"Mining Plays Second Fiddle"

Location: East of Geyser

“MINING PLAYS SECOND FIDDLE—FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MONTANA’S HISTORY AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS TAKE THE LEAD” Newspaper headlines in 1910 proclaimed the change brought about by settlement of more than one million acres of Montana land. By 1922 over 40% of the entire state would have claims filed on it.

This immediate area got a big influx of homesteaders between 1900 and 1910. Many Finns settled the benchland northeast of here, thereafter called Finn Bench. Many of them got their stake in Montana as coal miners in Sand Coulee, Belt, or Stockett or as silver miners in Neihart.

Once on the freight and stage route between Great Falls and Lewistown, Judith Basin was occupied mainly by a few stockgrowers before that homestead boom. Arrival of the Great Northern Railway in 1908 signaled the end of the isolated range. It advertised “Wheat—Forty Bushels to the Acre” and “Stockmen’s Paradise Has Become the Home Builders Garden Spot” to attract farmers to stake their claims here. Great Northern was motivated by its need to fill its box cars for the return trips east. What better way than to promote the government’s free land to farmers who would have to ship their crops to eastern markets?