A third factor in Stuart’s lifelong run of debt and disappointment was his short attention span. Paul Robert Treece, Stuart’s biographer, notes that
while fate seems to have dealt perversely with Stuart, his inability to concentrate long on any one particular vocation is the major explanation why Stuart, despite his leadership qualities, never achieved a position of wealth similar to that of many of his more single-minded acquaintances.
Stuart freely admitted that he liked to daydream. Noting one trip to prospect Gold Creek, Stuart confided to his diary that instead of panning, he “read Byron and indulged in many reveries.” On another, lulled by the babble of the presumably auriferous creek, he fell asleep under a tree.
With some self-deprecation, Stuart himself laid the blame on a striking image from his school days.
For text books we had Webster’s spelling book, with that discouraging frontispiece, a picture of a very lightly clad young man weakening when half way up a high mountain with a little cupola on top of it and on its front gable the word “Fame,” in large letters, and a rough looking female ordering him to climb or bust. I attribute my failure to achieve greatness to that picture. The constant contemplation of it so impressed the difficulty of being famous (in that costume) upon my youthful mind that hope died within me.
Webster’s influence complemented that of Stuart’s father, who moved his family five times in Stuart’s first nine years, always westward. Robert Stuart left by himself for the California goldfields in 1849, and returned only long enough to fetch his two boys with him on the second trip—not only because he needed mine hands, but also from a desire to share the adventure. Granville and James said good-bye to their father a few weeks after arriving in California and did not see him again before his death in 1861.
Of course, the Stuarts never found more than day wages in their gold pans. They prospered more as laborers and market hunters and had no plans beyond a brief family visit when they left California in 1857. As Treece says, “The sum of Granville Stuart’s California experience was to render him... unfit for regular employment for decades.” In hindsight it is clear that Granville’s illness and the Mormon troubles that sent him north to Montana were a rare stroke of good luck. He would not have been happy in Iowa anyway.
The patriarch of the Beaverhead was Richard Grant, a querulous old Hudson’s Bay Company trapper who demanded the title “Captain.” Grant had wintered a few head of shorthorns in the valley as early as 1850 and now lived in the only proper home, a three-room log cabin. The remainder of the five dozen or so Europeans present lived in elk-hide tepees; nearly all were Captain Grant’s relatives or employees. The other locals included small groups of Bannock, Snake, Nez Perce, and Flathead who had set up their lodges in the vicinity when the Stuarts came into the country in the fall of 1857.
The winter was mild, and during its course James and Granville acquired twenty horses in trade with the Indians. On March 28, 1858, they started for Fort Bridger, in the southwestern corner of Wyoming, but a late-season blizzard drove them back. In their dilatory way, the Stuarts drifted over to the Deer Lodge Valley, where they happened to hear rumors of gold traces discovered some time earlier by a French Canadian trader named Francois Findlay and known as Benetsee. The Stuarts were no more wedded to the notion of Fort Bridger than they had been to the notion of Iowa, and headed instead for Benetsee Creek (now Gold Creek), above the Clark Fork sixty miles east of Missoula.
A half century later, Granville Stuart lobbied the Montana Legislature to grant him an annuity in recognition of his first discovery of gold in the state. In his petition, Stuart wrote that his test hole was “the first prospecting for gold done in what is now Montana and … the first real discovery of gold within the state.”
Stuart’s claim was specious, and he knew it. At the time of his own prospect, Stuart freely acknowledged Benetsee’s find in 1852 and admitted that he was tipped off to the spot by other men who had found color there, probably including an associate of Captain Grant, Robert Hereford, who panned the creek in 1856. Various historians have suggested at least a dozen others as the first discoverer of Montana gold.
Stuart neither improved on Benetsee’s six-year-old prospect nor started a rush. In fact, Stuart never washed more than ten cents to the pan on Gold Creek, did not post a claim, and did not return for two years, although during that time he lived nearby. His discovery was perfectly ordinary; you can get color in a pan of Gold Creek gravel today, but not enough to come out any better than Stuart did in the same spot 130 years earlier.
