Great Falls

Five Falls and a Portage

Five dams now hold the Missouri at Great Falls, where a 360-foot drop in the river once gave the young town a ready source of power.^3,5 The city lies on a gentle slope of sandy plain in a bend of the Missouri River, opposite the mouth of the Sun River, and its courthouse still serves Cascade County.^3,4

Capt. Meriwether Lewis first saw the Great Falls of the Missouri on June 13, 1805, after informants’ accounts of a single fall had led the captains to expect a short portage.^3,5 Instead he found a run of five, and the Corps hauled canoes and gear 18 miles over the plains on a rude cart that used a boat’s mast for an axle and sections of cottonwood for wheels.^3,5 On the evening of July 4 the last small store of liquor was doled out, and the men sang and danced until a brisk thunderstorm stopped them.³

Paris Gibson’s Plat

The Federal Writers’ Project guide says Paris Gibson, a Minneapolis man, first visited the spot in 1880, while the downtown historic district tour says he looked over the plain by the cataracts in 1882 and pictured a metropolis there.^3,6 Backed by James J. Hill, Gibson returned in the spring of 1883 with Robert Vaughn and H. P. Rolfe, and they platted the townsite and named it Great Falls.^2,3 Rolfe made the streets of the 160-block plat wide enough for freighters to turn their wagons around, and piles of rocks marked the corners on ground where, his wife recalled, grass and sagebrush grew and nothing indicated that a city would rise.⁶ Johnstown stood across the river near historic-era Chippewa-Cree encampments, and the West Bank marker calls it the earliest permanent Euro-American settlement; the growing city slowly absorbed it.^7,8 In 1884 Worden Wren opened the first store in a canvas tent as a branch of Murphy, Maclay and Co., which sold everything from flour and fine teas to window glass and blasting powder.^6,9 Ed Simms, whom the state historic preservation office calls the first and perhaps most influential black resident of Great Falls, arrived in 1886.¹⁰

Rails, Smelters, and Dams

In October 1887 the Great Northern Railway arrived at Great Falls, then a young city of 1,200 people.³ Great Falls was incorporated as a city on November 28, 1888, and elected Gibson its first mayor; a silver smelter built near the Giant Springs that year did not last long once silver was demonetized.³ By 1890 nearly 4,000 people lived in Great Falls, and the Federal Writers’ Project guide counts Black Eagle Dam, which generated 9,000 and later 25,000 horsepower, as the first of four hydroelectric units near the city.^3,9 In 1892 the Boston and Montana Consolidated Copper and Silver Mining Company, later acquired by the Anaconda Company, put its smelter on a treeless bluff above the river, and in 1916 electrolytic copper and zinc refineries and a wire and cable factory replaced the original plant.^3,11 By 1912 the Rainbow and Volta plants together generated 140,000 horsepower, and a company organized by John D. Ryan, with offices in Great Falls, controlled them.³ Ryan, president of the Anaconda Company, and James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway, sat on the board of the Great Falls Townsite Company, which had the 1911 Rainbow Hotel built, and Ryan explained that they designed it for the much larger city they expected Great Falls to become.¹²

Homesteaders, Refineries, and the War

The downtown district nomination says Great Falls lost population for the first time between 1900 and 1910, because of the national depression.⁹ Newcomers poured in during the 1910s as mining boomed; the Northside tour says the city grew from 17,000 to 26,000 between 1910 and 1920, while the downtown nomination gives a population of 24,121 for the same period.^9,11 When the use of copper declined, the city kept growing as the center of a large agricultural area, and 4,500 new citizens arrived, many of them fleeing failed homesteads.^3,9 In January 1930 the Great Falls Family Welfare Association collected household goods and 27,000 pieces of clothing for the destitute.⁹ The Federal Writers’ Project guide counted 28,822 people and reported that the metal refineries and the wire and cable mill ran at capacity through the summer of 1937, employing more than 2,500 men, until employment fell off that fall.³ In 1892 Republicans elected William Morgan constable, possibly the first black man elected to office in Montana, and the state historic preservation office says that by the 1930s Great Falls had the highest percentage of black residents of any Montana city.¹⁰ Beginning in 1941, the Army’s Air Transport Command flew daily from Great Falls to Fairbanks.⁹

Central Avenue, the Northside, and the West Bank

The Central Business Historic District counts 103 contributing buildings built between 1886 and 1951, and in August 1921 thirty-six hundred people watched Nomads of the North at the grand opening of the Liberty Theatre.⁶ On the Northside, more than 200 homes and buildings date from 1885 to 1945 and stand along boulevards shaded by trees planted between 1888 and 1913; in April 1903 the Tribune reported 20,000 elm and ash trees budding.^2,9 The Sunburst Oil Refinery operated on the West Bank from 1923 to 1933, and two buildings remain there from that early oil boom.⁷ The Cascade County Courthouse, built of grey sandstone quarried nearby, was dedicated on July 4, 1903, under a dome made entirely of copper, and during World War II lookouts used that dome to watch for possible Japanese air attacks.⁴