On July 21, the Upper Missouri Special went to the railway’s summit on the southern boundary of Glacier Park where the GN had commissioned the sculptor, Gaetano Cecere, to do a statue of John F. Stevens. Then just 31 years old, Cecere went on to do sculptures for the U.S. Capitol, Smithsonian, and 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The statue of John Stevens has been moved a short distance from its original location, but former GN–now BNSF–tracks are still visible in the background. Flickr photo by jvstin; click image for a larger view.

Stevens, of course, was the engineer who had followed a branch of the Marias River to Marias Pass, thereby locating the Great Northern’s route across the Rockies. The statue was unveiled by John F. Stevens III, the engineer’s grandson. Speeches were given by Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler and the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Robert Ridgeway. The engineer himself (who lived until 1943) was on hand to “graciously and gracefully respond.” In between speeches, the Great Northern Songsters sang “Land of Hope and Glory,” “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

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On July 19 the Upper Missouri Special arrived in Havre at 8 am, where expedition members made an auto trip to the site of the last battle of Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce Indians, about 15 miles south of the Great Northern line. This battle ended one of the most dramatic epics in the Old West, in which a band of about 800 otherwise peaceful Indians resisted being located on a reservation by fleeing their homes in northeastern Oregon and traveling nearly 1,200 miles while being chased by the U.S. Army.

Click image to download a 10.5-MB PDF of this booklet, most of which was reprinted from the North American Review.

The story actually began in 1855, when Chief Joseph’s father, Joseph the Elder, was the leader of one of several Nez Perce bands who signed a treaty agreeing to accept a 7.7-million-acre reservation in western Idaho and northeastern Oregon. Just eight years later, however, the federal government asked the tribe to accept a reservation of less than a million acres in north central Idaho. Some of the bands agreed, but others, including Joseph’s, did not. Initially, the army did not try to force the non-treaty bands to move, but neither did it stop whites from settling on Nez Perce lands.

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On the morning of July 17th, the Upper Missouri Special arrived in a town of about 75 people in North Dakota that had been named Falsen. However, Budd had persuaded the Post Office to rename it Verendrye after an early French explorer who, with his two sons, were the first Europeans to enter the Dakotas in 1738. Expedition members got off the train to find a huge monument to explorer David Thompson, who had gone through what is now Verendrye in 1797. Called by some “the greatest land geographer who ever lived,” Thompson mapped much of interior Canada for the Hudson’s Bay Company and later the North West Company.

A Great Northern postcard showing the Thompson Monument. Click image for a larger view.

When asked why the town was named Verendrye when the monument was to Thompson, GN employees replied that Verendrye already had a monument a few miles away from this spot. This referred to the Verendrye National Monument, 250 acres of land designated in 1916. There was no stone monument there, just a wooden sign. By 1956, when the Corps of Engineers wanted to flood the monument, historians had conveniently–and incorrectly, it turned out–concluded that Verendrye hadn’t actually been to the monument area, so Congress withdrew the designation and most of what was the monument is now under Lake Sakakawea, the third-largest reservoir in the United States. The truth was that Budd wanted to rename the town Thompson, but a town in eastern North Dakota had already claimed the name.

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