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Hutchtech Imaging, Miles City, MT (2026)

09/12/2026

🛠️ THE ARMY OF SHOVELS: How Eastern Montana Out-Worked the Great Depression 🚜
Friday Night Fun Facts: The Staggering Manpower Behind Montana’s New Deal Wonders
When the Great Depression hammered America in the 1930s, Eastern Montana caught the worst of both worlds: widespread bank collapses and the brutal Dust Bowl drought. Crops blew away, ranches dried out, and paychecks vanished overnight.

As we celebrate the sweat and grit of the American worker last weekend, we look back at the muscle-powered resurrection of Eastern Montana. During the depths of the 1930s, our corner of the state transformed into the epicenter of the greatest public works engineering effort the country had ever seen.

1. Fort Peck Dam: An Army of 10,500 Men in the Mud
Started in October 1933 under the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Peck Dam was an empire built from raw mud and river gravel.
Peak Manpower: At its height in 1936, the project employed over 10,546 workers on site simultaneously.
The Boomtown Cities: Workers poured in from across Montana and the country. Overnight, shantytowns with names like Wheeler, Delano Heights, and New Deal exploded across the prairie, packing over 40,000 men, women, and children into tarpaper shacks and tents.
The Shifts: Crews worked 24 hours a day in round-the-clock 8-hour shifts through sub-zero blizzards and blistering 100°F summers, handling heavy electrical dredges, driving giant steel pilings, and clearing hundreds of thousands of acres of timber along the Missouri River bottoms.

2. The Per-Man Power: What a 1930s Laborer Built
Before modern GPS graders and mega-excavators, moving mountains took literal human muscle and determination.
Moving 122 Million Cubic Yards: When completed, Fort Peck stood as the largest hydraulically filled earth dam on planet Earth, containing roughly 122 million cubic yards of material. That equals nearly 12,000 cubic yards of rock, earth, and clay placed per worker on the roster over the life of the construction!
The Dollar Value: Common laborers started at roughly 50 cents an hour ($100 to $120 a month)—a steady lifeline at a time when families were starving. Most of that cash was wired directly home to save family farms and ranches across Montana.
The Cost in Blood: The work was brutally dangerous. In September 1938, the massive dam face slid, burying 34 men. Eight bodies were never recovered and remain entombed inside the core of the dam to this day.

3. The Local Footprint: WPA & CCC Across Custer & Dawson Counties during the great Depression.
While Fort Peck grabbed world headlines (landing the first-ever cover of LIFE magazine in 1936), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) were putting boots on the ground right in our backyards:

Miles City & Fort Keogh: WPA and CCC crews quarried local sandstone, paved city streets, improved Frank Wiley Field, built dikes along the Tongue River, and modernized stock water reservoirs across the range.

Makoshika & Terry: CCC crews carved early trails, established shelter huts, constructed rural timber bridges, and built shelterbelts of cottonwood and caragana trees to stop the prairie topsoil from blowing to the Atlantic Ocean.
Nearly a century later, we are still driving across the bridges they poured, walking the badlands trails they cut, and depending on the river dams they raised out of the gumbo with picks, shovels, and steam.
Did your granddad or great-uncle work on Fort Peck, the CCC, or a local WPA road crew back in the 30s? Drop a 🛠️ or a 🚜 in the comments and let’s honor the Montana hands that built this state!

📸 Enjoyed this story? Follow the HutchTech Imaging page for more hidden Montana history, local lore, and Friday Night Fun Facts every week!

