Miles City

The Cantonment on the Tongue River

The original townsite of Miles City lies east of the Tongue River, with its grid concentrated west of the Northern Pacific tracks laid in 1881.⁶ The town first grew to serve the Tongue River Cantonment, set up just after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and then Fort Keogh, which was completed in 1878.^4,6 One account says the fort was named for the sole survivor of the Little Bighorn, the horse of Captain Myles Keogh.²

George Miles came to Montana in 1876 as quartermaster clerk for the Fifth Regiment at Fort Keogh.⁵ When parts of the military reservation around the fort were abandoned, he filed on 10 square miles of level land east of the Tongue River, part of which is now Miles City.⁵ Buildings went up near 10th and Pleasant streets in 1877, and the original grid, oriented to the ferry landing, was platted in 1878 on a northeast-southwest line.⁶ The nomination says George Miles and his father became the first wool growers in the area, shipping their wool down the river several years before the railroad came.⁵

Brick Blocks and the Hard Winter

The Northern Pacific arrived in November 1881 by one account and in 1882 by another, and it put ranchers close to the Chicago slaughterhouses, making it cheaper to ship their cattle.^2,6 Architect Byron Vreeland, who came from Bozeman in 1882, almost singlehandedly turned the “wooden city” of 1880 into a red brick city by 1887.^6,7 His 1886 Episcopal church, a blend of Romanesque, Gothic, and Queen Anne styles, still stands in the Carriage House Historic District.^3,6 Miles City incorporated in 1887, as the Hard Winter of 1886-1887 decimated the range herds and ruined stockmen and the businesses that served them.^4,8 The population dropped from 2,500 in 1887 to 1,400 in 1892, and Vreeland gave up his practice and went back to Bozeman.⁶ Ranch families still came to town: Nannie and Walt Alderson left their cattle ranch for Miles City in 1893 so their children could go to school.³

The Milwaukee Road and the Homesteaders

Lorenzo Stacy, a land developer, cattleman, and banker, organized other businessmen to secure and donate a right-of-way for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad.⁹ One account says the Milwaukee arrived in 1907 and made the town a division point, and another dates its arrival to 1908.^2,9 As settlers flocked to eastern Montana, the Carriage House district’s nomination put the 1910 population at 7,000, more than twice the 1904 figure, and at 9,000 by 1918, while an East Main Street tour gives 4,697 for 1910.^6,9 William Kelly, an engineer for the Milwaukee Road, bought a one-story house in the East Main Street district, and in 1920 he lived there with his wife, Nellie, and their three-year-old son.⁹ Joseph Leighton built the Leighton hotel in 1898-1899, and within a few years his son Alvin renamed it the Olive; Brynjulf Rivenes designed its new façade, lobby, and east addition.¹⁰ Most of the town’s African Americans were young men stationed at Fort Keogh or railroad workers, and the state survey places the largest group of their homes near chef Dan Hurt’s house on Atlantic Avenue.¹¹

Drought, Deco, and the Pumping Plant

The drought that began in 1917 brought Miles City into severe economic depression a decade before the national Great Depression of the 1930s.² Thousands of homesteaders lost their land, business at the Olive fell off by the mid-1920s, and the town’s black population dropped from 59 in 1910 to 35 in 1930.^2,10 Between 1935 and 1940, as the Great Depression lifted, new Art Deco and Moderne buildings went up on Main Street.⁸ The Federal Writers’ Project’s Montana guide gave Miles City an altitude of 2,357 feet and a population of 7,175, at a junction of US 10 and State 22.¹² The Miles City Air Force Station, a radar post of the 902nd Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, ran from 1954 until the Air Force closed it in 1968.¹³

An Act of Congress in 1911 allowed the city to build a pumping station on Fort Keogh land to draw water from the Yellowstone River, and the plant ran from December 1911 until 1974.⁴ In 1974 the Custer County Art and Heritage Center leased the building and turned the tanks into gallery and workshop space, and the original 1911 equipment remains inside, down to the marble-topped oak cabinets.⁴