Distinctly Montana Magazine

53 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m Cromwell Dixon didn't even have his pilot's license by Ely's final attempt to fly over the Divide. His meteoric ascent to the heights of heavier-than-air aviation occurred in roughly one month, from getting his license to performing at the Montana State Fair in Helena that September. On a clear day, at two in the afternoon, Dixon took off from the field. He had to get high enough to clear the mountains, but it was a struggle. Finally, he achieved 7,000 feet in elevation, enough to clear the mountains. The weather was clear enough for smoke from a signal fire to be visible from Blossburg, a small town across the Divide. Watching it intently, Dixon followed the smoke over the spine of the Rocky Mountains and success- fully, safely set down at Blossburg, where enraptured onlookers congratulated him with a $10,000 prize. He had done it—the Continental Divide had been tamed from the air. The flight had taken him just over a half hour. His eyes had beheld what no other human's ever had. After sending a telegram to the Curtiss Exhibition Company to let them know he had been successful, he got back into his plane and took off again. A half hour or so after that, he landed at the Helena Fairgrounds, where another crowd greeted him as the conquering hero he was. Eugene Ely attempted it on June 3, before a huge crowd of lookers-on at a Butte show that, according to Frank Wiley, also included "horse races, automobile races, and motorcycle races." Another race was to be staged between Ely's flying machine race and a Stevens-Duryea car. Two other aviators were scheduled to show up, but were "un- avoidably delayed," so all eyes were on Ely's attempt. He rose to over 2,000 feet above the famously "mile high, mile deep" city, high enough to perform the trick, but judged that the wind wasn't favorable for a crossing. He landed. The next day, the capricious Butte weather prevented him from flying. On Sunday, in front of a crowd "acclaimed as the largest ever gathered in Butte," with thousands having poured in on trains from towns all over the state, Ely tried once again. This time, the fault was not mechanical, or meteorolog- ical, but human: part of the crowd broke off and rushed the runway even as he began to take off. He turned to avoid them and somehow damaged his plane sufficiently to pre- clude any further attempts. The Butte crowd, as you might expect, was steamed. They made their dissatisfaction known to the sponsors of the show, who held back $1,000 in receipts to the Curtiss Exhibition Company and donat- ed it to, in the words of Frank Wiley, "an indefinite miner's charity." A few weeks later, Ely flew in Kalispell, staging two per- formances after which, Wiley says, he "praised the man- agement for handling the crowd" in what may, or may not, have been a dig at Butte. Ely, who was touring east to west, was now too far to conquer the Divide. He performed an impressive series of displays in Missoula to another huge crowd, but left Montana in late June to fly at a Fourth of July performance in Reno. As he left, he may well have already been planning a return the next year, provided someone didn't beat the Divide before he got the chance. As it happened, Cromwell Dixon did—and Ely would never return to Montana again.

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