09/05/2026

🚢 THE STEAMBOAT THAT WALKED OVER MONTANA: The Wild Dash of the 'Far West' 🌊
Friday Night Fun Facts: How a Frontier Riverboat Conquered the Yellowstone & Made World History
When we think about early Montana transportation, we picture dusty cattle drives, horse-mounted cavalry, or the click-clack of the railroad. But before tracks crossed the prairie, the ultimate lifelines of Eastern Montana were the winding channels of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers—navigated by massive, churning paddlewheel steamboats.
None of them was more famous, or piloted with more sheer nerve, than the Far West and its legendary captain, Grant Marsh.
In the early summer of 1876, this boat pulled off an engineering miracle right in our backyard—literally "walking" across dry sandbars and setting a world speed record that stands to this day.
1. The Steamboat Wizard: Captain Grant Marsh
Navigating the Yellowstone River was considered near-suicidal. Unlike the deep, gentle Mississippi, the Yellowstone was wild, rocky, and riddled with shifting sandbars, submerged cottonwood snags, and sudden rapids.
Enter Captain Grant Marsh. A riverman since age 12, Marsh had worked alongside Mark Twain and had a supernatural ability to "read" muddy river water. In 1876, the U.S. Army hired Marsh and the Far West to supply troops during the Sioux campaign. His mission: push a 190-foot wooden riverboat further up the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers than any sane captain had ever dared.
2. "Grasshoppering": How to Make a Steamboat Walk
In late June 1876, the waters of the Bighorn and Yellowstone dropped rapidly. When the Far West scraped bottom and got stuck on gravel bars, Marsh didn't turn back. He used a wild frontier technique called "grasshoppering."
The Wooden Crutches: The crew planted massive wooden spar poles into the riverbed on either side of the bow, tilted forward at an angle.
The Steam Lift: Chains running from the steam capstans hauled on the spars, literally lifting the entire front of the boat out of the water!
Leapfrogging: The stern paddlewheel churned forward, lurching the boat ahead a few feet before the hull dropped back down into the water. By repeating this grueling process over and over, Marsh literally walked the multi-ton steamboat across shallow gravel and sandbars!
3. The Tragic Cargo & The Dash Past Miles City
While stationed near the mouth of the Little Bighorn River, Marsh received devastating news: General Custer’s 7th Cavalry had been annihilated.
Soon, Crow scout Curley and surviving soldiers arrived carrying 51 severely wounded cavalrymen. Marsh immediately transformed the Far West into a floating field hospital, carpeting the deck with freshly cut willow boughs and grass to cushion the injured men.
On the evening of July 3, 1876, Marsh cut the lines. His orders: get the wounded to the military hospital at Fort Abraham Lincoln (Bismarck, ND) before they died of gangrene, and transmit the news to a shocked nation.
4. 710 Miles in 54 Hours: An Unbroken Record
What followed was the greatest piece of river pilotage in North American history.
Full Throttle in the Dark: Running the twisting Yellowstone in broad daylight was dangerous; running it at night was considered impossible. But Marsh kept the steam boilers roaring at maximum pressure, dodging blind bends, debris, and canyon walls by the light of the moon.
Flying Past the Tongue & Powder: The Far West screamed past the mouth of the Tongue River (where Miles City would soon be founded) and shot past the Powder River at breakneck speeds of over 20 miles per hour.
The Record: On the night of July 5, just 54 hours after leaving, the Far West pulled into the docks at Bismarck. She had covered 710 treacherous river miles in just over two days—averaging over 13 mph downstream while navigating hair-raising bends.
Marsh’s daring speed run saved the lives of almost all 51 wounded soldiers on board. The boat's arrival also sent the telegraph wires singing, breaking the shocking news of the Little Bighorn to an America celebrating its Centennial Fourth of July.
Today, when you look out across the quiet waters of the Yellowstone River near Miles City, it's hard to imagine that the very same channel once shook under the thundering paddlewheels of a walking steamboat racing to save 50 lives.
Have you ever spotted old steamboat channel markers or river landings along the Yellowstone? Drop a 🚢 or a 🌊 in the comments and let us know your favorite river memories!
📸 Enjoyed this story? Follow the HutchTech Imaging page for more hidden Montana history, local lore, and Friday Night Fun Facts every week!

