Betters' Station

Following the lead of some train enthusiasts in a Facebook group I belong to, I decided to poke around on eBay recently to see if I could find any old photos of things and places I've been researching that I haven't been able to find elsewhere online. Unbelievably, one of the very first items I found was a souvenir booklet for Clinton School from the 1906-1907 school year that listed my great-grandpa Phillip Betters among the pupils and his dad, Austin Betters, and brother-in-law, Daniel McQuarrie, as trustees. Unfortunately, no photos of the students are included, but it does feature a photo of the teacher on the cover. The eBay listing called this thing a "cabinet card" (a thin photograph mounted on a card that usually had an embossed design), but this was more of a booklet than a photograph. With only two pages plus a front and back cover, even calling it a "booklet" is generous. I had never seen anything like it. I didn't even know what to call it. W

Last weekend, I was reviewing and organizing digital copies of newspaper clippings I have acquired through the years and I came across something pretty amazing that I had completely forgotten I had discovered. On a trip to the Missoula Public Library on January 18, 2017, I found a newspaper column from September 1932 that gave an account of travelers on the Mullan Road sometime in the early 1880s that included a stop at the Pine Grove House. I found the column, written by  Grace Stone Coates , in The Big Timber Pioneer, but it was published in several Montana newspapers under the headline, "Three English Gentlemen Who Made Overland Journey from Missoula to Helena Fifty Years Ago, Experienced Hardships of Frontier Travel, Their Diaries Revealed." The column was made up almost entirely of excerpts from the travelers' diaries. I'm not sure if I knew what I had at the time. Coates' column wasn't very specific about dates, so I couldn't be sure if the travelers

I have written previously about my attempts to nail down exactly when the Betters came to Montana and what route they took from Vermont.  In that post, I shared an article about Fannie (Betters) Nettle's 99th birthday, which stated that she came to Montana at age nine. If true, that would mean the Betters came to Montana sometime between May 3, 1879, and May 2, 1880, but I have since discovered that I should be skeptical of any facts sourced from an aged Fannie Nettle . Austin Betters' obituary in the October 9, 1921 edition of The Missoulian states that he came to Montana in 1881. Fannie told Don Omundson the same thing when he interviewed her in 1961. If it was 1881, Fannie would have been 10 or 11 when they took the train to Montana. A few months ago, I came across this notice  in the October 1, 1881 edition of The Butte Miner that included Austin Betters on a list of people with letters waiting for them in the Butte post office. This was a common practice in those days.