During the next few years the Stuarts traded stock and furs between southwestern Montana and northern Utah, with modest success. By 1861 they owned over eighty beeves and some horses and were genuine settlers. They lived in a cabin, kept chickens and milk cows, and bought flour, sugar, and salt at Frank Woody’s mercantile sixty miles down the Clark Fork, on the Mullan Road near the present site of Missoula. The country was opening up; the first Missouri River steamboat had reached Fort Benton the previous spring, and from there teamsters hauled freight down the Mullan Road all the way to Fort Walla Walla in Washington.
But what opened the country for all time was gold, the same gold that had eluded the Stuarts. In late 1861 two of their neighbors finally found Benetsee’s fabled prospect. But when the rush to Gold Creek did not amount to much, the newcomers ranged further afield, and in the gulch country between the Madison and Ruby rivers found paying placers. Between 1862 and 1865, boomtowns sprang up at Bannack, Virginia City, Nevada City, and Alder Gulch.
The Stuarts prospected most of these places, with their usual luck. So they turned to boomtown business, profiting moderately through trading, gunsmithing, butchering beef, market hunting, and speculating in real estate. As old Montana hands, both became community leaders. In 1862 James was elected first sheriff of Missoula County, which at the time comprised most of Montana west of the divide. In 1865, Granville was commissioned a lieutenant-colonel in the territorial militia.
The Montana fields eventually produced about ten million dollars of gold; in comparison, nearly one billion dollars, one hundred times as much, came out of the Sierra Nevada deposits in California. But gold in Montana was the first explosion in a chain reaction.
In 1866 a Texas cattleman named Nelson Story drove six hundred sinewy longhorns from Dallas to Virginia City, fifteen hundred miles in six months. His was the longest and most famous of many drives that within fifteen years brought hundreds of thousands of cows to the open ranges of central and eastern Montana, where only buffalo and deer had grazed before. When the natives reacted to this imperialism with hostility, the government established a network of army forts to protect the invaders. The soldiers in turn supplied a new market for trade goods. The Missouri and Yellowstone rivers were further developed as shipping routes, and military and private surveyors crisscrossed the territory with roads.
During this period, the Stuarts did a little prospecting, pursued all their old trades, added part ownership of a quartz smelter and a lumber mill to their portfolio of bad investments, and shared with each other their daydreams. Granville wanted to be a travel writer, and both brothers had a schoolboy-like fondness for Latin America. At one point, James tried to persuade their influential friend Samuel T. Hauser, who would later be governor, to secure for him the appointment as U.S. consul to Honduras.
While Granville Stuart’s financial fortunes changed little during these two decades of Montana’s greatest growth and development, his personal fortunes took two debilitating blows. The first occurred on April 15, 1862, when he married a twelve-year-old full-blooded Shoshone named Awbonnie Tookanka. Stuart was twenty-seven.
At least through the 1860s, male settlers vastly outnumbered female, and most took Indian or mixed-blood women as common-law wives. These marriages were casually made and casually dissolved. Granville’s previous wife had run off ten days before he took Awbonnie, and James had several wives and two children over the years. But when civilization, and
civilized women, came into the country, the notion of the squaw man took on currency. Wives of native blood were viewed as whores or savages.
Most men solved the problem by abandoning or banishing their wives and children. Granville Stuart remained married to Awbonnie for twenty-six years, until her death in 1888 liberated him from the one turn of fate in his life he rued most, the step he blamed for his greatest failures.
