Neander97 / Historical Trivia: Montana history and biography at its finest. Examine the lives and/or deaths of such famous Montanoids as: Mother Mary Amadeus, Burton K. Wheeler, and George "Big Nose George" Parrott.
Neander97's Historical Trivia
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Famous (Dead) Montanoids:
Part 2FAQs:
- What are Montanoids?
--Persons or other critters (objects?) who lived, died, or spent part of their life in Montana or were, in the opinion of the owner of this web site, otherwise associated with Montana.
- What criteria are used to determine who or what is a Montanoid?
--Whatever happens to strike the fancy of the owner of the this web site.
- What criteria are used to determine the "fame" of these Montanoids?
--Whatever happens to strike the fancy of the owner of the this web site.
- Why is this web site limited to "dead" Montanoids?
--Because the owner of this web site doesn’t particularly care to be sued by living Montanoids.
Mother Mary Amadeus: Lady Black Robe
On January 18, 1884, six most unusual passengers arrived at the Northern Pacific depot at Miles City, Montana. Wearily disembarking from the train, the newcomers, six black-clad Ursuline nuns, gathered up their few pieces of luggage and began to survey their new home. Miles City was, in the 1880s, still very much a rugged and raw frontier community. Home to some 2,500, more or less, permanent residents, the town survived by catering to the needs of soldiers, hide-hunters, wolfers, cowboys, and cattlemen. To many of the community citizens, the arrival of the Ursulines was a welcome event--a sign that the town might be maturing, perhaps, even, becoming civilized. The leader of this small contingent of nuns was Mother Mary Amadeus. In reaching Montana, Mother Amadeus--a small, incredibly vibrant and resilient woman--was on the brink of realizing her long-held dream of conducting missionary work among the Native American peoples of the West. And what a missionary she was. Over the course of the next three decades she opened eight mission schools among the Tribes of Montana and three among the Aleut peoples of Alaska. The Cheyenne knew the strong-willed, but always compassionate, Mother Amadeus as Maka-mahe-hona-wihona, The Great Holy White Chief Woman. The Aleut simply called her Anyachak, Mother.
After struggling for a time to place a roof over their heads and put food on the table, the six Ursulines funded their operation by opening a boarding school in Miles. Never one to be distracted from the task at hand, by March 30, 1884, Mother Amadeus and three of the sisters had departed for the Cheyenne Reservation south of Miles City. On April 2 the sisters and their military escort reached the site that would be the Ursulines' new home, an abandoned cabin, near the confluence of Otter Creek and the Tongue River. Building upon this ramshackle three-room, dirt-floored, log cabin the sisters soon established Saint Labre's Mission, the first in a long line of such missions and schools founded by Mother Amadeus and her supporters. For the next twenty-five years, Mother Amadeus and her nuns—who, since theirs was a sister order to the Jesuits, were, naturally, known as Lady Blackrobes--traveled across Montana establishing mission schools.
In the autumn of 1884, only six months after opening St Labre's, Mother Amadeus was summoned to Saint Peter's Mission, south of Great Falls, were she founded a boarding school for Indian girls. In 1887 Mother Amadeus, or Lady Black Robe as she was called by many of her students, established a school for Gros Ventres and Assiniboines children at Saint Paul's Mission on the Fort Belknap Reservation. That same year she founded a school for the Crow at Saint Francis Xavier on the Little Big Horn. In 1890 Mother Amadeus established a school for Kalispel, Pend'Oreilles, Kootenai, and Flathead children at Saint Ignatius in the Flathead Valley and one for the Blackfeet at Holy Family near Browning. Never seeming to tire, Lady Black Robe opened schools for Plenty Coups' band of Crow at Saint Charles in Pryor in 1892 and then hurried on to found a similar institution for Chief Charlot's Flatheads at Saint John Berchman's in Arlee. During this period, Mother Amadeus also managed to find the time to establish two parochial academies in Anaconda.
Life at the mission schools established by Mother Amadeus and her Ursuline sisters was neither easy nor pleasant. Clotilde McBride in Ursulines of the West described some of the hardships endured by the Lady Blackrobes:
"Most of the experiences of those days were recorded only by guardian angels--the rigors of the weather and extreme poverty, snow up to the waists of the nuns, winds that blew them flat on the ground, their shoes often froze to the floor when they tried to put them on in the morning, the nights spent sitting up when the scanty supply of bed clothing had to be given to the children, sickness among members of the [Ursuline] community, malignant diseases among the children, time after time provisions running low until there was but a little oil and handful of meal in the house."
