Hellgate Trading Post

Founding and growth

The settlement of Hell Gate (also known as Hellgate Trading Post) was founded in 1860 by Frank L. Worden and Captain Christopher P. Higgins. 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. 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. Hell Gate was named the county seat, and Montana's first county election was held there in 1861. 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).