8-26-19 W Yellowstone, MT III & Deer Lodge, MT I

Fountain Paint Pots

A few more things about Yellowstone:

I described “mudpots” in an earlier story.  I thought I would send you a picture of one called “Fountain Paint Pot.”  It is a big one, famous for the reds, yellows, oranges and browns of the mud due to oxidation of iron in the soil.  Nearby, Clepsydra Geyser, is active almost all the time.  These two are features of what is called the Lower Geyser Basin.

Clepsydra Geyser

Beryl Spring and 2 geezers

You don't want to fall in here!

On the way back from Mammoth Hot Springs, another monster spring caught our attention.  It is called Beryl Spring.  It was named this because of the color of the water.  When the sun shines just right, the pretty pool is aquamarine, the color of the gemstone beryl.  This is the hottest spring in the park;  the water can reach 196F.  You don’t want to fall into this puppy!  The huge steam vent just above the boiling pool blows out steam with a huge roar, like a smoke stack or a steam boat.  This spring is in the Gibbon Geyser Basin where the Gibbon River flows.  Way down in the canyon, the Gibbon Falls drops 84 feet and the river continues on its way. 

Gibbon Falls - Runable only by salmon
(or maybe not)

Gibbon River continues on its way

Reluctantly, we leave the Tetons and Yellowstone behind but the memories live on.

Switchback on the back road to
Deer Lodge, MT  Yikes!

Driving to Deer Lodge, MT is a white knuckler!  We deliberately stayed off the freeway and took the little roads and to be sure, the scenery is beautiful.  No time for the driver to stare at scenery, though.  The roads, once again, were squiggly with switchbacks, steep grades and 180 deg. turns at 15 mph.  And of course, drop-offs with no Armco barriers.  Noobee was up to the task but the steering wheel got pretty sweaty.

Nobody escaped from this one!

The Montana Territorial Prison was built in 1870 in Deer Lodge.  The original building was so badly damaged by an earthquake in 1959 that it was leveled.  The original wall around the prison was wood, nothing that could retain somebody who really wanted out.  So, although Montana was still a territory not a state, Congress allotted money for a block wall.  The prisoners were conscripted to build the wall, 24 feet tall, three feet thick at the top and 4 ½ feet thick at the bottom.  It was impossible to tunnel under the wall because it extended 5 feet underground.  The prison was small and a new cell block was constructed in 1912, designed to hold about 200 more convicts.  Each cell was intended to hold one prisoner but later, they added more beds and many of the small cells held two.

The average cell

Three part shower:  wet down,
suds up, rinse off

Mug shot camera

Cell block built in 1912

For its time, it was a rather “modern” prison;  they had hot water, for example.  The showers were production line:  the first spigot got you wet, the second spigot soaped you up and the third spigot rinsed you off.  There were rewards for the well-behaved prisoners, like time in the craft shop, for example, but the more obstreperous types were put in solitary, maximum security confinement.  They lived in total darkness and got bread and water twice daily for as long as ten days at a time.  Rats were their only companions.

We read the history of some of the convicts at the prison.  There were a number of them that were imprisoned during WWI for “sedition,” speaking out against the war and the country.  “Fuck the USA, I hope Germany wins!”  Some of today’s Congressmen would be felons by those standards!  One guy got 6 years for stealing a horse.  In the women’s cell block, Della McCoy was convicted for being a prostitute, a felony in those days, also known as a “sporter, sporting woman, street walker or sporting house keeper.”  Well, they had a sense of humor, anyway.  Sex IS a sport (if you do it right).  Another chick, Sarah Hughes, was convicted of murdering her husband.  He showed up alive afterwards.  (He faked his death in a fire by stealing a body from a nearby cemetery.)  Meanwhile, Sarah had married somebody else.  Nope!  Can’t do that!  She did time for being a bigamist.  Another chick wanted her boyfriend to move out of her house but decided to speed up the process by shooting him and killing him.  She got 3 years for that.

There was an uprising at the prison in 1908 in which a Deputy Warden was killed and the Warden was mortally wounded but survived.  Two inmates were hanged for that one, George Rock and William Hayes, on the “jerking gallows.”  The jerking gallows dropped a counterbalance of 300 lb. of rock that jerked the guy up and was supposed to snap the neck.  It didn’t work so well.  It took the two guys who were hanged 10 minutes to die of asphyxiation.  Jeez.  Trap doors worked.  If it works, don’t fix it, as we say in the biz.