Distinctly Montana Magazine

70 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 4 - 2 5 tion, and should it be blown to bits by war spies of the enemy it would seriously affect traffic on the main line of the Great Northern," opined the Glasgow Times on May 11, 1917. By the time FDR was elected in 1932, the radicals had been chased off or simply lost interest in the revolution. The Snowden bridge has been a significant ele- ment not just in northeast Montana's history, but in the personal lives of the area's denizens as well. Ralph Chase's parents arrived in Mondak in 1911, and his father got a job driving passengers and mail from Mondak to Sidney. He has vivid memo- ries of the bridge's construction. "I can remember going for a Sunday ride with my folks and seeing the shack town and the steel work for the bridge, all laid out on the north side of the river." Montana poet and storyteller Philip Burgess has written several books that feature stories from his youth on the family's ranch some three miles west of the bridge. He attended the tiny schoolhouse in Nohly, almost in the shadow of the massive structure. Some evenings, when the grown-ups were involved in a PTA meeting, Bur- gess and his friends would turn the bridge into a jungle gym, climbing all over it. "At night the kids would run wild," he recalls from his home in Missoula. Some had enough guts to scale the hundred-foot towers. "I did that more than once. Believe me, you took a good, sound grip on that ladder. Then when you got up there, there was a platform you could stand on." Imagine the view a kid would have of his surrounding world, perched ten stories above the big river that flows through his life. For most of the families that ranched and farmed the wedge of land between the two great rivers, the bridge was a big part of their lives, something they could count on to al- ways be there. Sadly, the effort, time and expense that went into building this glorious structure was deemed unnecessary pretty much the day it was finished. When the railroad arrived in the area around 1900, the speedy and efficient mode of transpor- tation effectively sealed the fate of the steamship era, which was already in its death throes on the Missouri. The last commercial load of freight was taken by the F.Y. Bachelor to Fort Benton in 1889. Smaller boats and ferries did continue to move through the lower Missouri, but by 1910 it was clear that the railroad was king. The lift deck on the Snowden bridge was raised once as a test in 1913, then only a few times after that. In all, it was lifted only 16 times in 22 years. It became such a hassle to lift the span that bridge tenders would sometimes persuade the captain of a pass- ing barge to take on water until the craft rode low enough to slip under the bridge. The railroad re- tired the lift machinery and permanently secured the lift span in 1943. Trains, cars and pedestrians shared the bridge until 1985, when the MonDak bridge was com- pleted just over the border in North Dakota. In- credibly, even though bridge traffic was always one-way, no serious incidents were ever report- ed. A 1981 DOT study found that the bridge "was so dangerous that it was safe." Today the bridge still sees an occasional train on its short siding line, but is closed to cars and pedestrians. It is elegant in its simplicity, solid and silent in the sparsely populated countryside of this wide open, fertile corner of Montana. The Snowden bridge stands as a testament to American ingenuity, and also as an example of how that ingenuity can be tripped up by its own ambition. EDNOR THERRIAULT

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