JUNE 2025 Ghost Towns and History of Montana Newsletter LANDUSKY ON THE OUTLAW TRAIL Clothes were rationed in Britain and the U.S from June 1, 1941. This limited the amount of new garments people could buy until 1949, four years after the war’s end. Fabric restrictions also put a new emphasis on legs and hemlines. Many women during this time were then able to take an old dress and mend it into a new style.— Courtesy of Frontier Montana Museum From The Harlem News, Jan. 7, 1944 Accessed via: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ B y D o n F . K l e p p e r The old Outlaw Trail, which in its entirety ran from just south of the Montana-Canada border to El Paso, Texas, has, like those who rode it, faded into the past. In Montana there remains a visible link to that trail and its notorious users-the crumbling little town of Landusky. In the summer of 1893, Powell “Pike” Landusky and Bob Orman, prospecting in the foothills of the Little Rocky Mountains, discovered gold in a small streambed. News of the strike soon leaked out. By 1894, the influx of prospectors and boomtown followers had created a town which, in deference to one of its founders, was called Landusky. By that time, Pike apparently had given up prospecting and was proprietor of the Landusky Saloon. Previous to his prospecting excursion into the Little Rockies, Pike Landusky, a native of Pike County, Missouri, had fashioned a reputation in the gold camps of Virginia City, Alder Gulch and Last Chance Gulch. He was a big, tough man with a violent temper. Because of its proximity to the Outlaw Trail, the town of Landusky became a stopping-off place for those seeking supplies, the hard liquor of Pike’s saloon, or just a place to hide out. The nearby Little Rockies and the Missouri River breaks offered quick sanctuary to those evading the law. A few miles south of Landusky there lived a ranch family of three sons, John, Loney and Harvey Logan, and their mother. The sons exhibited wild traits at an early age. Harvey eventually picked up the assumed name “Kid Curry,” Photo Courtesy of Lewistown Public Library
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