When she felt that her mission schools in Montana were firmly established, Lady Black Robe set out to find new challenges to confront, new missions to undertake. For many years, despite her demanding schedule, Mother Amadeus had found the time to travel across the United States consulting with the Church hierarchy and raising funds for her mission schools. On several occasions she had traveled as far afield as Rome, where she was able to press her case for additional funding and support for her schools. One such trip to the Vatican led to Lady Black Robe's realization of yet another long-held dream, the establishment of mission schools for Eskimo children in Alaska. In 1905 she opened the first of three such mission schools, Saint Mary's, at the tiny village of Akulurak, on the coast of the Bering Sea. Mother Amadeus spent her remaining years shuttling back and forth between rural Alaska and her new headquarters in Seattle, were she had established an Ursuline convent.
Following her death on November 10, 1919, Lady Black Robe was brought back to Montana and interned in the shadow of the Mission Mountains at Saint Ignatius. Mother Amadeus was in the words of Mother Angela, her friend and biographer, truly "a pioneer [who] stamped her name upon the soil of Montana and Alaska."
Burton K. Wheeler: "Bolshevik Burt"
Born in Hudson, Massachusetts, on February 27, 1882, Burton Kendall Wheeler and moved to Montana shortly after his graduation from law school in 1905. Wheeler began his law career in Butte, where he served as U.S. Attorney for Montana from 1913 to 1918. Wheeler became known as a friend of the working man for his stance in support of the law rather than the interests of the establishment during the labor unrest that swept through Butte in 1917-18. These actions earned Wheeler the scorn of many among Montana’s establishment, who gifted him with the nickname "Bolshevik Burt." His popularity with workers, and voters, however carried him into the US Senate in 1922.
In 1922 a coalition of labor, Progressive, Populist, and socialist activists united to forge a new political action group. This PAC, the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA), threw its support behind the Progressive Party in the 1924 presidential elections. The Progressive party in turn chose Senator Robert M. La Follette (Republican of Wisconsin) as its presidential nominee and Wheeler (Democrat of Montana) as its candidate for vice president. The La Follette-Wheeler slate fared surprisingly well and garnered over 4.8 million popular votes.
Wheeler is remembered as one of the most powerful senators in Washington during the in the 1930s. As chair of the Interstate Commerce and of Indian Affairs committees, he influenced such pivotal New Deal legislation as the Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (the Wheeler-Howard Act).
Wheeler is also remembered for his "Isolationist" policies and his active roll in the "America First" movement. A consistent opponent of war, he supported the so-called neutrality acts of the 1930s, lashed out against peacetime conscription in 1940, fought against the Lend-Lease Act. After the US entered World War II, however, Wheeler gave his full support to the effort.
It was his opposition to President Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, that was perhaps, Wheeler’s finest hour. Following the striking down of key elements of his New Deal agenda on constitutional grounds by the Supreme Court, Roosevelt decided to forestall such interference in the future by expanding the size of Court—a move which would allow him to "pack" the Court with justices favorably inclined to support his policies. Wheeler, a life-long champion of liberal causes, had, like most liberals been critical of the Court, but he was also a firm believer in the Constitution and the American system. And as such, he found it impossible to remain mute at the prospect of Roosevelt’s plan to destroy the independence of the judiciary. At the urging of senators Glass (Democrat of Virginia), Byrd (Democrat of West Virginia), and others, Wheeler assumed the leadership of those in congress who were determined to oppose the president. While Wheeler’s masterful performance on the floor of the Senate doomed the president’s hopes of "rigging" the Court, his opposition to Roosevelt also brought doom to his own political career. Wheeler failed to win re-election to the Senate in 1946. Following his defeat, Wheeler practiced law in Washington, DC, until his death in 1975.
Big Nose George Parrott
Our story begins in 1878 as George Parrott, noted horse-thief and highwayman, journeyed north along the nascent Outlaw Trail from Utah into Montana Territory. Like many another pioneer entrepreneur, Parrott, known to friend and foe alike as Big Nose George, came to win, or steal as the case might be, fame and fortune on the Montana frontier. For Big Nose George, Montana's allure lay not so much with the riches of its gold fields or grazing lands as in the fact that word of his past deeds had yet to reach the ears of the local law enforcement community. Parrott soon found his way to Miles Town on the middle reaches of the Yellowstone River.