In his autobiography, Stuart includes the diary entry noting the marriage and then never mentions Awbonnie again. But in other writings, his conflict, and the terrible burden that he considered his marriage to be, is clearly limned. In early 1866, for example, in a letter to James reporting his first visit home in fourteen years, Granville writes that their mother reacted to the news of their marriages as if both were “a little more wicked than the inhabitants of Sodom & Gomorrah.” Stuart describes the attractive single women in their east Iowa hometown and continues, “If I wasn’t quite so much married already, I think I would have to succumb to the pressure ... to drown my outfit …”
The next year the Stuarts’ younger brother, Sam, and his family moved to Montana. Sam’s wife, Amanda, demonstrated her disdain for her sisters-in-law by dressing in blankets and aping them. Soon after, the Sam Stuarts returned to Iowa.
In April of 1873, while on his way back from a visit home during which his life-style was criticized anew, Granville met four men on the train to Cheyenne. One claimed to have observed a massive but ill-publicized gold strike in French Guiana. This news played to Granville’s two favorite fantasies: striking it rich and traveling to South America. In a letter to James, he proposed chucking it all:
It will give me a chance to reconstruct my social basis & close out my present family arrangements for I shudder with horror when I contemplate getting old in my present fix, or ever to get poor would be awful my repugnance to my present mode of life increases daily just
think of having to go anywhere with such an outfit as mine. On the [train] cars for instance & then to settle in a strange place & live in defiance of public opinion as we have always done... with my present outfit I can never go anywhere .... I could never marry any respectable high toned woman after [my] conduct.
A photographic portrait reveals Awbonnie to be a compact clean-featured woman with dark skin and straight black hair. She bore eleven children with Granville Stuart and raised James’s two sons, Robert and Richard, with such devotion that for years they thought themselves her natural issue. Awbonnie Tookanka Stuart died of a fever at the age of thirty-eight, twenty days after the birth of her last child.
Granville Stuart was fervently irreligious, so his stoic devotion must be attributed to a sense of ethics and responsibility, and a lifelong belief that one lay in the bed one made. It is also possible he loved his wife. By all accounts, Stuart never ill-treated her or his mixed-blood children, or publicly demonstrated his ambivalent feelings. On the contrary, he was solicitous of the family’s health and welfare as long as Awbonnie lived. As their children grew, he assured they were educated, hiring teachers and opening the school to his neighbors’ offspring. In later years several of Stuart’s children remembered their father’s reading to them aloud from volumes in his three-thousand book library.
The second blow to Granville Stuart’s grand vision was James’s unexpected death of liver disease on September 30, 1873. James was forty-two.
The brothers had spent their entire lives together. All their ventures were jointly pursued, and Stuart believed the unit they formed was greater than its parts. “We were much nearer and dearer to each other than brothers usually are,” Stuart wrote his mother after James’s death. “We ... passed through many perils unscathed and our lives were so closely knit together that the separation is dreadful beyond all description to me. I feel like my life was shipwrecked shattered, & that all our toiling & struggling had been in vain since he is taken from us.”
As Treece notes, “Gone were the dreams of discovering that elusive Eldorado, establishing a successful business or industry, authoring and illustrating travel books, or achieving great political or financial success because all of them had included James.” For Stuart, James’s death left “a gap in my life that will never close.”
I felt like forever abandoning these familiar scenes where everything reminds me of the pleasant hours I have spent among them with poor James, and that all our many plans of what we would do in coming years are now wrecked and sunk in the sea of death. The enjoyment that either of us took in anything was always in proportion to the pleasure it gave the other.
Stuart, who was generally too busy for illness, now complained of malaise and ordered “heart pills” by mail. His illness was likely psychosomatic, but the destitution that caused it was real enough. Stuart would recover his health, but he would never fully recover his zest.
In 1879 Stuart partnered up with his old friend Sam Hauser and two other investors in a cattle-raising enterprise capitalized at $150,000. Stuart kicked in $20,000, which he borrowed from Hauser’s bank. He was appointed ranch manager, and he journeyed to Oregon, Deer Lodge, and Sun River Valley to buy stock. By the fall of 1880, Stuart had driven five thousand head of cattle and sixty horses into the great grassy range of the Judith Basin and erected his ranch house near some year-round cold springs on Ford’s Creek.
