Hell Gate (sometimes known as Hell Gate Ronde, Hell's Gate or Hellgate) is a ghost town at the western end of the Missoula Valley in Missoula County, Montana, United States. The town was located on the banks of the Clark Fork River roughly five miles downstream from present-day Missoula near what is now Frenchtown.Fogarty, Kate Hammond. The Story of Montana. New York and Chicago: A. S. Barnes company, 1916.
Geography Hell Gate lay at the west end of the Missoula Valley. About 13,000 BCE, the advance of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet created an ice dam on the Clark Fork which created Glacial Lake Missoula.Alt, David and Hundman, Donald W. Northwest Exposures: A Geologic History of the Northwest. Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 1995. ; Bjornstad, Bruce N. On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods: A Geological Field Guide to the Mid-Columbia Basin. Sandpoint, Idaho: Keokee Books. After the Missoula Floods and the final draining of Glacial Lake Missoula about 11,000 BCE, the lake sediment dried and became the fertile Missoula Valley.
The Hell Gate Valley is framed by the Rattlesnake Mountains to the north and northeast and the Bitterroot Mountains to the southeast, south, and west. Since the early 1900s, the area has been surrounded by the Lolo National Forest. The eastern mouth of the valley is defined by a narrow pass between Mount Jumbo and Mount Sentinel, which leads to Hellgate Canyon. The western mouth is less well-defined and narrow, and leads to Ninemile Divide.
The community of Hell Gate was located at (46.8832566, -114.0870563), at an elevation of 3,123 feet (952 m).
Native American and western settlement Members of the Bitterroot Salish (or Flathead) Native American tribe often traveled through the Missoula Valley on their way east to bison hunting grounds.McRae, W.C. and Jewell, Judy. Moon Montana. 7th ed. Berkeley, Calif.: Avalon Travel Publishing, 2009. Mathews, Allan James. Montana Mainstreets, Volume 6: A Guide to Historic Missoula. Helena, Mont.: Montana Historical Society, 2003. As the Salish passed through the valley's narrow eastern and western mouths, members of the Blackfeet tribe would often attack and kill them. The Salish called the valley lm-i-sul-étiku, which transliterally means "by the cold, chilling waters" but which the Salish used metaphorically to mean "the place chilled with fear".Palladino, Lawrence Benedict. Indian and White in the Northwest: A History of Catholicity in Montana, 1831-1891. 2d ed. Lancaster, Pa.: Wickersham Publishing Company, 1922. The entire valley was heavily wooded, and ideal for ambush.
The first Euro-Americans to see the Missoula Valley were the members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, who explored the Clark Fork River on their way back east after reaching the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and a small group of men passed through the Missoula Valley and camped near the confluence of Rattlesnake Creek and the Clark Fork on July 4, 1806.Federal Writers' Project. Montana: A State Guide Book. New York: Viking Press, 1939. English-Canadian explorer David Thompson visited the area in 1811, and mapped much of the valley and the surrounding peaks (including Mount Jumbo).
French trappers passing through the valley in the 1820s were horrified to see so many remains of Salish in the deep canyons which formed the valley's entrances, and called the valley "Porte de l'Enfer," or the "Hell Gate." The next known European person to visit the area was the British fur trapper Alexander Ross in 1824. In 1841, the Roman Catholic priest Father Pierre-Jean De Smet passed through the Hell Gate Valley, bringing with him what were probably the first wagons and oxen to enter what would eventually become Montana. Jesuit missionaries soon followed and settled in the Hell Gate Valley (as the Missoula Valley was then known), but did not remain due to the hostility of local Indian tribes.
In 1852, Métis explorer Francois Finlay (also known as "Benetsee") discovered gold in what is now Gold Creek near the eastern mouth of the valley, but it was not a commercially viable deposit and no gold rush occurred. A year later, Isaac Stevens, Governor of the Washington Territory (which at the time included western Montana), led a railroad survey party through the valley. Impressed with the suitability of the entire western Montana area for white settlement, Stevens negotiated the 1855 Hell Gate Treaty, signed by the Bitterroot Salish, Pend d'Oreilles, and Kootenai tribes at Council Grove near Hell Gate, which established the Flathead Indian Reservation. Peace with the local Native American tribes increased traffic in the area, and the Hell Gate Valley became the preferred transportation route from Montana to the west.Burlingame, Merrill G. The Montana Frontier. Helena, Mont.: State Publishing Co., 1942. Significant numbers of pack mule trains traveled through the valley, eventually leading to the settlement of Hell Gate itself. The Mullan Road approached the area in the winter of 1859-1860."Marking the Mullan Road." Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society. March 1918.
Founding and growth
The first settlers in the Hell Gate Valley arrived in late December 1856 to begin preparations for a permanent settlement (Hell Gate). This first group of men consisted of Judge Frank H. Woody, James Holt, Bill Madison, Bill "Pork" West, and a man with the last name of Jackson. They cut timber for the settlement throughout the winter, and in the spring moved to the future site of Hell Gate where they raised cattle and established the first garden and farm in the valley. In the fall of 1857, they built two houses with the timber they had cut. A handful of additional settlers took up residence in the valley from 1857 to 1895.
