Homesteader Days

On the Sunday of Homesteader Days the Grand Parade comes down Main Street in Hot Springs. Riders on the floats and fire trucks throw candy by the bucket to children, and to some adults, scrambling along the route. In 2024 the line included a three-person bagpiper crew and many cowboys and cowgirls on horseback. The grand marshal, Alice Webber, stood and waved from a classic convertible. A rider on the “75th anniversary” float called out “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” to the crowd. Craft and food vendors line the downtown streets for the weekend. Homesteader Days is always held the second weekend in June. The 2026 celebration, the 77th Annual Homesteader Days Celebration & Rodeo, ran from 5 p.m. Friday, June 12, to 4 p.m. Sunday, June 14.

Three days on Main Street

The Town of Hot Springs lists these events:

• a three-day rodeo
• a kiddie parade and games
• day-long Music on Main Street on Saturday
• a street dance
• the Grand Parade on Sunday
• softball and horseshoe tournaments
• a car show and a quilt show
• breakfasts and barbecues honoring the original homesteaders and their descendants

The 2026 schedule also had cribbage and cornhole tournaments, a farmers market, food trucks, and a Sunday pancake breakfast raising money for pickleball. In 2024 the Valley Press counted bands and entertainment “up and down the main street,” with visitors from outside the area coming for the weekend.

Saturday starts at 9 a.m. with the Skunk Alley Run, a 3K and a 13K in 2026. Its proceeds go to the Skunk Alley Run Scholarship Fund. Classic cars line up and register for the car show at the same hour, and children get free face painting before the kiddie parade.

In 2008, 46 children walked that parade in costumes ranging from dinosaurs to Dutch girls carrying tulips. Raffy Samson, rifle in hand, led his brother Rubin in a covered wagon pulled by their mother, Retha, and won the Homesteaders category. Afterward about 50 children ran three-legged and sack races, pulled in tug-of-war, and tossed water balloons in the park. Dan Smith had overseen those games for about 12 straight years. “I kind of got it down now,” he said.

The duck race is run with plastic ducks. In 2008 Ida Prosser’s duck beat 142 others over 100 yards of Hot Springs Creek in about two minutes. For 2026 the organizers offered 500 of Donna’s Dandy Ducks for sale from May 1. Wayne Crane’s duck took first place. Winners collected at the car show table or, once it closed, at Fergies.

The town lists the street dance for Saturday night. In 2008 about 300 people danced on Main Street to the local band Skunk Alley Song Factory until about 2 in the morning. Organizer Leslee Smith said the dancers got a nice surprise when the Great Scots Pipes and Drums, a 12-member band from Polson, took the stage. The Valley Press reported that in 2024 the dance closed the party on Sunday night, as it customarily did, with music by the “406” band. That same 2008 weekend had opened on Friday with arts and crafts on Main Street, the film “The Story of the Bitterroot” in the old high school gym, and bands at the Montana Bar and at the Symes Hotel, a Mission Style resort hotel finished in 1930 beside a hot spring.

The open rodeo

The rodeo is an open rodeo, run in 2026 with Brash Rodeo Company, on Saturday at 5 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. On a windy Sunday afternoon in 2024:

• A Miss Teen Rodeo rider presented the colors at the opening ceremony.
• A junior ladies barrel racer drove through the arena dust.
• A steer rider tried to stay aboard while, in Chuck Bandel’s caption, “eating a moutful of dust.”

The bleachers are usually crowded, though Bandel noted a few empty seats that year, and described the competitors as “talented young competitors from this end of Montana and beyond.”

In 2008 cowboys and cowgirls competed in 11 events over two days. Rodeo organizer Laurence Walchuk put attendance up 15 to 20 percent from the year before. He said an Australian couple had seen the rodeo sign on the highway and stopped. “They told me it was the highlight of the trip,” he said. In 2024 Harley Ryder, from the Milwaukee area, sat beside the Harley Road King he and his girlfriend had ridden west. “The folks we talked with said this was about as small town West as you can get and we would not be disappointed if we stopped,” he said. “They were right. Great parade and we are going to hit the rodeo next.”

The arena itself is due for work. AG West Farm Credit gave the celebration a 2025 Stewardship Grant of $75,000. In April 2026 the organizers were planning the first phase of rebuilding the rodeo facilities.

Pineville and the lottery of 1910

The Valley Press describes the celebration as a commemoration of the founding of Hot Springs, then called Pineville, by homesteaders in 1910. The town sits on the western edge of the Little Bitterroot River Valley, within the borders of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation. It was platted astride Warm Springs Creek, with grassland rolling away to the east and low forested mountains on the other sides. The Flathead, Kalispell, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai occupied the valley long before European-American trappers and traders came into it.

A 1904 law opened much of the reservation to settlement. Between 1905 and September 25, 1909, tribal members received allotments of 80 and 160 acres. On April 1, 1910, the federal government offered 1,126,587 acres of the remaining land by lottery. President Taft then authorized Indians to sell their allotments. Under that order, parts of the DeMers and Maillet families’ allotments and the land of an early settler, Ed Lamereaux, became the townsite of Pineville. Pineville took the name Hot Springs in 1913.

Henry Otto Spies and Meta Tina Spies came out from Chicago in 1910 with their two-year-old daughter, Gladys. They took 80 acres just south of town. Gladys’s younger sister, Dorothy, was born on the homestead in 1911.

A square dance on horseback, 1949

Gladys, by then Gladys Weltz, turned 100 on March 9, 2008. That June she was the oldest of 20 second-generation descendants of the original homesteaders of Hot Springs, Lonepine, and Camas Prairie who met for a reunion at the senior center. Longtime residents Mac and Lolo McDougall were grand marshals of that year’s Grand Parade. The LaRue Hot Springs Museum held its grand opening the same weekend. “Last year, we didn’t have a building, we just had a dream,” Leslee Smith said. “We’ll keep losing our history, if we don’t get busy recording it.”

Many of those descendants had attended the first Homesteader Days, in 1949, which was itself a reunion of the original homesteaders. Jim Thorpe, described in the Valley Press as “an Indian man and an Olympic athlete,” was a guest. Rosie King, whose father, Emery Swisher, settled in the Niarada area in 1912, remembered the day. “It was quite a to doings,” she said. She could still recall the square dance on horseback down at the airport.