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Ranchers.net

Terrorist/extortionist threats--Corporate expansion- -Energy Shortages--Corporates using monoply power to control products at the expense of the general public--Christmas Charities providing for the homeless and poor--cowboys over imbibing and over celebrating the Christmas season--Montana gambling and vice-- Billings "southside district"-- Overseas revolutions and famine--Republican President spending tax money and needing more--politicians trying to limit corporate campaign contributions-- D.C. sex scandals--meatpackers health and safety standards a nationwide media subject....

Doesn't look like much has changed in 100 years! :wink:



CHRISTMAS 1906 HOAX: Sugar factory eyed in scam
Law officials arrest informant after money drop fails to happen
By LORNA THACKERAY
Of The Gazette Staff

Late Christmas night 1906, Yellowstone County Sheriff Adams concealed himself on the vestibule at the back of a Burlington Pullman car as the train chugged its way west toward Livingston.

Armed with a shotgun and a revolver, he peered into the bitter winter night watching for a red lantern he expected to see somewhere near Columbus. That was where he guessed an extortionist who threatened to blow up Billings' new sugar factory on State Avenue would be waiting for the payoff.

In the week before Christmas, factory manager Edmond Simmons received a letter demanding $25,000 in $20 bills. A few days later, a man named F.H. Smith woke Deputy Lavelle at 3 a.m. to report that he had overheard six men talking at one of the local hotels about a plan to extort money from the factory.

"Don't try to cause me any trouble for by God I will blow her up and go to hell," the letter warned. Its instructions were explicit. No police or newspapers were to be notified. A company representative was to board westbound No. 43 and watch for the appearance of a waving lantern behind the train. That would be the signal to throw the money onto the tracks.

Simmons didn't know what to make of the threat and went to the sheriff, who kept it quiet enough - except for the Gazette representative who accompanied him and two other lawmen when they sneaked onto a sleeper car standing alone in the Billings rail yard. As No. 43 readied to continue her journey, the coach carrying the posse was attached to the rear.

When the train pulled into the dark night, sheriff-elect J.T. Webb moved onto the vestibule and positioned himself in the corner opposite Adams. Deputy Lavelle sat between them. Railroad detective R.H. Goddard joined them at Laurel.

The plan was to drop a bag filled with fake bills when the red light appeared. The train would be immediately stopped and the officers would apprehend the criminals.

"If they really meant business it was thought they would display the red light near the bluffs about two miles east of Columbus, or at an equally advantageous spot some 14 miles west of Columbus," the Gazette reporter in on the ambush wrote the next day.

They shivered as the train wound its way through Columbus and passed the areas they had judged most advantageous to criminals bent on an easy getaway. No red light appeared then or as they passed through Big Timber.

When the train pulled into Livingston at 5 the next morning, the men decided the threat to the sugar plant was merely a hoax that took them away from their families and warm fires on Christmas night. They hopped a train home an hour later.

Lavelle, who had been searching for his informant, F.H. Smith, since their initial conversation a few days earlier, caught up with Smith Dec. 28 and hauled him off to jail. Lavelle said that he smelled a rat from their first conversation. Smith told The Gazette that he would have nothing further to say.

Messing with the sugar factory, the city's pride and joy, was a matter to be taken seriously. The behemoth on the city's South Side had just been completed and everybody who was anybody had been escorted through. Delegates to a December teachers' convention visited the factory. Investors from the Hi-Line hoping for similar developments there took the grand tour and marveled at the thoroughly modern facility. Every farmer, businessman and ladies group for miles around dropped in to check out the plant.

It wasn't the only new facility in the works in 1906. The YMCA was going up on North 29th Street and the Masons were preparing to invest $75,000 in a temple at North 28th Street and Third Avenue North. A new opera house was under construction on North 28th adjoining the Stapleton Block. It would be the finest in the state for a price tag of $60,000.

Billings, launched when the Northern Pacific arrived just 24 years earlier, was on its way. An estimate in December put the population at 11,000 people. "It is expected by the first of next August that this number will be increased at least 3,000 people more," The Gazette reported.

