At the beginning of 1890, six of Stuart’s children lived at home, but within a few months, tension overwhelmed the household. On March 26 James’s son, Richard, lit out for Canada. The next day Elizabeth Stuart, sixteen, left or was expelled by Allis Belle and went to live with her older sister, Mary, and her husband, Teddy Blue. Soon afterward, the remaining four children were placed in the Saint Ignatius Catholic Mission School on the Flathead Reservation north of Missoula. They were Sam, thirteen; Edward, nine; Harry, five; and Irene, two. Granville Stuart, conscientious though tortured husband and father for twenty-six years, had abandoned his family absolutely.
Edward immediately ran away from the church school to live with Mary and Teddy Blue. Sam remained for about a year before returning to central Montana and hiring on as a hand, where he achieved some fame for his cowboying skills and was subsequently featured in a Life magazine article. Harry was adopted by a Flathead named John B. Findlay, possibly a descendant of Francois “Benetsee” Findlay, whose gold prospects Stuart explored thirty-two years earlier. Harry died in 1906 at the age of twenty and was buried on the reservation.
Irene’s fate is obscured by contradictory hearsay and the loss of mission records in two fires in the early part of this century. One tale has her dying as a child; in this version the Sisters consult Allis Belle Stuart for instructions, and the curt reply is “Bury her.” In another, Irene becomes Sister Marie and visits Rome.
What is uncontradicted is that Stuart’s contact with his children was minimal to nonexistent from here on. Several years after the marriage, Stuart’s oldest son, Tom, was committed by a judge, on the advice of two doctors, to the state insane asylum at Warm Springs. Stuart was not involved in the decision and never mentioned the episode.
To complete Stuart’s personal purgatory, he was now reduced to the one job he had hated and feared all his life, the job his father had fled for the goldfields forty years earlier. Stuart became a dirt farmer, living by the owners’ forbearance on the ranch he had once managed and part owned, a fifty-six-year-old man in coveralls and straw hat hoeing a truck garden.
In March 1891, Stuart, a lifelong Democrat, was emancipated by Montana’s first Democratic governor, Joseph K. Toole, who appointed Stuart state land agent. Stuart used this reprieve to petition every influential friend he could think of, soliciting a position worthy of his impressive background. It was three years before Stuart hit pay dirt, incidentally fulfilling his lifelong dream of visiting South America. On March 1, 1894, President Grover Cleveland appointed Stuart to the post of U.S. envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Paraguay and Uruguay, at an annual salary of $7,500.
Stuart’s instinctive social grace, patience, and intelligence overcame any handicap from spending his life outside the States, and historians give him good marks as a diplomat. Allis Belle Stuart loved being an ambassador’s wife, but Stuart was less taken with the foofaraw. “The social duties of a Minister are just awful,” Stuart wrote to a Montana friend, “and as you well imagine that sort of thing comes about as natural to me as climbing a tree does to a fish.”
But neither age nor the exotic venue improved Stuart’s fiscal prudence. He continued his optimistic search for one great strike-it-rich scheme with undimmed enthusiasm.
His predecessor, a bachelor, lived at a private club, and the legation in Montevideo was a ramshackle, ill-furnished place. Stuart rented new quarters, remodeling and furnishing at his own expense. Attaché to Paraguay as well, he traveled frequently, and always he kept his eye open to opportunity.
Observing the stock-growing industry on the broad plains drained by the Rio de la Plata, Stuart became convinced that he could do it better and make a fortune by the way. Land, water, and wages were dirt-cheap; there were neither rustlers, disease, nor predators; and the weather was mild year-round. To his old patron Sam Hauser, Stuart wrote:
I understand the business thoroughly and can improve upon some of their methods of raising cattle … I want to buy from 80 to 100 square miles … with 10,000 cattle to begin with … Now I want you to assist me in borrowing this money in New York. You can testify to my honesty & ability and my present position is evidence of my standing … Now Sam this is no rose colored impracticable dream of mine …
Stuart had that part dead wrong. For one thing, another international depression had driven the economy to a nadir; Hauser’s First National Bank of Helena had gone belly-up in the summer of 1896. For another, Stuart’s personal financial condition was, as always, precarious. He owned virtually no capital assets, and for at least the prior thirty years had never lived a debt-free day. He was a credit risk no prudent lender would assume.
Not long after, the election of President William McKinley put Stuart out of work. In the few months before he was replaced by a Republican newspaper editor from Wisconsin, Stuart traveled extensively in South America and bought trunk loads of books. He returned to Montana in June 1898 about as broke as when he left.
