Havre: Above and Below

Havre exists because James J. Hill needed a railroad service town. When Hill's Great Northern Railway was building its transcontinental line west through northern Montana in the late eighteen eighties, the engineers who laid out the route along the Milk River needed service points for the steam locomotives that would haul freight across the Hi-Line. Bull Hook Bottoms became one of them. The tracks arrived in the late eighteen eighties, and the Great Northern soon made this spot a divisional point, the place where crews changed and engines were serviced between the wheat country of eastern Montana and the passes of the Rocky Mountains to the west.

The town that grew up around that divisional point was called Havre, after the French port city, and it developed along the tracks with the characteristic velocity of a railroad town: hotels, saloons, supply houses, brothels, and gambling dens followed the workers. In nineteen oh four, a devastating fire swept through downtown Havre and burned most of the business district to the ground.

In the aftermath, something genuinely strange happened. Because lumber was scarce and rebuilding took time, businesses literally moved underground. The steam tunnels that heated the railroad buildings ran beneath the streets, and merchants converted the tunnels and basement spaces into an underground commercial district. It became, by some accounts, one of the first shopping malls in American history, a network of storefronts, a laundry, a bordello, and an opium den that operated beneath the feet of anyone walking the streets above.

When Prohibition arrived, the tunnels found new purpose. Bootleggers and gamblers found underground Havre ideal for commerce that benefited from invisibility. When Prohibition ended, the underground largely went dark. Today guided tours take visitors through recreated scenes from the underground era: the underground dentist's office, the Chinese laundry, the saloon, the opium den. The history they tell is the history of a frontier railroad town's shadow economy, the part of the American West that does not appear in the promotional literature.