Superior, Montana: Gold Rush Town and the First Hotel Bible

The town you are passing is the county seat of Mineral County, a quiet Clark Fork River community that can claim two entirely unrelated distinctions: it was born in a gold rush, and it gave the world the hotel Bible.

On October ninth, eighteen sixty-nine, a prospector discovered coarse gold nuggets where Cayuse Creek joins Cedar Creek, about fifteen miles south of present-day Superior. Word spread fast. Within months, thousands of miners flooded the area, and a boomtown called Forest City sprang up on Cedar Creek itself with a population exceeding seven thousand by eighteen seventy, briefly making it one of the largest settlements in all of Montana Territory. The placer gold ran out within a few years, as it almost always did, and the camps emptied. What survived was a smaller, more permanent town on the Clark Fork named Superior, after the hometown of some of its founders back in Superior, Wisconsin. It became the seat of newly created Mineral County in nineteen fourteen.

The second distinction arrived quietly, in November of nineteen oh eight. A traveling salesman and member of the Gideons International named Archie Bailey was a frequent guest at the Superior Hotel. He asked the proprietor, a woman named Edna Wilkinson, whether she would place a Bible in her hotel for guests to read. She had a bigger idea: place a Bible in every single room. On November ninth, nineteen oh eight, she ordered twenty-five Bibles from the Gideons, enclosed a check to cover the cost, and distributed them throughout the hotel.

It was the first time Bibles had ever been placed in hotel rooms anywhere in America. The practice spread across the country and eventually around the world. Today the Gideons have distributed more than one point seven billion Bibles in over one hundred ninety countries, and every chain hotel room that still carries one traces its origin to this small Montana town on the Clark Fork River.