing of the men who had put all on a gamble.
But let's get back to the railway adventure out of Livingston. It was from the site of Livingston to be that we started our regular survey work, crossing the Yellowstone River where the Shields River joins it. By the way, the Shields River was named after Sergeant Shields of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. From this point we followed all streams and all possible openings into the range, through the Shields Valley, to get over the range of mountains to the Missouri River slope.
After strenuous work of several months, we perceived that the only possible solution lay in a long tunnel, much too expensive for the road to build.
Pulled back to the mouth of the Shields and connecting with a former survey, we continued westward, passing over the site of the present Livingston. We continued westward up a stream to the head of the divide between the waters that flow to the Yellowstone and those that finally join with others at Three Forks across the Bozeman Valley. This is the real head of the Missouri River. The town of Three Forks is situated not far from our former survey. It is at the point that the Madison, Jefferson, and Blackfoot waters join, all within 1,500 feet of the real head of the river.
From there on, our survey followed down the Missouri and across the considerable valley to where we again crossed the Missouri near a little town, then called Centerville, but which was afterwards moved to our line of survey and named Townsend — about thirty mile west of the city of Helena.
This part of the survey took the great part of the summer and fall of 1881....
About this time I was assistant to the topographer, who made the maps and sketches of the survey. During my work with the Beckler party, as our outfit was called (after the Chief Engineer), I came to know the country as man knows his own particular farm.
Our job, however, was not know the country as farmers but as engineers, because our task was to find a way through the mountains to join up with the line coming from the west coast. After trying the opposite side of the Missouri back as far as Three Forks and connecting it with the one we had already made, a survey coming westward from the Yellowstone country, we returned....
Source:
Mildred Houghton Comfort, Meet Tom Cooney. (Minneapolis: The Lund Press, 1945).