08/29/2026

🚂 THE MIDNIGHT GHOST TRAIN OF CUSTER CREEK: Montana’s Deadliest Rail Disaster 🌊
Friday Night Fun Facts: The Forgotten 1938 Milwaukee Road Catastrophe
If you head northeast out of Miles City toward Terry, the vast prairie between the Yellowstone River and the high breaks of Big Sheep Mountain looks peaceful and dry. But in the summer of 1938, this exact stretch of badlands drainage became the site of the worst rail disaster in Montana history.
It was the night the Milwaukee Road’s luxury streamliner—the Olympian—vanished into the churning waters of a flash flood at Custer Creek.
1. The Cloudburst Over Big Sheep Mountain
On the evening of June 18, 1938, a massive, localized "cloudburst" thunderstorm stalled over the high divide near Big Sheep Mountain.
The Dry Gulch Trap: Custer Creek was normally an innocent, bone-dry coulee that barely trickled into the Yellowstone River.
The Wall of Water: The storm dumped inches of torrential rain in a matter of hours. The runoff channeled down from the badlands into a sudden, 20-foot wall of muddy water, slamming into the wooden and concrete bridge piers of the Milwaukee Road railway crossing.
The Invisible Damage: About 20 minutes before the disaster, a track inspector had checked the bridge and found it solid. But the intense rush of water undermined the underwater foundation bed, leaving the heavy rails suspended over an unstable abyss in the pitch-black darkness.
2. 50 MPH into the Abyss
Just after midnight on June 19, the Olympian came barreling westbound toward Miles City at roughly 50 mph, carrying dozens of passengers asleep in their berths.
The Plunge: When the heavy steam locomotive hit the weakened structure, the bridge instantly collapsed. The massive engine tore across the chasm, embedded itself into the far bank, and steam exploded into the night sky.
Submerged in the Flood: Five passenger cars piled into the swollen creek bed. The raging floodwaters quickly tore through the coach cars, submerging passengers in total darkness and rushing mud.
3. The Rescue in the Prairie Mud
Miles City and Terry sprang into immediate action. Local ranchers, railroad crews, and doctors rushed through washed-out dirt roads with lanterns, rowboats, and makeshift stretchers.
Heroes in the Current: Rescuers tied ropes to cottonwood trees and waded into the deadly current to pull survivors out of broken passenger car windows.
The Grim Toll: In total, 47 people lost their lives and scores more were injured. The tragic event made front-page headlines across the globe, leading to nationwide overhauls in railroad bridge engineering, track inspections, and flash-flood warning systems.
Today, the Milwaukee Road tracks are long gone, and Custer Creek has returned to a quiet, dry coulee winding through the sagebrush. But beneath the shadow of Big Sheep Mountain lies the memory of the night the prairie floods brought down the mighty Olympian.
Did your family or grandparents ever talk about the 1938 Custer Creek wreck, or have you ever spotted where the old Milwaukee line crossed the coulees north of the Yellowstone? Drop a 🚂 or a 🌊 in the comments!
📸 Enjoyed this story? Follow the HutchTech Imaging page for more hidden Montana history, local lore, and Friday Night Fun Facts every week!

08/22/2026

🏹 THE FIRST LORDS OF THE PLAINS: 13,000 Years of Eastern Montana’s Tribes 🦬

Friday Night Fun Facts: The Deep Origins, Migrations, and Clashing Lifestyles of the Plains Nations

When people imagine the history of Eastern Montana, they usually picture the late 1800s—cavalry bugles, wagon trains, and warriors on horseback. But that iconic horse era was just the final, brief chapter in a human story spanning well over 13,000 years.

Long before the bow and arrow, the horse, or European contact, ancient peoples crossed icy tundra corridors and made Eastern Montana's river valleys their hunting grounds. Over millennia, waves of migration transformed these early hunter-gatherers into the distinct tribal nations that defined Big Sky Country.
1. The First Peoples: Mammoth Hunters & The Buffalo Jumps
Human history in Montana stretches back to the end of the last Ice Age.

