Petroleum County Community Library

History of Petroleum County

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“This country can be rough and certainly isn’t a place for people who are not tough and stubborn. It truly is a next-year country but the best place in the world.”

– Carroll Manuel (1920 – 2012)

 

After initial exploration up the Missouri River and through Montana, various groups of adventuresome men and women set out to create more permanent settlements. Most established trading posts that served both Native Americans and fur trappers.  From the 1860s through the early 1880s, points of settlement developed along the mouth of the Musselshell River and to the south, along Flatwillow Creek.

 

The mouth of the Musselshell River provided an excellent place for the founding of a new town.  In this area at least three attempts were made at settlement.  In 1866, the Rocky Mountain Wagon Road Company launched a freight route across the mountains south of the Missouri River to the mouth of the Musselshell.  They named the town built at the end of the road Kerchival City; the Musselshell River soon washed away the little town.  In March of 1868, the Montana Hide and Fur Company of Helena sent a nine member party, led by James Brewer, to plot a town and build a warehouse.  They named this new settlement situated on a bluff above the river, Muscle Shell City.  In 1874, the Diamond R Transportation Company built Carroll approximately 30 miles upstream from the mouth of the Musselshell.  Like its counterparts, Carroll thrived for only a few years.    All three towns are now covered by the waters of Fort Peck Reservoir.

 

During the open range boom of the 1880s, cattle replaced bison on the ranges of eastern Montana.  Stockmen, mainly from southwestern Montana and Texas, moved their herds into land being vacated by both Native Americans and bison herds.  They claimed homesteads or bought property on rivers and streams and let their stock loose on the grassland.

 

Most of those who first called the area home were sheepmen.  Traditionally, these men camped closer to their herds than cattlemen and therefore extended their headquarters further onto the prairie.  In 1877, Mr. Fred Lawrence trailed 400 sheep from Idaho to Flatwillow.  At least seventeen sheep ranchers located in the region by 1880, and by 1884, approximately 38,000 sheep roamed the prairie.  The first cattleman to settle was Frank Chamberlain in 1877.

 

Controlled by stockmen, these lands housed the iconic culture of the American Cowboy.  The great cattle boom gave way to the era of the western roundup and the legend of the cowboy.  Roundups generally took place twice a year.  The spring roundup served to gather the cattle after they scattered during the winter and sort them according to ownership.  New calves were branded and herds were trailed to summer pasture.  The fall roundup served to select the animals ready for market.

 

A number of men established large cattle and sheep ranches on the lands of what later became Petroleum County.  The country on McDonald Creek, below the sandstone rimrocks, provided the perfect location for Mr. Walter J. Winnett to start his ranching operation.  Mr. Winnett arrived in 1879 (some reports say 1883).[1]  His closest neighbors, the Lepper and Garl Ranches, operated near Flatwillow.  A trading post conducted business at the east end of his property, near the confluence of Box Elder Creek and Flatwillow Creek.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 1880s saw the open range boom as well as developing settlements.  The cattlemen and sheepmen ran their stock on the open grasslands with few competitors.  The exact dates for the beginning of Flatwillow are unknown; however, the Junction City-Maginnis Stage Road traveled through the area to where gold was discovered in 1879 in the Judith Mountains.  The Flatwillow Crossing, which developed into the town of Flatwillow, served as a station on this route, where Powell “Pike” Landusky and Joe Hamilton operated a trading post.    Landusky and Hamilton sold their property on Flatwillow to Fred and Mattie Sawyer Lawrence in 1882.  The couple built a hotel, a large house, and ran the trading post.  They helped to establish a post office in Flatwillow on March 27, 1883.  When Fred died in 1890, his grave was the first in the Flatwillow Cemetery.

 

By the turn of the century, a small stream of homesteaders began to flow into the area.  The small flow of homesteaders turned into a river beginning in the 1910s and stockmen like Walter Winnett and Mons Teigen adjusted.  They helped the new settlers by supporting struggling towns.  While Teigen lasted only a few years, Winnett became the most substantial settlement and the center of growth in the area.

 

The Montana plains became desirable to homesteaders only after 1900, with the development of new farming machines and techniques, new land policies, and large land promotional campaigns.  Following a long series of public land laws enacted between 1862 and 1912, more people claimed more land in Montana than any other state.  From 1909 to1923, 114,620 homestead claims were filed; approximately 32 million acres passed into private hands.  Two thousand of those people filing claims did so on property that would later become Petroleum County.

 

Around 1909, the Winnett ranch buildings began to give way to a struggling homestead town.  Walter Winnett constructed the first buildings: a saloon, general store, and post office.  Winnett built the famous Log Cabin Saloon, it is said, to prevent his cowboys from traveling the distance to Grass Range to go to the bar.  He at least saved the miles on his horses by building a saloon nearby.  Oscar Badger and Winnett formed a partnership and started a general store to supply the newly arriving homesteaders.  The supplies came by Winnett’s freight business from Musselshell or Lewistown.  Tony Rasmussen bought the general store business in 1913 and moved it to his own building after a year.  The post office, named Winnett, came into existence on October 4, 1910.  John Hughes served as the first postmaster and the mail was delivered from Flatwillow.  After the first few years of school in the Winnett house, the Winnett children went to Lewistown for school.  By 1912 community growth necessitated the construction of a designated schoolhouse.  This building was one room, 20 x 40 feet, white, and served about twenty-five students.  This building still stands and serves as the Methodist Church.  The Milwaukee Land Company purchased a portion of Winnett’s ranch lands for a town site around 1913.  On July 18, 1914 the first sale of Winnett town lots took place, $64,000 of town lots were sold. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1910, when the homestead boom began, Fergus County still encompassed all of present day Petroleum County.  Routes to the area consisted of a few roads, passable only in good weather.  The largest waves of settlers rolled into the Winnett area during 1910 and again from 1912 to 1918.  Most new arrivals came by rail, which reached Lewistown in 1903.  Connecting rails were completed to the towns of Grass Range in 1913 and Roy in 1914.  Melstone and Musselshell to the south received rail lines in 1908.  The railroads greatly aided new homesteaders in reaching the remote lands of what was to become Petroleum County.  The homesteaders arrived from various places and with various life experiences, but once settled in the area they all shared the common struggle of surviving on the unrelenting plains.  1912 saw the largest influx of settlers in a place that previous to 1910 contained only four post offices (Flatwillow, Edgewater, Weede, Valentine).  It grew to at least twenty-two known post offices by 1922.  These new homesteaders came from all over the world, but most were native born Americans.  One area in the western part of the county, near the community of Blakeslee, came to be known as the Minnesota Bench due to the number of Minnesotans who settled there.

