Facts about how the Betters came to Montana
A draft of this post has been sitting, mostly complete, since November 2013. Today, I finally put the finishing touches on it and published it. Hopefully, this will spur me to resume sharing the results of sporadic research I have conducted on the Betters in Clinton over the past decade.
Ernest Terry and Fannie Nettle aren't in my direct line, but this is one of those cases where I learned about my ancestors through tangential research. Guy Howlett lived next to Fan and Ern when he was growing up, so he was able to tell me quite a few stories about them. After meeting with Guy in Clinton, I decided to do some research on Ernest and Fannie, which turned up this article in the June 2, 1969 issue of the North Pacific Union Gleaner about Fannie's 99th birthday:
In searching the Terry name, I also discovered a little bit about Ern's mine. I hadn't connected the dots before, probably because his initials were used instead of his first name. This is from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality's historical narrative about the Clinton/Wallace mining district that I shared previously:
Ernest Terry and Fannie Nettle aren't in my direct line, but this is one of those cases where I learned about my ancestors through tangential research. Guy Howlett lived next to Fan and Ern when he was growing up, so he was able to tell me quite a few stories about them. After meeting with Guy in Clinton, I decided to do some research on Ernest and Fannie, which turned up this article in the June 2, 1969 issue of the North Pacific Union Gleaner about Fannie's 99th birthday:
The article provided me with a number of gems:
- Fannie "came to Montana with her family, including her great-grandmother" - This was a completely new revelation to me. While I don't have a name, and I don't know which great-grandmother it was, this places another of my ancestors in Montana, and has alerted me that I should be looking for her in adjacent census records and the like.
- Fannie came to Montana at age nine, which means the Betters came to Montana between 3 May 1879 and 2 May 1880.
- "They traveled by train the first year the train came to the West." - This confirms that they traveled by train, but the rest of the statement is too ambiguous. What train? Where is "the West?" The NPRR wasn't finished until 1883, but I suppose they could have come part of the way on the NPRR. Construction had halted in Bismark in 1873. Construction supposedly resumed in 1879, but it looks like the end of the line was still Bismark in 1880. From there, they could have taken a steamer on the Missouri to Fort Benton, then taken the Mullan Road to the Hellgate Canyon. Another possibility is that they took the Union Pacific to the Utah and Northern Railway. The Utah and Northern reached the Montana Territory on 9 March 1880, Dillon, Montana on 4 December 1880, and the first train reached Butte on 26 December 1881.
In searching the Terry name, I also discovered a little bit about Ern's mine. I hadn't connected the dots before, probably because his initials were used instead of his first name. This is from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality's historical narrative about the Clinton/Wallace mining district that I shared previously:
The Hobo mine, consisting of two claims, was located about three miles up Wallace Creek from Clinton. Thirty tons of ore were shipped from the mine containing 11 ounces of silver per ton, with 5 percent lead, 1 percent copper, 0.5 percent antimony, and 3 percent iron. In 1949 it was operated by E. R. Terry and Carl Larson (Sahinen 1957).Additional info about the Hobo mine and the Hobo claim are available from Western Mining History.
Comments
Post a Comment