Stuart summed up his prospects in an article for the Deer Lodge newspaper. “In five or six years the ranges will begin to exhaust,” he wrote. “In the meantime, with ordinary good luck, there is ‘big money’ in the business.”
Stuart’s first prediction was extraordinarily prescient. As to his second, he was still unaware that “ordinary good luck” was a commodity with which he was not blessed. Although by 1883 Stuart was running 12,000 fat shorthorns and turning a steady profit, his reputation and fortune would suffer due to two incidents, one an unfortunate act of man, the other an act of nature.
The rustler problem in central Montana and Granville Stuart’s activities as leader of the vigilante group that came to be known as Stuart’s Stranglers is discussed in our afterword to the second book in the Cord series, The Nevada War. However, Treece’s research turns up several less savory aspects of the adventure, in which at least seventeen men were executed.
One member of the Stranglers had a criminal record and was later convicted of killing a sheepman in a drunken rage. This did not inflame contemporary opinion in some corners as much as the killing of Dixie Burr, Stuart’s own nephew, or the hanging of Billy Downes. Downes had friends who considered him an honest man, and although the twenty-six horses the Stranglers found at his cabin could have been stolen, Downes’s Indian wife claimed he had obtained them in a legitimate trade, unaware of their origin. Notwithstanding significant local objection to the vigilantes and some community resentment directed at Stuart, the cattlemen were pleased. The next year the Montana Stock Growers Association elected Stuart president.
Not long after, Stuart’s prediction about the range’s longevity came tragically true. A drought in the summer of 1886 was followed by the most vicious winter in memory. Stuart’s Pioneer Cattle Company lost at least two-thirds of its 40,000 head. The next spring, after surveying the rotting carcasses piled in the coulees, Stuart wrote, “I never wanted to own again an animal I could not feed and shelter.” He need not have worried. With the massive winterkill, the ranch failed and Stuart could not meet his loan payments. He was allowed to keep a single token share of Pioneer Cattle Company stock; aside from it, he was bankrupt once again.
On January 8, 1890, a little more than a year after Awbonnie’s death, Stuart married Allis Belle Brown Fairfield, twenty-six, a one-time teacher at Stuart’s ranch schoolroom. During the courtship she was living with her parents in the Bitter Root Valley at Grantsdale, the town founded by Captain Richard Grant, Stuart’s first friend in Montana. The marriage had the peculiar and regrettable result of succeeding where nearly thirty years of social opprobrium had failed: It utterly sundered Granville Stuart’s family.
The Stuart children disliked Allis Belle with a vehemence only partially explained by the discoverable facts. Their accusations of bigotry were probably true; Allis Belle surely shared the prevalent prejudice toward children of mixed blood. How overtly she demonstrated her bigotry and how Stuart reacted are conjectural, because the children’s other accusations are so clearly biased that their credibility is undermined.
Mary Stuart, eighteen, and herself newly married to Teddy Blue Abbott, one of her father’s cowhands, was convinced Allis Belle was a harlot and may have meant the accusation literally. According to Mary, during Allis Belle’s one-term tenure as schoolteacher, she had carried on an open affair with Will Burnett, Stuart’s foreman. Mary believed that the Wyoming marriage to Fairfield was a sham as well. In a letter to Teddy Blue before their marriage, Mary concluded, “Well Ted she is very pretty but did you ever see one that wasn’t?”
All of this smacks of girlish gossip flavored with a dash of Electra complex, except that the older and more temperate Teddy Blue is even more vituperative in his opinion of Allis Belle. Teddy Blue, like his father-in-law a diarist and eventual autobiographer, was a well-liked open-minded man who would remain married to Mary until his death forty-nine years later. Yet in diary entries postdating Stuart’s marriage, Abbot writes, “I pity Granville Stuart.... I feel ashamed of him tonight.... It makes me Hot to think [he] would ever marry such a thing.” In other entries, Abbott calls Allis Belle Stuart a “hag,” “Bitch,” and “Whore.”
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