 

While homesteaders continued to arrive until the 1930s, an exodus began in 1918.  In just six years since the majority of homesteading began, the land filled, the people realized the impossibility of surviving on 320 acres or less on the unforgiving lands and began to leave.  The end of World War I, falling market prices, and the flu epidemic of 1918 contributed to this mass departure.  Also, drying grass, crops and soil of drought, and the resulting economic hardships led to bleak years prior to 1920.  Homesteaders piled onto railroad cars, heading to new lives at an alarming rate, and it appeared that Winnett’s heyday would be over almost as quickly as it had begun.  The tides turned in February 1920, however, when an oil discovery again brought hope and excitement to the young town.  The discovery, located just west of the Musselshell River near the communities of Mosby and Cat Creek, stemmed the flow of outgoing homesteaders and created boomtowns of Winnett and Cat Creek.

 

On February 19, 1920, in the flows of the 2nd Cat Creek Sand formation, the men found the first oil well of what was then eastern Fergus County.  The Cat Creek strike produced the first commercial oil field in Montana and the second oil strike (the first being in the Devil’s Basin).  Numerous companies rushed to the oil field, and 1920 saw much development due to the oil strike.  Homesteaders took advantage of the new jobs and moved closer to Cat Creek to work in the fields.

 

After years of failed attempts to split from Fergus County, on November 4, 1924, residents of eastern Fergus County voted to break away from the larger county.  The new county government of Petroleum County began operating on February 22, 1925.  The growth and the accompanying optimism from the oil boom and county separation lasted only briefly.  Winnett went from an estimated population of 2,000 in 1923 to 408 in 1930.  So it was, that on the eve of the Great Depression, Petroleum County residents had already suffered the adversities of drought and depression, however, none of the previous experiences would amount to the devastation wrought during the ‘30s.

 

The Great Depression in Montana began with a severe drought in 1929 that reached disastrous proportions by 1931.  Governor John Erickson wrote that the people were “in rather a desperate condition.  The grain crops and feed crops are practical failures.”  Farm numbers and value fell along with food prices, forcing many to sell their places.  Grasshoppers, Mormon crickets, and dust storms combined to create an even more desperate atmosphere.  The rains refused to fall for nearly a decade, with brief and insufficient respite.  The world-wide depression led to decreasing food purchases and rising crop surpluses, which resulted in lower markets for the farmers.  The situation worsened and, “slowly, inexorably, the rural depression squeezed the lifeblood out of the parched Great Plains.”

 

Soon after assuming office in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began implementing changes.  His basic rationale included using the spending and regulatory powers of the federal government to fight against the Depression.  This basic principle led to increased roles of both state and federal governments in the everyday lives of the people.  The Alphabet Soup Agencies were instrumental in the relief effort in Petroleum County, as they were throughout the rest of Montana.  The major programs in the County were the Civil Works Administration which employed local men in public works projects including graveling county roads, installing indoor lavatories and a sewer system in the school, building an airport and construction of reservoirs.  Other New Deal programs in Petroleum County were the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 1930s and the Great Depression gave way to World War II and more prosperous years.  The local government in Petroleum County continued to struggle, however.  The debt it accrued during the 1920s by building roads and other services multiplied during the Depression.  The decrease in privately owned property led to a drop off in property tax operating revenue for the county.  At the start of the 1940s, the county asked Roland R. Renne, president of Montana State College (now Montana State University), to investigate another form of government for the struggling region.  He suggested the county manager form and the county adopted it in 1942.  Petroleum is the only county in Montana that operates under a county manager form of government.

 

A mini oil boom at Cat Creek in the mid-1940s caused excitement and brief speculation.  Electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephone lines reached rural residents during the 1940s and ‘50s.  The town and county continued to work to improve the community.  In the 1960s the first community pool was built, in the 1970s the county courthouse was extensively remodeled and a new school addition was completed, with the public library moving into the school to become the only school-community library in the state.  The town completed a new water and sewer system in the 1980s.  The largest torosaurus skull yet found was extracted from Petroleum County in 2001.

 

Large ranches once again occupy the land with areas of dry land farming and minimal irrigated land.  However, the landscape retains the mark of past homesteaders and small farms that once occupied every 320 acres.  The story of Petroleum County, that of initial adventure, investment, development and speculation, exodus, and a return to the originally successful large cattle spreads reads like a book across the landscape.

 

 

[1] According to a Winnett Times article quoted in the Pages of Time, Mr. Winnett arrived in 1883, however, multiple other newspaper articles and short histories written on Mr. Winnett, including one by his daughter, Mirth Keihl Hedman, claims he arrived in 1879.