Missoula Mills to Garden City

Two men arriving from Walla Walla, Washington in eighteen sixty set the coordinates for everything that followed. Christopher Higgins and Frank Worden traveled east with a pack train of seventy-six animals and a canvas tent they intended to use as a store. They set up on the Mullan Road, the military wagon route connecting Fort Benton to the Pacific coast, and called their settlement Hellgate Village. It was barely more than a supply stop, but it was the only one for a considerable distance.

The problem was water. Without a reliable stream powerful enough to run a mill, there was no foundation for a real town. Higgins and Worden found that foundation four miles to the east, where the Clark Fork ran with enough force to turn a wheel. They bought land from a settler named David Pattee, laid foundations in eighteen sixty-four, and by eighteen sixty-five had a working grist and lumber mill. Missoula Mills, as they named it, became the county seat of Montana Territory in eighteen sixty-six.

The Northern Pacific Railroad reached town on June twenty-third, eighteen eighty-three, the single event that most dramatically accelerated Missoula's growth. A community of a few hundred people became a regional commercial hub almost immediately, the new depot anchoring a commercial strip along Higgins Avenue that has remained the city's main street ever since. By the time the Weekly Missoulian referred to the surrounding county as 'justly called the garden spot' in eighteen eighty-one, the nickname Garden City was already in circulation, a boast about the valley's mild climate and productive soil that the town has carried for a hundred and forty years.