Railroads were crisscrossing Montana with mainlines to almost everywhere. In the middle of December the Milwaukee Road estimated it would have 20,000 workers in Montana by summer building 600 miles of track from Ekalaka to Saltese in Missoula County. It would traverse the open farm country between the Great Northern in the north and the Northern Pacific in the south. In another development, hundreds of men were already constructing a line that would take travelers and goods between Great Falls and Billings.

At Christmas time, the passenger cars were packed with people coming to Billings to shop and homesick immigrants headed East for the holidays. In November alone, nearly 10,000 railway tickets were sold in Billings. December promised even more travelers.

Trains were the life's blood on the last frontier, but in December 1906, it seemed to many, including The Billings Gazette, that the railroads were trying to suck the last drop from the communities they had created.

As winter racked the Northern Plains from the Dakotas through Montana, a fuel crisis blamed squarely on the railroad reached desperate proportions. The railroad, thanks to generous land grants from the government, owned much of the coal and controlled the only way to get it to market. But trains carrying coal that winter were scarce.

Some of the railroads blamed a shortage of train cars, arguing that railcar manufacturers couldn't keep up with the demand of rapidly expanding rail lines. The claim was viewed with skepticism. The public seemed convinced the shortage was more about railroad profits than about a dubious car shortage.

On Dec. 15, The Gazette reported that North Dakota farmers were becoming so desperate they were burning outbuildings to keep from freezing. The folks in Glenburn, N.D., asked the governors of North Dakota and Minnesota to use state militias to get coal trains moving. Farmers in Oklahoma stopped a Sante Fe railroad train and helped themselves to 100 tons of coal.

In Montana, Helena didn't have enough coal to run its gas plant. Coal deliveries were being rationed in Billings. The railroad's popularity sunk further when it was learned that one local dealer had three cars coming from Wyoming mines, but the coal was confiscated by the railroad for its own use.

The Gazette's editor, normally a booster of all things commercial, railed against the railroad monopoly in a Dec. 15 editorial.

"Everywhere people are compelled to stand by and see car after car of coal pass their doors, while they themselves are wondering how they are to keep from freezing. Everywhere prices have been advanced until it has become a serious problem to the moderately well off how they are to meet them, let alone the poor, who have the foolish habit of getting cold and wanting their food cooked."

Fuel considerations aside, Billings seemed poised for a merry Christmas. Billings was home to several thriving department stores advertising sales and late hours for shoppers' convenience. Cut glass and leather were the fashionable gifts of the season. Merchants reported their strongest sales ever.

Cold weather got the festivities started early. By Dec. 7, the Yellowstone River was frozen over and large parties of skaters were seen headed in that direction. A Christmas Eve grand carnival was being readied at the Coliseum Skating Rink. Old timers lamented the lack of enough sleighs to take advantage of a generous snowfall. The snowfall, however, delayed most trains coming in from the west for hours, if not days, and occasionally created gridlock at train stations across the Northwest.

Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow, accompanied by Running Water, Hits the Pipe, Johnny Brave Boy and Afraid of His Face bought sleeping car tickets for a trip west to visit Nez Perce friends at Lapwai, Idaho, The Gazette noted. He expected to return in mid January and bring many of his friends with him.

Associated Charities of Billings was preparing for a Christmas Eve distribution of gifts and turkey feasts for the city's "worthy poor." The community planned to make Christmas merrier for its children, the sick and the people who worked on Christmas Day.

During the day, 30 to 40 newsboys, bootblacks and others "who may not be provided for at home" were rounded up and taken to one of the city's restaurants for an elaborate meal. Then they were treated to a performance at the Family Theater.

Businessman W. B. George purchased 120 dozen carnations that were made into bouquets and distributed at St. Vincent Hospital and to people confined to sick rooms all over the city on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Day, just as it had for several years, Billings Hardware gave away all toys that hadn't sold during the Christmas season. Between the hours of 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. the store distributed more than 1,000 presents.

"Children blocked the streets of Montana Avenue for nearly two blocks, while the crowd extended south on 27th Street for nearly that distance," The Gazette reported.

