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 “We really started the town in September platting it into lots and filing the plat in the courthouse at Missoula. The contractors put in their headquarters and in a few days we had a city started. At that time there was a state law providing that liquor could not be sold within two miles of a construction camp except within an incorporated city. So we incorporated. A little while later the county attorney arrested the whole town—that is all the saloon keepers—but the case fell through because the town was incorporated. I was elected mayor and I believe I was the youngest mayor in existence. I was just over 20 years old. Now I guess I’m the oldest mayor in the country, in point of service, because my successors never qualified and according to law, I'm still the King. Before winter came McCarthyville was a complete city. We had a city government, although I don't believe there was a single ordinance on the books, a post office, sidewalks, Red McConnell's dance hall, three hotels, a dozen short order houses, three stores besides the company's commissary; in fact everything to supply the necessaries and luxuries of life as it was lived thereabouts. That town in its balmy days was a real, live settlement. It was a place for rough men and there was nobody else there. From Cut Bank west, there was no other town and we were the metropolis of miles of country full of working men. All the supplies for the camps went out from McCarthyville and all the men from the camps came in for their pay. Winter and summer the construction on the big grade from the summit down was pushed and the camps held from three thousand to four thousand men. That made an enormous payroll for one town. Any man could get a check any time for what was due him, so there was always big money circulating in the town. McCarthyville also had the company hospital and in the winter of ninety and ninety-one that was the busiest place in the young city. Laborers were scarce in the west, so the company brought them out from the east, most of them picked up in cities. They would come by train to Cut Bank and from there on, would have 60 miles of hiking across the prairies and over the summit.” DIED LIKE FLIES "It was about as tough a jaunt as any man would want and it was a whole lot more than most of these city-bred fellows could stand. They weren't used to the altitude and hardly any of them had enough clothes. They would start out from Cut Bank, in the dead of winter, and usually they'd get caught in a blizzard out on the flat. Then a couple of days later they'd wobble into McCarthyville and drop into a bunk with pneumonia. Well, there wasn't many of 'em lived through. Buryin's got too frequent and we begun to take notice. Not that they bothered us much in the way of attending services, because we didn't have no time for funerals and anyway, there was no minister in town. I think that was about the only institution we ever lacked, though. It got so that every morning just at daylight a big Swede that Workers stand by their locomotive in the 1890s. Photo Courtesy of the Stumptown Historical Society
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