Alzada: Stoneville, Cattle Thieves, and a Medal of Honor

The tiny community of Alzada sits in the far southeastern corner of Montana, close enough to Wyoming and South Dakota that it feels like a meeting of frontiers. The settlement began as Stoneville and had the rough character to match the name. In eighteen eighty-four, local law clashed with the Axleby gang, a band of cattle thieves, in a gunfight that put the place on the territorial map for all the wrong reasons.

The name changed to Alzada in eighteen eighty-five to avoid confusion with another town, taking the new name from an early settler named Laura Alzada Shelden. A few years later came a very different kind of arrival. In eighteen ninety, Private Peter Thompson, a survivor of the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and a recipient of the Medal of Honor, homesteaded north of town on the Little Missouri River.

Thompson had earned his medal for courage under fire in eighteen seventy-six; he later ranched in this remote country. Today Alzada is known mainly to travelers on US Two Twelve as the last or first serious stop in Montana, with the Stoneville Saloon still serving that purpose.