P a g e 5 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 These boys found work holding mule teams in Virginia City, Montana Territory, circa 1864. (Photograph by the Montana Picture Gallery, 965113, Montana Historical Society Research Center Photograph Archives, Helena.) Virginia City and returned to Bannack to retrieve his family. The Sheehans followed the trampled ground in the wake of stampeding miners. As the mule team panted up the last hill, the Sheehans stopped to let the animals rest. Mollie hopped down from the wagon, grabbed a stick, and wrote her name in the dirt, announcing, to her father’s amusement, “I stake my claim.”8 Life on the Urban Frontier Once settled at Virginia City, Mollie and her friend Carrie Crane roamed the countryside gathering wildflowers and edible goosefoot to sell to the boarding houses. They learned the names of plants and observed the wildlife. Mollie ignored the fancy ladies who lounged around smoking cigarettes. She knew they were different, but never questioned why they were not “good women.”9 Harriett Sanders, however, worried about the settlement’s influence on her two boys, James and Wilbur, and insisted that their house be built well out of town, out of earshot of the miners’ coarse vocabulary. Thomas Dimsdale, Montana Post editor and author of Montana’s first book, Vigilantes of Montana, complained about young hooligans in the streets and opened a school to help corral Virginia City’s youth.10 Mollie Sheehan attended Dimsdale’s school. She found its mild-mannered professor so preoccupied with his writing that she and her friend Carrie took advantage of him. They delighted in asking permission to be excused. The professor would wave them away and the girls would make their escape. They would run down the hillside to a corral below, take a few daring minutes to slide down the haystacks, then scurry back up the hill to slip into their seats unnoticed.11 Mollie saw the aftermath of two vigilante hangings at Alder Gulch, but it was the hangman’s tree at Helena that le ft her shivering. She arrived at school one day to find the boys clustered together, pointing down the hill. There she saw a man hanging on a branch, his head bruised and clothing in disarray. The man’s wrinkled, stiff boots made an impression she could never forget. Mollie heard that a Sunday school teacher took her students there to look at the dead man, to impress upon them that crime does not pay.12 As Helena matured into Montana’s capital city, its citizens consciously tried to shed its rough mining camp image. This applied to children as well, whose parents dressed them up for portraits. They played somber games of chess, put on pageants, and took ballroom dancing at Mrs. Sulgrove’s Academy. Many children who lived in Helena from the 1890s to the 1920s took these lessons. The Fligelman sisters recalled that Mrs. Sulgrove required every boy to wear one white glove, so that when he put his hand on the small of a girl’s back, it would not soil her dress.13 Elizabeth Farmer Smith le ft wonderful descriptions of her childhood in the mining camp at Garnet in the 1920s. Her father was an engineer and partner in the Pra-Fa-Po Mine Company. She and her mother and sister spent three summers at Garnet beginning when Elizabeth was ten. She and the other children had
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