The Clovis Era (13,000+ Years Ago): As glaciers retreated, early Paleo-Indian hunters followed herds of megafauna—mammoths, mastodons, and massive prehistoric bison (Bison antiquus)—along the ice-free corridor between the ice sheets.

The "Dog Days" Era: For thousands of years, these early nomadic bands possessed no horses. They traveled entirely on foot, using domesticated pack dogs pulling timber frames called travois to transport lodges and dried meat across vast distances.

The Buffalo Jumps: Hunting massive bison on foot required genius-level tactical coordination. Hunters engineered funneling drive lines using stone cairns to direct entire herds over rimrock cliffs—creating the famous pishkun (buffalo jumps) used for thousands of years.

2. The Great Migrations: Where Did the Modern Tribes Come From?

The tribes associated with Eastern Montana didn't all share one common origin or language; they arrived from vastly different corners of the continent over distinct eras.

The Apsáalooke (Crow Nation): The Crow were originally part of the Hidatsa people living as settled, agricultural farmers in earthen lodges along the Upper Missouri River. Around 500 years ago, driven by prophetic visions and a quest for sacred to***co seeds, leader No Vitals led a splinter band westward. They abandoned farming entirely, migrated into the fertile Yellowstone, Powder, and Bighorn River valleys, and became elite nomadic bison hunters.

The Tsitsistas (Northern Cheyenne): The Cheyenne originally hailed from the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi woodlands, where they farmed corn, harvested wild rice, and built permanent timber villages. Pushed west by competing tribes and colonial pressures, they migrated across the Missouri River, adapted entirely to the Great Plains, and formed legendary warrior societies.

The Nakoda & Dakota (Assiniboine & Sioux): The Assiniboine originally split off from the Yanktonai Sioux in the northern woodlands and migrated west onto the plains between the Milk and Missouri rivers. Meanwhile, the Lakota pushed westward out of the Minnesota woodlands throughout the 1700s, crossing the Black Hills and establishing dominance over the vast eastern grasslands.

3. Different Lifestyles & Defensive Tactics
While popular culture often depicts plains tribes as identical, their survival strategies, home life, and military defenses were distinctly tailored to their geography.

The Crow: Masters of Mobility and Horse Wealth
* Lifestyle: Inhabited the rich river bottoms and mountain foothills of the Yellowstone basin.

* Defense & Warfare: The Crow acquired horses early and bred some of the largest herds on the continent. Their tactical defense relied on rapid cavalry maneuvers, mountain scouts, and swift raiding parties to protect their hunting grounds.

The Cheyenne: The Elite Warrior Societies
* Lifestyle: Completely nomadic, deeply spiritual, and tightly organized into military societies (most famously the Dog Soldiers).

Defense & Warfare: When under attack, Cheyenne camps deployed intricate circular defenses, using tipis and pack saddles as barricades while specialized warrior societies fought rear-guard actions to allow women, children, and elders to escape into canyon breaks.

The Assiniboine: The Northern Winter Specialists
* Lifestyle: Roamed the northern prairies along the Milk River and into Canada.

* Defense & Warfare: Experts in sub-zero survival. They utilized dense river cottonwood groves and coulee bluffs as natural stockades during winter, maintaining an ironclad trade-and-military coalition with fi****ms early on through northern trading posts.

4. The Equine Revolution
In the early 1700s, the horse made its way north through trade routes from Spanish territories in the Southwest.
The horse transformed plains culture almost overnight. Walking bands became the most formidable light cavalry in North America. Tipis grew larger, hunting territories expanded hundreds of miles in days, and Eastern Montana became the stage for a dramatic, complex clash of powerful nations.
Eastern Montana’s dirt carries the footprints of over 500 generations of human history.

Did you know that many of the iconic plains tribes originally migrated from eastern farming communities? Drop an 🏹 or a 🦬 in the comments and let us know your favorite piece of Montana history!

