A Firsthand Account of Travelers Stopping at the Pine Grove House on the Mullan Road in 1883

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 had stopped at the Pine Grove House before or after Austin Betters and Charles Harris bought it. After re-reading the column and doing a bit of research, I discovered this week that the travelers' journal featured in the column was published as a book in 1884, is now in the public domain, and is available for free online. So I went directly to the original source and discovered that the "English Gentlemen" had stopped by the Pine Grove House when my great-great-grandfather owned it.

The book is called Life and Labour in the Far, Far West: Being Notes of a Tour in the Western States, British Columbia, Manitoba, and the North-West Territory. It was written by W. Henry Barneby while touring North America in the spring and summer of 1883 with his friend, Meysey Clive, and his brother-in-law, Arthur Mitchell. The portion of the book that takes place in Montana is relatively small, but it documents a very interesting time and place in Montana's history, especially for me.

Map of Barneby and Mitchell's travels through Montana from Life and Labour in the Far, Far West. The red line does not accurately reflect their route from Missoula to Helena, as they stopped in Bear's Mouth and New Chicago and passed through Garrison.

Through the Rockies in a Buggy

Barneby and Mitchell (after leaving Clive in Portland) entered Montana from the West. The Northern Pacific Railroad was not yet transcontinental, but they were able to ride it as far as Missoula. Based on dates mentioned earlier in the book, I was able to work out that they had arrived in Missoula on or about July 11, 1883. Barneby notes in the book that "Missoula had been blessed with a railroad for only about a week" when they arrived. Based on multiple other sources, I can tell you that the first train from the west arrived in Missoula on July 6, 1883, so the dates work out.

After spending the night in Missoula ("quite a small place, being in fact only a collection of wooden houses, the majority of which are saloons"), Mitchell was able to procure transportation to Helena for him and Barneby in a two-horse buggy for $75. The buggy owner agreed to transport them the 135 miles to Helena in three days or take them to Deer Lodge in two days and provide them with "fresh means of locomotion for completing the journey."

We are at the important part, so I will now quote directly from the book:

At starting our road was pretty easy, but it soon got rough, and one of our two horses — "George" by name — showed signs of bad temper; however, we arrived at Pine Grove House (twenty-one miles) in safety, and, while the horses were resting, went down to the river for a wash. We had passed a large drove of horses on the road; they caught us up during our halt at Pine Grove House, where the drover stopped for a glass of beer and a cigar, in payment for which he threw down a dollar, and on change being given, tossed back the small change to the saloon-keeper, which looked as if money was plentiful hereabouts. From this halting-place it was a fine drive, on past a good many ranches (both for cattle and horses), where there seemed to be plenty of bunch-grass.

This may not seem like much, but I have several takeaways from this brief passage:

1. At first, I found it interesting that they didn't stop at Baker's Station, but then I remembered there had been a fire at the stage station about that time, so I checked my notes and, sure enough, the fire happened just 2-1/2 weeks prior. One of the two new owners of the station, H.A. Amiraux, told The Missoulian after the fire that they would be ready for business again within days, but the fire completely destroyed the two-story house and the granary, so I find that timeframe improbable. Maybe the reason they didn't stop at Baker's Station was because they were riding in a private buggy, not a stagecoach.
2. Travelers on the Mullan Road did stop at the Pine Grove House. Was it a full-fledged stage station? It doesn't seem likely, but at the very least, it appears to have been a stopping place (or "halting-place" as Barneby put it).
3. No mention of "Betters' Station." It looks like people knew this place as the Pine Grove House.
4. You could buy a beer and a cigar at the Pine Grove House! As I noted in a previous post, the Helena Weekly Herald had described the Pine Grove House the year prior as "a fine two story public house." When I read that, I immediately thought they meant it was a drinking establishment but I didn't want to jump to conclusions. I hadn't found anything else about the Betters running a saloon, tavern, or restaurant, so I wondered if carried some other meaning in America in the 1880s. It seems "public house" ("pub" for short) meant what I thought it meant after all.
5. Gilbert Betters, Austin's oldest son, would have been eight years old in July 1883, so the saloon keeper described in this book was likely either my great-great-grandpa or his partner, Charles Harris.
6. Unless I am misinterpreting the 1880s English, the line about accepting the tip makes it sound like the saloon keeper was pretty well off. Either that, or the idea of tipping was foreign to the Englishman Barneby.

While I haven't read the whole book yet, the passages I have read are fascinating. If you are interested in 1880s Montana, you should definitely check it out.

Before we move on, I want to share Barneby's assessment of the road through the Hellgate Canyon. Writing from Bear's Mouth, he had this to say:

The road we had traversed to-day was a mere track, and, besides, much damaged by the making of the railroad; stumps of trees were a common obstacle, and apparently nobody ever thought of clearing away boulders or any small impediments of that sort.

 He then shared these thoughts about the Mullan Road from Missoula to Helena:

I am very glad to have accomplished this route, and to have seen this part of America, but (supposing pleasure to be the only object) I do not think that I should fancy traversing it a second time. All American stage-roads are abominable, but this is the worst by far that I have as yet seen, and we were both very tired in the evening in consequence of the three days' jolting, &c.

Pine Grove as a Place-Name Endured Through at Least 1916

It looks like I already need to revise a statement I made in my November 4, 2023 post about the Pine Grove House. In that post, I said "If the house was known as the Pine Grove House, it apparently wasn't known by that name by many people. I have done numerous searches for 'Pine Grove House' and 'Pine Grove Place' in newspapers, government records, and Montana history books over the years and I always come up empty."

I've already shown above that the Betters/Harris place was called the Pine Grove House in the summer of 1883. In addition to the mentions in Coates' column and Barneby's book, I recently came across two other references to the Betters homestead as Pine Grove.

In this update on Clinton news in the February 14, 1894 edition of The Weekly Missoulian, it notes that Fannie (Betters) Terry and her children are visiting the Betters family at Pine Grove:

There are multiple other familiar names in this clipping, along with place-name I don't believe I have come across before. It appears that the Swartz farm may have been called "'Peach Blow' farm."

In another Clinton news update in the December 11, 1916 edition of  The Missoulian (below), it notes that the Moore ranch, "better known as the 'Pine Grove' ranch" was sold to "Mr. Shappard."

Lest you think this is some other "Pine Grove," allow me to trace the property ownership for you: Austin deeded the Betters homestead to Dan and Grace (Betters) McQuarrie after Jane's death. In 1908, the Milwaukee Road right-of-way took a strip right down the middle, leaving the McQuarries with two parcels separated by the railroad. One of those parcels was sold to Carl E. Mueller in 1911, then transferred to Harriet Moore in 1913. In the 1916 property transaction reported in the newspaper clipping above, Harriet and R.J. Moore sold the property to Charles and Alma Shapard.

I wish I had a great literary conclusion for this post, but I don't and it's getting late. If you have any information about any of the topics I am researching and blogging about, I'd love to hear from you. Please leave a note in the comments. Thanks!