P a g e 2 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r married best friends John Donovan (Jesse’s husband) and Ashley Morse (Margaret’s husband). I like to imagine these two sisters flipping a coin to determine which train they would hop as they embarked on their journey into the then still pretty wild west, just to see what was out there. And since oral testimony is unavailable, I figure they chose the bustling mining city of Butte to meet men worthy of their willfulness and independence. In terms of a timeline, we know that Grandmother Morse cued my dad that she was born around the same time as President Lincoln’s assassination and that the two couples purchased the ranch at a public auction in 1910. To say they were wholly conventional couples would be an understatement. John and Ashley were both professionals in the thriving mining town of Butte, but they were probably better known naturalists, who published a variety of guidebooks for surviving in nature and living off the land. They traveled together with local American Indian guides, who led them on months long expeditions into the far northern territories of North America where they primarily hunted big game. I like to imagine these American Indian guides as brothers; really as invaluable teachers of all the tricks of the survivalist trade, but historical knowledge demands I acknowledge a much different possibility. My now trained eye is quite skeptical of the old photographs I’ve seen of these men on my family tree posing together with the American Indian guides to commemorate and to mark their various successful expeditions. I will never know for certain if the guides were also counted among the bounty. The fantasy goes down much sweeter. I do know for certain that our house, built in 1898, served for a time as a stage coach stop servicing weary travelers coming into the state from Idaho. The Red Rock Stage Coach, and others of its kind, followed and slowly built upon generations old American Indian migration and hunting trails as it transported prospectors, traders and other visitors to Dillon over fifty miles away from the Donovan Ranch stage stop. The ranch was where Margaret and Jesse (and eventually also my Grandfather) lived and thrived while their men were away. If only the walls of the old brick house could speak! What stories they could share of conversations, dreams and life from those days! Fig. 1 Red Rock Stage Coach Traveling Over Lemhi Pass As it was, the walls of our house did have a few stories to tell. When I was a kid, I remember that the walls were full of paintings by E.S. Paxson, a good friend to Aunt Jesse and Grandmother Morse. Since he worked for a stage coach company (as a guard) prior to moving to Butte and then to Deer Lodge to pursue his work as a visual chronicler, I’d like to believe they first met at the ranch. “Maybe he had even stayed there in room 6,” added my dad. Paxson, a self-trained artist, tasked himself with studying historical sites
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