While Miles Town originally owed its existence to the army post at Fort Keogh, the community's founding fathers did not limit themselves solely to providing goods and services to the military. Miles quickly expanded its line of goods and services and became a commercial center serving the needs of such sterling characters as buffalo hunters, bull whackers, whiskey peddlers, three-card monte dealers, and a varied and diverse collection of simple renegades--an ideal environment for a man of Big Nose George's caliber.
Coincidentally with the arrival of Parrott in Miles Town was the decision of Morris "Old Man" Cahn (some sources give the spelling as Cohn), post sutler at Fort Keogh, to travel East in order to purchase supplies for the fort's commissary store. Sutler Cahn was not the most popular man in the Territory--as the high prices he charged his blue coated customers insured that the lion's share of their meager wages found its way into his pockets. In fact, it was hard to tell what motivated Old Man Cahn more, his love of money or his miserly affection for wealth. Cahn, aware of his unfavorable reputation with the troopers and well aware that many in the civilian community knew of his wealth, arranged to make the first leg of his purchasing expedition, from Miles to Bismarck, in the company of a group of officers from the Fort. What could be safer than traveling with Officers and Gentlemen of the U.S. Army and their mounted escort?
Big Nose George, who by this time had ensconced himself as one of the leading lights of the area's outlaw establishment, determined that he and his cohorts in crime would do the neighborly thing and relieve Cahn of his money. After all, if what they say is true is true, and money is indeed the root of all evil, then it was Parrott & company's civic and . . . well almost spiritual duty to remove such an immense burden from Cahn's conscience and soul. So far as Parrott could see, there was but one small detail that might possibly interfere with his missionary work--that was how to prevent the Sutler's army escort from interfering in Old Man Cahn's financial exorcism. Not to worry, however, kind readers, Big Nose George that epitome of the frontier renaissance man, was an astute student of human nature and soon hit upon a plan to distract the troopers charged with protecting Cahn and his profits.
And so it came to pass on that fateful morning when Old Man Cahn departed for Bismarck and points East, each an every one of the soldiers accompanying the Sutler carried a quart of the finest and most potent red eye available in Miles Town--courtesy of the Big Nose George Missionary & Fund Raising Society. By the time that the Cahn party had journeyed but a few short miles from town their intrepid escorts, those faithful boys in blue, had became somewhat befuddled and disorganized. Now the mere fact that one's escorts may have imbibed of hard spirits need not necessarily insure that one is in peril, however, Sutler Cahn had made a costly error. Perhaps it was an attempt to be neighborly, perhaps it was a bribe, in any event Old Man Cahn had brought with him keg of peach brandy--brandy that he was quick to share with his officer friends.
By the time that the Cahn and his party reached a deep gully some eighteen miles east of Old Miles Town the entire cavalcade, from lowliest private to highest officer, was well oiled and lubricated. So well lubricated in fact, that Cahn's money fairly slipped from his miserly grasp and into the waiting pockets of the Big Nose George missionary fund raising society. When Cahn and his escort arrived at the bottom of the coulee Parrott and his highwaymen, armed with Winchesters, sprang their ambush and cleansed the Sutler's soul and wallet of its golden burden. According to Cahn, his less than fortunate encounter with this band of road agents cost him the, then, grand sum of $16,218.75 and, of course, a partially full keg of peach brandy.
Although it surely had to have been common knowledge along the middle reaches of the Yellowstone that Parrott and company were behind the robbery, no action was taken by either the civilian or military authorities. Circumstantial evidence, most probably in the form of cash money and breath that smelled of peach brandy, was not enough to warrant the arrest of the members of the Big Nose George Missionary & Fund Raising Society.
Old Man Cahn through his operation of the post commissary eventually recouped his losses and retired in genteel comfort. In time, Big Nose George Parrott also bade farewell to his chosen profession, although his retirement occurred in much less genteel circumstances as he eventually dangled from a noose in Wyoming Territory. For many years thereafter the legacy of Big Nose George and Old Man Cahn lived on in Old Miles Town. Eighteen miles east of town lay a deep ravine known to the old timers as Cahn Coulee; while for many years thereafter it was the custom when one gentleman wished to treat another to a dose of rot-gut to proclaim, "Come along Old Chap and wet your whistle, I still have a few of Old Man Cahn's dollars left to spend."
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