08/15/2026

🪨 THE YELLOWSTONE RIVER’S SECRET GEMS: Giant Agates & The Local Treasure Market 🌋
Friday Night Fun Facts: The Secret Science & Big Business of Montana Moss Agates
If you walk the gravel bars along the Yellowstone River anywhere between Miles City, Glendive, and the North Dakota border, you’ll see people bent over, staring at the rocks. They aren't looking for gold—they’re hunting for Montana Moss Agates, one of the rarest and most unique geological treasures on Earth.

While they look like clear, glassy stones packed with dark trees, fern patterns, or fires inside, their origin story stretches back tens of millions of years to a massive volcanic catastrophe.

1. Born from Volcanic Ash & Ice Age Floods
Around 50 million years ago, giant volcanic eruptions blasted millions of tons of silica-rich ash across Eastern Montana. As groundwater seeped through that heavy ash, it dissolved into liquid quartz, filling empty pockets in the soil.
Over thousands of years, iron and manganese crystallized inside the hardening stone in branching patterns (called dendrites), creating scenes that look like dark pine forests, mountains, and red sunsets locked inside solid rock. During the last Ice Age, raging floodwaters tore these nodules out of the ground and washed them hundreds of miles east, dumping them straight into the Yellowstone River valley.

2. How Big Do They Get?
While most river hunters celebrate finding an agate the size of a golf ball or a fist, Eastern Montana is famous for producing absolute monsters.
The River Legends: The Yellowstone River regularly yields 10- to 20-pound agate nodules after spring ice breakups and high water wash out new gravel bars.
Eastern Montana Giants: True trophy hunters down around Custer, Prairie, and Dawson counties have pulled massive, raw agate boulders weighing 40 to over 60 pounds out of local gravel benches! These rare giants often become prized centerpieces in private family collections or local rock shops in Miles City and Glendive.

3. The Eastern Montana Agate Market
What starts as a fun afternoon walking the riverbanks turns into a surprisingly lucrative micro-economy for local rockhounds and lapidary artists.

Rough vs. Cut: Raw, unworked river nodules generally sell for $5 to $20 per pound. But once a stone is sliced open, the price changes instantly based on art, not weight.
The "Scenic" Premium: If a slab reveals a perfect natural "landscape" or "scenic forest" inside, a single cut stone (or cabochon) can easily command $50 to $300+ from custom jewellers.

The Local Industry: Between local rock shops, artisan jewelry, rock shows, and rockhounding tourism, Montana Moss Agates fuel a multi-million dollar statewide industry—with Eastern Montana sitting directly on top of the mother lode.

Today, Montana Moss Agates are found nowhere else on the planet in this specific form. They are literally bottled-up pieces of ancient volcanic history, river water, and Ice Age flooding.

Are you an agate hunter? What's the biggest or best Montana Agate you’ve ever pulled out of the Yellowstone River? Drop a 🪨 or a picture of your favorite find in the comments!