Although The Gazette noted a relatively quiet holiday season, there were areas of town, mainly the "restricted district," where the celebration was a bit more raucous than in the respectable residential sections.

Men who'd spent most of the year watching sheep or wrangling cattle arrived in town to blow their holiday paycheck. More than a few habitants of the more colorful areas of town were waiting and watching for the moment when an unsuspecting victim would flash a bit of cash.

W.E. Collins, a sheepherder, staggered into police headquarters Christmas week to report that he'd been robbed of $18 cash, an Ingeroll watch worth $2 and some keys.

The Gazette reported that Collins seated himself unsteadily in a chair "for the festive sheepman had been imbibing freely of red liquor and looking upon the amber stuff in long glasses until he was not in full possession of his faculties."

Another reveler was fined $10 "for the futile effort he made to reduce the visible supply of whisky in Billings."

Henry C. Kerr, proprietor of a saloon at 2724 Minnesota Ave., found himself in deep trouble when County Attorney Wilson accepted the invitation of an informant to visit Kerr's establishment Dec. 17.

Unobtrusively making his way into the watering hole, Wilson found a crowd surrounding a roulette wheel "that whirled and rattled in lively fashion." Chips and money lay on the table as patrons waited patiently for their lucky numbers.

Wilson quietly left the saloon, went to his office and wrote out an arrest warrant.

Wild as Billings could be, it appears something had happened since the previous year to tame the city's bawdy elements. Gone from The Gazette were reports about the lusty adventures of ladies operating in the restricted district. The few mentions of these women referred to them euphemistically as "secretaries."

Advertising for the city's theaters and the vaudeville acts that frequented them were missing from the pages of the newspaper. The only theater mentioned in December was the Family Theater. A new opera house being constructed on 28th Street promised not to feature "the barnstorming productions, which are of little value or interest and seem to think that Montana is their legitimate field."

Meanwhile, city church leaders were eagerly preparing for a massive, five-day revival meeting in the spring featuring nationally celebrated evangelist Billy Sunday.

Elsewhere in the world in 1906, revolution was brewing in Russia, where winter famine raged and military men fresh from a disastrous war with Japan turned mutinous. President Teddy Roosevelt, who brokered the uneasy peace between the warring nations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt made the first official state visit outside the United States by a sitting American president when he inspected progress on the Panama Canal.

The president was busy at home, too, trying to manage a country of 85.5 million people with a budget of $570 million. In an address to Congress Dec. 5, he railed against an epidemic of lynching, advocated education for blacks and proposed prohibiting corporate contributions to political campaigns. The indefatigable Republican also advocated a graduated income tax and a graduated inheritance tax.

A titillating sex scandal broke out in Washington, D.C., when former Utah Sen. Arthur Brown was shot and killed Dec. 12 in an apparent love triangle. Anna M. Bradley, who claimed that Brown had fathered her two young children, had followed Brown from Utah to Washington, where he was attending a Supreme Court hearing. When he came back to his hotel room, he found Bradley going through his private papers. Bradley held up a letter from another woman - the mother of famed actress Maud Adams, to whom he was purportedly engaged - and shot Brown dead after he refused to marry her.

Bradley was arrested. Brown's body taken back to Utah, where more scandal developed when his legitimate son filed the will, in which Brown said he doubted Bradley's children were his. He specifically disinherited them whether they were or not and left nothing of his $75,000 estate to their mother. Bradley's attorneys were expected to contest the will using letters Brown had written to Bradley acknowledging the children as his.

On the literary front, Upton Sinclair published "The Jungle," his expose of the meatpacking industry that shocked the nation.

Gustav Mahler introduced his "Symphony No. 6," and George M. Cohan's "You're a Grand Old Flag" became a patriotic classic.

On Christmas Eve, Reginald A. Fessenden broadcast the first music over the radio. His program included a violist.

A day after Christmas, "The Story of the Kelly Gang," the world's first feature film, made its debut on the newfangled silver screen.

http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/12/25/news/local/25-scam_g.txt
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