This is a land of abandoned erosional waterways, streamless coulees with empty cataract cliffs and plunge basins, potholes and deep rock basins, all eroded into the basalt of the gently southwestward dipping slope of the Columbia Plateau. The pattern of dry stream ways; a plexus, an anastomosis; totally unlike any other drainage pattern on earth. A debacle was demanded to explain this landscape, the volume of which would fill normal stream valleys to overflowing. These great floods spilled over former divides, eroding their summits to complete the new network.

As we have a day here, the ladies have overhauled and repacked their trunks. I think there is no occupation that has the fascination for women when travelling as the unpacking and overhauling of large travelling trunks. They go at it early miss their luncheon and are late to dinner and yet show no signs of fatigue. ...

During the Pleistocene glacial periods, glaciers dammed the Clark Fork River Valley creating Glacial Lake Missoula. The ice dams broke periodically and at that time the Clark Fork River carried more water than the combined flow of all of the streams of the world: The Missoula Floods, also known as the Spokane Floods or the Bretz Floods, would rush down the Clark Fork and the Columbia River, flooding much of eastern Washington and the Willamette Valley in western Oregon. After the rupture, the ice would reform, recreating Glacial Lake Missoula.

Arlee was named after the Salish leader Arlee. In October 1873, he moved a small group of his people from the Bitterroot Valley, a "conditional reservation" according to the 1855 Hellgate Treaty, to the Jocko Agency, later known as the Flathead Indian Agency, located a few miles south of the town of Arlee. This forced move stemmed from the efforts of a congressional delegation led by future president James Garfield to negotiate Salish removal from the Bitterroot Valley. The Indians of Arlee have a celebration that happens to fall on the fourth of July.

By 1887 the Northern Pacific, like many U.S. roads, was living on borrowed time. Henry Villard returned to the board of directors. Though offered the presidency, he refused. However, an associate of Villard dating back to his time on the Kansas Pacific, Thomas Fletcher Oakes, assumed the presidency on September 20, 1888. In an effort to garner business, Oakes pursued an aggressive policy of branch line expansion. In addition, the Northern Pacific experienced the first competition in the form of James Jerome Hill and his Great Northern Railway.

August 6: Two ambulances were sent to the hotel for our party and Adjutant General Ruggles, who is here on a tour of inspection. Mark rose early and said he would walk to the fort slowly, he thought it would do him good. General Ruggles and the ladies went in one ambulance, the old four mule army officers ambulance, and the other waited some little time before starting that I might complete arrangements for all the party to go direct from the fort to the depot. I was the only passenger riding with the driver and enjoying the memory of like experiences on the plains when in the army.

The Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway is a short line railroad in the U.S. state of Montana which was founded in 1892. It was financed by the interests behind the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, (Daly and JJ Hill), and operated primarily to carry copper ore from the mines at Butte, Montana to the smelters at Anaconda, Montana, although the company was chartered as a common carrier and also carried passengers and general freig

The Panic of 1893 was a serious economic depression in the United States that began in 1893 and ended in 1897. It deeply affected every sector of the economy and produced political upheaval that led to the 1896 realigning election and the Presidency of William McKinley. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, perhaps along with the protectionist McKinley Tariff of that year, has been partially blamed for the panic. Passed in response to a large overproduction of silver by western mines, the Sherman Act required the U.S.

Samuel Thomas Hauser, territorial governor of Montana from 1885 to 1887, formed the Missouri River Power Company in 1894 and won the approval of the United States Congress to build a dam, the Hauser Dam, two miles below Stubb's Ferry on the Missouri River. It was a steel dam built on masonry footings on top of gravel, with the ends of the dam anchored in bedrock on either side of the river. The dam was 630 feet long and 75 feet high.

Egbert Malcolm Clark(e) arrived in the upper Missouri region in the 1840's with a reputation for violence. He had been briefly enrolled at West Point but was quickly expelled for assaulting a classmate. President Andrew Jackson reportedly intervened and Clarke was reinstated only to be court martialed for another attack on a classmate. He had been in the Texas Army and worked for the American Fur Company. Eventually he owned property along what had been the Mullan Military Road.