08/01/2026

💸 THE HISTORY OF THE PAYCHECK HEIST: When the Government Met Your Wallet 🪓
Friday Night Fun Facts: The Secret History of the Montana Income Tax
There are two things every Montanan loves to complain about: the unpredictable weather and the chunk of change missing from their Friday paycheck. But it wasn't always this way. For a huge portion of American history, what you earned was exactly what you kept.
As we look back at the laws that shaped our modern state, let’s look at the wild history of how the taxman finally broke into Big Sky Country—and the massive payroll shock that changed working forever.
The Tax-Free Century
For the first 130-plus years of the United States, there was no permanent federal individual income tax.
How the Country Ran: The government funded itself almost entirely through tariffs on imported goods and taxes on liquor and to***co. If you worked a hard day on a ranch or in a mine, Uncle Sam didn't take a dime of your wages.
The 1913 Shock: That all changed when the 16th Amendment was ratified, officially birthing the federal income tax. When the first modern tax form rolled out, the base tax rate was just 1%. Most everyday workers didn't even make enough to qualify to pay it!
1933: Montana Enacts the Heist
While the feds were taking their cut, Helena stayed out of your pocketbook for another two decades. But then the Great Depression hit, wiping out property values and leaving the state completely broke.
The Emergency Measure: In 1933, the Montana Legislature passed the state’s very first graduated individual income tax as an emergency move to keep public schools afloat and fund the state government.
The Original Cutoff: When Montana's income tax started, the rules were a lot more forgiving. A single person didn't have to file a single return unless they made more than $999.99 in net income for the entire year!
1937: The Social Security Payroll Shock
Even with federal and state income taxes on the books, you still didn't see deductions pulled directly out of your weekly check the way you do now. You just paid what you owed at the end of the year.
That changed with the birth of Social Security.
The Missing 1%: In January 1937, workers across Montana opened their pay envelopes and noticed a brand-new deduction labeled "F**A." The government started quietly pulling 1% out of gross wages to fund the new retirement system.
The Great Uproar: Because the concept of automatic payroll withholding was completely new, thousands of workers thought they were being robbed by their employers. Riots and strikes almost broke out nationally as workers demanded to know why their actual cash was missing before they even had a chance to hold it.
Today, Montana remains one of only five states in the entire nation with no general sales tax—meaning our state income tax remains the heavy lifter that keeps the state running.
Do you remember the first time you opened a paycheck and realized how much "FOIC/F**A" and Helena took out? Drop a 💸 or a 🪓 in the comments and let us know your first job story!

07/25/2026

Friday Night Fun Facts: The Forgotten Empire Just Outside Havre

Over the last few weeks, we’ve chased military history from Cold War bomber runs down to the vanished log walls of Fort Custer. But for this chapter, we are heading back up to the Hi-Line to look at a military base so massive, so grand, and so expensive that it was practically the Pentagon of its day.

When the U.S. government decided to lock down the northern border in 1879, they didn't just build a fort—they built a sprawling, red-brick imperial city just southwest of Havre. It was called Fort Assinniboine, and it remains the largest military outpost ever constructed in Montana history.

The Canadian Panic
To understand why the government spent millions of dollars building a brick fortress in the middle of the prairie, you have to look at the political panic of the late 1870s.

Following the defeat of Custer, Chief Sitting Bull and thousands of Lakota Sioux crossed the northern border into Canada to escape the U.S. Cavalry. The American military was absolutely terrified that Sitting Bull would use British Canada as a safe haven to launch lightning raids back down into Montana. To guard the international border, Uncle Sam decided to build a permanent, heavily armed wall of brick and steel.

A City of 100 Brick Buildings
Unlike the muddy log cabins of earlier outposts, Fort Assinniboine was built to last forever.

The Millions of Bricks: The military set up a massive kiln on-site, using local clay to fire over several million red bricks.
The Imperial Scale: At its peak, the base boasted 104 grand, permanent buildings, including massive two-story barracks, elegant officers' quarters with wrap-around porches, a post office, a massive hospital, and stables for hundreds of horses.

The 700,000-Acre Empire: The military reservation wasn't just a couple of acres—it spanned an unbelievable 700,000 acres, stretching all the way from the Milk River straight into the Bear Paw Mountains.

"Black Jack" Pershing & The Buffalo Soldiers
The elite muscle behind this massive northern fortress came down to the legendary African American 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, who patrolled the harsh border country in sub-zero winters.

But Fort Assinniboine also served as the training ground for the most powerful General in American history: John J. "Black Jack" Pershing.

In the 1890s, decades before he would command millions of American troops in Europe during World War I, a young Lieutenant Pershing was stationed right here at Havre. He cut his teeth leading a troop of the 10th Cavalry, braving the brutal Montana elements and establishing the fierce leadership style that would later make him a global military legend.

