blackfoot-valley

Actually, there had been a third city seriously in the capital sweepstakes. During the debates starting in the mid-1860s over relocating the Territorial capital from Virginia City to Helena, proponents of Deer Lodge weighed in and were sufficiently persuasive that a bill to move the capital to their city passed in the legislature and reached the governor’s desk. But the governor vetoed it. Later, in an 1892 plebiscite to select a permanent capital for the recently admitted state of Montana, Anaconda got more votes than the temporary capital Helena, but the third-place vote for Deer Lodge and a few other towns was enough to prevent any one of them from getting a majority, which re- sulted in the freewheeling runoff election between Helena and Anaconda two years later in which Helena emerged the victor by two thousand votes out of some 52,000 cast statewide. Before the choice narrowed down to Helena vs. Anaconda, Deer Lodge had set in motion its own campaign to be designated as the state capital. Half a year before the inconclusive 1892 vote, boosters produced a circular “diagram-map” with nine concentric rings around Deer Lodge as the hub of a “bullseye” to show its central geographic location among Montana’s popula- tion centers at the time. Anaconda and Garrison showed on opposite sides of the 20-30 mile ring, Butte and Granite and Philipsburg in the 30-40 mile ring, Helena in the 40-50 mile ring, with Missoula and Dillon on opposite sides of an outer 80-90 mile ring. In an accompanying text, the advocates of Deer Lodge stated that this map, “has been carefully prepared and may be relied upon as being authentic. It will be seen that within fifty miles of Deer Lodge, three-fifths of the wealth and population of the state is represented. Going on the plan of the greatest good for the greatest number, Deer Lodge can safely claim the permanent location of the capital of Montana.” To a geographer this attempt brings an amused smile, as a similar “map” can be prepared to show an optimal “central location” for almost any place one wishes. Deer Lodge did have a centrality with respect to the popu- lation centers of the time, but these proved transitory. As it has turned out, Helena is closer to “central” in this respect than are any of the other towns shown on the diagram. Naive as such statements may seem now, they are illuminating for the light they shed on the political temper of the times. The rhetoric doesn’t seem very different from that of our own political campaigns. Deer Lodge 106