The Stuarts settled in Butte, where they managed a boardinghouse called the Dorothy. Stuart begged Hauser for loans, pursued old fiscal wrongs in court without notable success, and in 1905 became the head librarian of the Butte Public Library. Allis Belle was variously a shop clerk and a hairdresser. Stuart retired from the library in 1914 and devoted himself to his writings, completing most of his autobiography before his death, of heart disease, on October 2, 1918, at the age of eighty-four. Despite his explicit instructions to the contrary, he was given a church funeral.
Besides the autobiography, Stuart at his death had been writing a multivolume illustrated Montana history that stood at 314,000 words. Although Mrs. Stuart solicited influential patrons, among them George Bird Grinnell, the history was essentially unpublishable, and after a number of rejections, she gave up.
After her husband’s death, Allis Belle Stuart lived in various communities in Montana, Idaho, and Colorado, eventually settling in the Bitter Root Valley in 1930. She worked as a Spanish translator for the federal government, a researcher for the WPA Writers’ Project, and a ranch cook. After suffering two strokes, she was forced to accept public welfare assistance, which was supplemented through the kindness of neighbors and friends. She was living in the home of Hamilton postmaster C. A. “Pete” Smithey when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 31,1947. There are dozens of people living in the Bitter Root today who knew Allis Belle Stuart well and recall her with affection.
In Montana, there is a popular image of Stuart in his last years: a kindly old gent, surrounded by the books he loved all his life and fondly, perhaps dotishly, recalling pioneer days on the great open plains, while autos chug by on Butte’s busy streets and the copper smelters spew great industrious billows of sooty smoke into the Big Sky.
But the evidence, augmented by the recollections of those who were there, limn a different, more complex man. Granville Stuart had seen some things and been some places and had nothing for it but the memories he was trying frantically to document at his death. He’d sat at many a table, but by the time the gravy boat got to him it was invariably empty.
Because he was unaware of his weaknesses, Stuart believed life had dealt him an endless series of Yarboroughs and cursed his fate. He did not die a serene bibliophile; he died a bitter, cynical, frustrated old man who had been stripped of all his gods. It was the way Granville Stuart was and, we suspect, the way he would prefer to be remembered.
Granville Stuart’s autobiography, published in 1925 as Forty Years on the Frontier as seen in the Journals and Reminiscences of Granville Stuart, Gold-Miner, Trader, Merchant, Rancher and Politician, remains in print in two volumes retitled Prospecting for Gold; From Dogtown to Virginia City, 1852-1864; and Pioneering in Montana; The Making of a State, 1864-1887. Among his protean skills, Stuart was an artist of some talent; a noteworthy selection of his drawings was published in 1963, nearly a century after they were made, as Diary & Sketchbook of a Journey to “America” in 1866, & Return Trip up the Missouri River to Fort Benton.
The most exhaustive Stuart biography is Mr. Montana: The Life of Granville Stuart, 1834-1918, an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Paul Robert Treece, presented in 1974 at Ohio State University. An accessible contemporary account of aspects of Stuart’s cattleman days, including the story of Stuart’s Stranglers, is We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher, by E. C. Abbott (“Teddy Blue”) and Helena Huntington Smith. Chapter 2 of The Ranchers volume in the Time-Life Old West series places Stuart’s endeavors against the background of the rise and first fall of stock raising in Montana. It reproduces photographs of James and Granville Stuart and both of Granville’s wives, as well as several of Stuart’s sketches. The text is by Ogden Tanner.
William Kittredge
Steven M. Krauzer
Missoula, Montana
Autumn, 1985
About the Authors
Owen Rountree was the pseudonym of two writers, Steven Mark Krauzer (1948-2009), and William Kittredge (1932 - ).
Krauzer was a prolific writer from Missoula, Montana. His aliases included ‘Jokemeisters’, Johnny Dee and the house-name Terry Nelsen Bonner, whose pseudonym appeared on the ‘Making of Australia’ series. He wrote several early Mack Bolan ‘Executioner’ novels, including Double Crossfire and Terrorist Summit, the Blaze series as J. W. Baron and the Dennison’s War series under the name ‘Adam Lassiter’. He also wrote two motion pictures, Cocaine Wars in 1985, and Sweet Revenge two years later.
William Kittredge is an American writer from Oregon. He grew up in Southeastern Oregon's Warner Valley in Lake County, where he attended school in Adel, Oregon, and later, high school in California and Oregon. He has received numerous awards including a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. With Annick Smith, he edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. A prolific anthologist, Kittredge has also written a great deal of nonfiction.
Read more about Krauzer and Kittredge here and here!
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Cord 9 Page 19