The Agricultural Legacy
By 1911, the border had quieted down, and the grand brick fortress was officially decommissioned. But it never turned into a true ghost town.

Today, the surviving historic structures form the Northern Agricultural Research Center. The old cavalry grounds that once shook under the boots of Buffalo Soldiers and General Pershing are now used to pioneer farming and livestock research for the modern families working the Hi-Line today.

Have you ever taken a tour of the historic red bricks at Fort Assinniboine, or driven past it just outside Havre? Drop a 🧱 or a 🤠 in the comments and let us know your favorite Hi-Line history!

07/18/2026

🪵 THE VANISHED FORTRESS: The Sprawling Citadel Built on Custer’s Ghost 🪓
Friday Night Fun Facts: The Secret Giant of Big Horn County
Over the last two weeks, we’ve tracked Montana’s military history from the Cold War nuclear skies down to the whiskey-fueled birth of Miles City. For our final chapter, we are hitting the brakes in Big Horn country.

When people think of military history here, they immediately think of the white headstones at the Little Bighorn Battlefield. But just a few miles up the road, sitting on a high plateau where the Big Horn and Little Big Horn rivers meet, the U.S. government built a massive, sprawling military city designed to ensure an uprising like the "Last Stand" would never happen again.

It was called Fort Custer, and it was one of the largest, most critical military installations in the entire American Northwest—yet today, it has completely vanished.

Building on a Battlefield's Shadow
In the spring of 1877, less than a year after Custer and the 7th Cavalry were wiped out, the Army was done playing games. Lieutenant-Colonel George Buell rolled into the valley with hundreds of soldiers, skilled mechanics, and lumber laborers.

The Cottonwood Citadel: They didn't have time to wait for brick and stone shipments. They dropped thousands of massive cottonwood trees along the riverbanks, sawed them into flat planks, and stacked them into interlocking walls six inches thick.

An Instant City: Fort Custer was massive. It didn't have tall log walls or palisades—it didn't need them. It was designed like a regular city wrapped around an enormous, dusty parade ground, featuring barracks built to hold 10 full companies of heavily armed soldiers and stables massive enough for hundreds of cavalry horses.

The Guardians of the Field & The Buffalo Soldiers
The soldiers stationed at Fort Custer were the ones who actually had to clean up the aftermath of the Indian Wars.

Reburying the Dead: In 1879 and 1881, troops were dispatched from Fort Custer straight to the nearby Little Bighorn battlefield. Their grim task was to properly police the area, rebury exposed remains that the prairie elements had uncovered, and haul in the heavy stone materials to erect the famous monument that stands on Last Stand Hill today.

The Buffalo Soldiers: By the late 1880s, elements of the legendary 25th Infantry Regiment—the famed African American "Buffalo Soldiers"—were garrisoned at Fort Custer. They patrolled the vast frontier, built roads, maintained the early infrastructure of the territory, and even rushed north to quell an uprising at the Crow Agency in 1887.

How a Giant Vanishes Into Thin Air
By the late 1890s, the frontier had quieted down and the railroads had fully connected the West. The strategic need for a massive cottonwood fort on the bluff faded away.

The Great Salvage: On April 17, 1898, the military officially closed Fort Custer forever. Instead of letting the massive wooden city rot, the government put the buildings up for auction.

Building Hardin: Local homesteaders and business owners bought the old officers' quarters and barracks, dismantled the heavy cottonwood logs, hauled them away on wagons, and recycled the wood to build the early homes and businesses of the brand-new town of Hardin, Montana!

Today, nothing is left on that windy bluff but a stone historical marker. The massive fortress that once shook the Big Horn valley was literally taken apart piece-by-piece and used to build the modern community we drive through today.

Have you ever stopped at the old Fort Custer marker near Hardin, or do you live in a house that might have old fort timber in the bones? Drop a 🪵 or a 🤠 in the comments and let us know your Big Horn history!

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