Livingston

Clark City at the Bend of the Yellowstone

Livingston stands near the point where the Yellowstone, flowing northward from Wyoming, makes a great bend eastward, and it has been the Park County seat since 1887.^1,4 Lieutenant Clark and his men came down Billman Creek and reached the Yellowstone just south of the present town on July 15, 1806.¹ The first settlement in the vicinity, Benson’s Landing, came into being about 1873 at a ferry crossing 4 miles north.¹

As the Northern Pacific pushed its tracks west in 1882, company representatives pitched a tent at the bend of the river and stocked it with 140,000 pounds of goods hauled by ox-drawn wagons.² Railroad surveyors camped on the site on July 14, 1882, and called it Clark City for William Clark, and Northern Pacific rails reached it late that year.¹ By 1883 Northern Pacific surveyors had platted a townsite nearby for their division headquarters, and the tents of Clark City moved to the new town of Livingston.² The new name honored a Northern Pacific director, Crawford Livingston of St. Paul.¹

Fire and Brick on Main Street

Early Main Street was a muddy track bordered by wooden sidewalks, where false-fronted wooden stores, offices, and many saloons did a lucrative business.² Henry Frank, a tailor and Jewish immigrant from Poland, followed the railroad to Livingston with his wife Barbara, and in 1883 they built the city’s first brick business block on East Park.² Fires in 1885-86 destroyed much of downtown, and owners rebuilt in more substantial brick.² On one lot, J. A. Danforth replaced a burned wood-frame cigar factory and shooting gallery with brick after the 1886 fire, then four years later added a second story so heavy it damaged the first floor.² Local cigar factories, mills, brickyards, and breweries further assured the town’s survival.²

Fire kept coming: after the opera house burned in January 1896, a $10,000 bond issue paid for a city hall and fire station, and city officials moved in before the end of that year.⁴ The Montana Historical Society marker says fire driver M. J. McGinnis, hired in 1894, was the town’s only paid fireman until 1906.³

The 1894 Strike, the Bucket of Blood, and B Street

During the railroad strike of June and July 1894, service stopped for two weeks and Federal troops were brought in to protect railroad property.¹ A drunken captain stabbed a townsman with a sword, President Cleveland declared martial law, and the strike failed.¹ Madame Bulldog’s Bucket of Blood Saloon, at 113 Park St., served a rowdy and transient clientele that included Martha “Calamity Jane” Cannary.^1,2 Legend has it, the 1939 state guide says, that the two women fell out and Madame Bulldog tossed Calamity into the street.¹

B Street’s establishments, part of the town’s red-light district, prospered from the 1890s to the 1920s on the trade of ranch hands, sheepherders, itinerant railroad workers, and local residents, and they closed in the late 1940s.⁵ Four small one-story houses, built as duplexes between 1896 and 1907, are what the marker calls the only remnants of the district.⁵

The Depot, the Shops, and the Two Sides of Town

By the 1890s the town had become the departure point for tourists bound for Yellowstone Park.² In 1901 the Northern Pacific expanded its repair shops.² The company hired Reed and Stem to design a passenger depot, built in 1901-02, which the National Register nomination calls an architectural work of national significance.^2,6

Blue-collar workers and their families settled on the Eastside near the shops, and in 1902 an underground walkway beneath the tracks gave them a safe crossing.⁷ Carpenters and speculators put up three-fourths of the district’s small wood-frame houses before 1907, Scandinavian and Italian families moved in, and the Norwegian Lutheran Church went up in 1905.⁷ On the Westside, Charles Garnier, whose “Montana Sport” cigar factory had a Livingston payroll second only to the Northern Pacific’s by the register’s account, built a residence in 1902.⁸

Stock Trucks, the Murray, and the Museum School

The Elite Hotel, built about 1904 when Livingston was a busy tourist hub, was expanded to four stories in 1922 by the family of Senator James E. Murray of Butte, which foreclosed on owner Josephine Kline in 1925 and renamed it.⁹ In 1939 the Federal Writers’ Project guide found a railroad and trade center in a farming and stockraising county, its streets full of trucks and trailers loaded with pigs, sheep, calves, or horses.¹ The marker ties the Murray’s decline in the 1960s to the demise of rail travel.⁹ The North Side School, built in 1907, closed in 1971, and since 1976 the building has been home to the Park County Museum.¹⁰