Paris Gibson and the Electric City
Near Great Falls, Montana
In eighteen eighty, a Maine-born entrepreneur named Paris Gibson rode to the Great Falls of the Missouri River and stood where Lewis had stood seventy-five years before. What Lewis had seen as a natural wonder, Gibson saw as a power source. All that falling water, dropping six hundred feet over ten miles, could run machinery. He began making plans immediately.
Gibson already had a track record of ambitious projects. He had built the North Star Woolen Mill in Minnesota and served on the University of Minnesota Board of Regents. He knew how to assemble investors. Most importantly, he knew James J. Hill, the railroad magnate who controlled the emerging rail network across the northern plains.
Gibson convinced Hill to extend rail lines through the new settlement. By eighteen eighty-seven, rail connections linked Great Falls to Butte and Helena, making the young city a genuine commercial hub for the surrounding ranching and farming region. In eighteen eighty-eight, the city was formally incorporated, with Gibson as its first postmaster and first mayor.
The hydroelectric dream followed quickly. Black Eagle Dam came online in December of eighteen ninety, the first hydroelectric dam ever built in Montana and the first on the Missouri River anywhere. It was a wood-crib structure that would be replaced with concrete in nineteen twenty-six. The copper smelter at Black Eagle followed in eighteen ninety-one. Mills, refineries, and packing plants moved in behind them.
Gibson laid the city out in a grid with broad streets and gave it the nickname that stuck: the Electric City. He lived long enough to see his water-power vision become industrial reality. He died in nineteen twenty, having watched the river do exactly what he said it would.
