My last three years have amounted to a crash course in all things Jefferson County and Montana (and newspaper publishing, actually). I’ve learned a lot. And I’ve come to understand how much I don’t know.
This was highlighted, yet again, in the wake of a recent weekend trip to Fort Benton. At the excellent Missouri Breaks Interpretive Center there, I became engrossed in an exhibit on homesteading, the defining demographic phenomenon that more or less built this state. And I perked up at this: “The first patent issued in Montana was dated June 15, 1872, in Jefferson County.”
Journalists are suckers for round-numbered anniversaries, so I took in the date with some enthusiasm. The first homestead patent! 150 years ago! In Jefferson County!
I shared this finding with our friends at the Heritage Center in Boulder and the Jefferson County Museum, and asked, basically: What gives?
It turned out, my question was more complicated than it seemed.
For those who, like me, need a history lesson refresh: Homesteading legislation enabled people to acquire land in western territories through the 1800s and into the 1900s. The landmark Homestead Act of 1862 allowed settlers to claim 160 acres if they stayed put for five years and made improvements.
Ellen Rae Thiel, a Heritage Center volunteer who knows pretty much everything, noted that the great-grandfather of Boulder resident Kathy Dyer received a homestead patent on land in the Boulder Valley on March 5, 1872. That was three months before the date I had seen in Fort Benton.
Meanwhile, James Brown, a Jefferson County Museum volunteer who knows his homesteading, told me that Patent No. 1, issued by the Federal Land Office for the Tanner homestead located east of Clancy, was dated April 15, 1875, way too late.
How to reconcile this? Fortunately, Brown turned me onto the General Land Office (GLO) database maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The GLO archive is a thing of beauty, I tell you. It contains records of every homesteading patent ever issued. Ever. Anywhere. You can search by state, county, tribe, name, and/or date. Each record includes a BLM serial number, map coordinates, and the legislation under which the patent was granted.
That last turns out to be important. As Brown explained, there were many laws that authorized homesteading under various terms; the 1862 act is just the best known. Edward Ryan, for example, received two patents on June 1, 1872 for land totaling 320 acres in what would become Jefferson County. But one was under the 1862 Land-Grant College Act (since Montana didn’t yet have a land-grant college, it was apparently free to dispose of that land as it saw fit); and the other was under 1842 legislation authorizing scrip, exchangeable for land, in payment for military service. Horatio Freeman acquired 80 acres north of Clancy under the Land Act of 1820, which required people to pay cash up front for their land.
All this proved a fascinating rabbit hole which occupied me happily for several hours. And eventually, it yielded clarity: Searching only for patents authorized by the 1862 Homestead Act produced the record of one Alfred Myers, whose 157.23 acres were, in fact, the first granted to a Montana settler under that 1862 act. So the Fort Benton exhibit was correct, just not specific enough.
A search of the Montana Cadastral – another thing of beauty, by the way — for Myers’ land coordinates brought further clarity. The parcels lie just east of the modern Highway 69, about four miles north of the Cardwell junction. Helen Carey, whose own family’s Montana roots go way back, and who has co-authored a history of the Boulder Valley, confirmed that the land now is owned by her late husband’s niece, Mary Leavitt, and her husband Glen.
Carey also offered this: In 1870, census taker Hiram Cook interviewed an Alford (sic) Myers, age 33. Cook’s notes indicated that Myers was “a stock raiser, not merely a farmer,” according to Thiel’s account. Born in Virginia, he was “no doubt of an older Eastern family” and had assets of $2,500.
This likely is the same Myers who ultimately (according to his 1920 obituary in the Hardin Tribune) moved to the Shields River Valley north of Livingston, married, made quite a fortune in cattle, helped frame Montana’s original state constitution, was active in Democratic politics, and became a 32nd-degree Mason.
Myers’ apparently extensive diaries are housed at Montana State University. I’m going to go look for them. My education continues.
