The Missing Cemetery of Taft, Montana, the “Wickedest City in America”
Published Spring 2020 in Montana The Magazine of Western History
by the Montana Historical Society
“Button, buckle, bullet,” the metal detector’s digital display signaled as Forest Service Archeologist, Erika Karuzas waved it over brush and rock. “Every hit was thrilling,” she said after her crew finished scouring a hillside bench near Interstate 90. The team was on a mission, to find the location of the missing Taft Cemetery and its occupants who died in a place once called the “wickedest city in America”.
Taft was a tumultuous railroad town in northwest Montana, nestled in a pine covered canyon seven miles east of the state line in Mineral County. In the late 1800’s the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern railroads operated in Montana and Taft was just a nameless bend in the road. In 1905 the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad directors decided to expand their line to the Pacific coast in order to remain competitive with the other northern railroads. Named, The Western Extension, its marketing edge was a route 18 miles shorter and faster than the other lines to the coast. Part of this extension ran through the Bitterroot Mountain Range and eventually became known as the Route of the Hiawatha. Upon completion the route over mountains boasted ten tunnels, seven high steel trestles and included the St. Paul Tunnel, later dubbed the Taft tunnel.
The town of Taft sprouted alongside the Northern Pacific rail line which ran from Missoula to Wallace, Idaho. Its claim to fame was the Taft Tunnel. A mile and a half long tunnel connecting the Montana and Idaho borders. When the tunnel was completed around Valentine’s Day in 1909 it was hailed as “a remarkable feat of engineering,” by a reporter with the Fergus County Democrat. The workers set a world record in boring and when the east portal crew met the west portal crew in the middle of the tunnel, the crews were a mere 3/8ths of an inch off each other's center line.
But the story of Taft is a cautionary tale where a remarkable feat came with the price of human misery. The work was hard and living conditions in the camps was miserable. Hot, infested with insects in the summer, cold and wet during the other months. Construction sites were unsafe and the lack of proper sanitation resulted in a regular parade of crushed bones, disease and death.
During construction, Taft and the surrounding area swelled to over 8,000 laborers.4 While campaigning to be President, Secretary of War, William H. Taft stopped his train in the nefarious railroad camp. As Secretary Taft spoke to the crowd, he chastised them for being a “sewer of sin” and “a sore on an otherwise beautiful national forest”. Either out of jest or spite, the name of the future President stuck.
Indeed, the labor crews not only worked hard but they played hard, too. Along with an army of workers came saloons, shops, prostitutes and crime. Crime fueled by harsh conditions, alcohol, and short-tempers. At the time, the closest sheriff was 80 miles away in Missoula. This rich mixture of mayhem which came to define Taft, started during the extension’s planning stage. The Milwaukee Railroad financed construction by issuing short-term bonds. With bond deadlines looming and construction costs on the rise, the need to finish the extension and tunnel quickly was of paramount concern. Laborers were a mix of many nationalities including Hungarians, Montenegrins, Italians, Swedes and more. The contractors worked three shifts around the clock in order to meet timeline goals which kept the town bustling 24 hours a day.
Because of its colorful past, Taft has been the topic of many articles, lectures and books. In the summer of 2018, John Shontz, a retired lawyer and historian, was researching an article about the Taft Tunnel for the Milwaukee Railroad Historical Association. He read a book called, “Doctors, Dynamite and Dogs” by Edith M. Schussler. Schussler’s book documented the years she and her husband, Otto, spent in Taft. Otto was contracted by the railroad to help run the small, two-story hospital along with four other doctors. In her book, Edith mentioned a cemetery located behind the hospital which was built on the west end of town in 1907.
“In all the research I did, nobody mentioned the location of the cemetery,” Shontz said. However, another clue to the cemetery was found in an article about when work began in Taft. It stated that before the hospital was built, typhoid broke out and had reached near-epidemic proportions with hundreds of cases and many deaths.
“A low log cabin was built for a morgue and a man was hired to make plain pine boxes for use as coffins. A cemetery was laid out on a hill above the hospital…many of the victims were buried without a service.”
He checked with the Forest Service and the Montana Department of Transportation, and neither had records verifying it. He also contacted Kay Strombo with the Mineral County Historical Society. Strombo said she knew about the cemetery but did not know of its exact location. Nor could she find a complete record of names for those buried at the site. Since the probable location was on Forest Service land, Karuzas, with the Lolo National Forest, became involved. The search was underway to find the buried souls lost to over a century of forest growth and erosion.
During its heyday, Taft was made up of 27 saloons including the Hay Market Saloon and Restaurant, The North Pole Saloon and Restaurant, and the Austrian Saloon with a sign which read “si parla Italiano (we speak Italian). There were two “show shops”; the Spokane Theatre and Spokane Saloon and the Arcade Theatre and Carr Saloon. These establishments sported a bar and gambling tables in the front and a show stage in the back. The Spokane Saloon advertised beds for 25 and 50 cents along with the sign “Scandinavian Headquarters”. Stores included the Flathead Trading Co., and the Taft Clothing Company and the old Montana Hotel Bar and Restaurant renamed The Taft Hotel. Additionally there was a post office, meat market, and numerous buildings for the contractors.
Nearly 500 prostitutes lived above the saloons or in hastily built “cribs”; shacks and tents strewn around town. When not working, men from surrounding camps descended on “Saloon Town” (which Taft was called) for relaxation and entertainment. Saloon keepers gladly cashed the laborers hard earned checks for a small percentage fee in the hopes workers would cash the rest in their saloons. Taft was not a family town. Men like George Weisel, manager of the Mann Lumber Company and Earl Hooks, a clerk at the Flathead Trading Co., refused to bring their wives to town. Hooks told a reporter, “a lot of fights took place because there was practically no law of any consequence.” Shootings, stabbings and murder became recurring events, coupled with a steady flow of accidents common to dangerous railroad work.
Taft started to make headlines in local newspapers about its resident’s egregious behavior. In 1907, The Daily Missoulian reported, “…it is a bit of the Wild West that is seen usually only in pictures. It is lively all the time…” “The town of Taft…is one of the toughest holes in the United States…” reported the Fergus County Democrat. The Western News out of Stevensville reported that “the law of the place was the six shooter.” “A Carnival of Crime” screamed a 1908 headline from an article in The River Press out of Fort Benton. That same year the Winston Brothers, who had the contract to build the extension, hired their own law; an Irish Deputy Sheriff named Pat Callahan.
[contact for entire manuscript]