The settlement of Hell Gate (also known as Hellgate Trading Post) was founded in 1860 by Frank L. Worden and Captain Christopher P. Higgins.Partoll, Albert J. "Frank L. Worden, Pioneer Merchant: 1830-1887." Pacific Northwest Quarterly March 1949.Axline, Jon and Bradshaw, Glenda Clay. Montana's Historical Highway Markers. Rev. ed. Helena, Mont.: Montana Historical Society, 2008. Jones, Edward Gardner. The Oregonian's Handbook of the Pacific Northwest. Portland, Ore.: The Oregonian Pub. Co., 1894. Higgins had come through the Hell Gate Valley with Governor Isaac Stevens' railroad scouting party in 1853, and now the two men built a log cabin and turned it into a store. Worden and Higgins had intended to settle at Fort Owen in the Bitterroot Valley, but instead chose the Hell Gate Valley because it was halfway between Fort Owen and the federal government trading post at Jocko on the new Indian reservation. This, they believed, would draw more traffic than a store closer to either existing settlement. The Worden and Higgins store was the first commercial building in the state of Montana not classified as a trading post. In August 1860, Worden and Higgins brought a pack train of 76 mules over the Mullan Road from Walla Walla to stock the store. Their goods included the first safe in the region. Several other cabins were soon built around the store that same year. One of the town's first residents was Judge Frank H. Woody of Walla Walla. The store was set up in a tent (the town's first structure), but purchased hewn cottonwood tree logs from David Patee, a white settler who had settled near the eastern mouth of the Hell Gate Valley, and quickly built a 16 foot by 18 foot (4.9 meter by 5.5 meter) rectangular building with a sod roof. The men were joined by the town's fourth resident, a French citizen named Narcisse Sanpar. Another new resident was "Captain" Richard Grant, the father of Johnny Grant (co-founder of the Grant-Kohrs Ranch), and who along with David Patee had helped supply the logs the Worden and Higgins store was built with.Morris, Patrick F. Anaconda, Montana: Copper Smelting Boom Town on the Western Frontier. Reprint ed. Bethesda, Md.: Swann Publishing, 1997. In December 1860, the Territorial Legislature of the Washington Territory (which at that time included much of what is today western Montana) organized a system of county government, and established Missoula County.Sanders, Helen Fitzgerald. A History of Montana. Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1913; Vaughn, Robert. Then and Now, or, Thirty-Six Years in the Rockies: Personal Reminiscences of Some of the First Pioneers of the State of Montana: Indians and Indian Wars: The Past and Present of the Rocky Mountain Country: 1864-1900. Minneapolis: Tribune Printing Company, 1900.McGinnis, Ralph Y. and Smith, Calvin N. Abraham Lincoln and the Western Territories. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994. Hell Gate was named the county seat, and Montana's first county election was held there in 1861.Woody, Frank H. "A Sketch of the Early History of Western Montana." Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana. 1896. Montana's first trial was also held in the town (in Bolte's saloon) in 1862 (a man sued a local farmer for killing a horse he had leased to him).Parry, Ellis Roberts. Montana Dateline. Guilford, Conn.: Globe Pequot, 2001.
Hell Gate grew quickly. Worden and Higgins built a second store in 1861. W.B.S. Higgins built the town's first residence in early 1861, and P.J. Bolte its second in the autumn of that year (it doubled as a saloon). John Mullan established "Cantonment Wright" at the confluence of the Blackfoot and Hell Gate rivers in November 1861 in preparation for completion of the Mullan Road. The Road reached the Hell Gate Valley in 1862, bringing additional white settlers into the area. What is likely the first wedding of white Americans in the state of Montana occurred at Hell Gate on March 5, 1862 (George P. White married Mrs. Josephine Mineinger), and the first white American child was born in the county of Missoula was born near Hell Gate on February 13, 1862. The first lawsuit in the state also occurred at Hell Gate in March 1862 (a man sued a farmer for killing a horse that the man had leased to him). The arrival of the Mullan Road led to the establishment of a stagecoach station in the town. Goods brought by steamboat up the Clark Fork to the Cabinet Rapids were transported over a new, groomed trail which connected with the Mullan Road just west of town.Malone, Michael P. and Roeder, Richard B. The Montana Past: An Anthology. Missoula, Mont.: University of Montana Press, 1969. Camel pack trains took goods and gold regularly over the Mullan Road to the rapidly growing Inland Empire. Sometimes as many as five pack trains a day passed through Hell Gate.Corbin, Annalies. The Life and Times of the Steamboat Red Cloud, or, How Merchants, Mounties, and the Missouri Transformed the West. College, Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. At times, goods were so plentiful that they sold for less than they did at their starting point in St. Louis, Missouri. The first post office in Montana was established at Hell Gate on November 24, 1862.