On January 14, 1904, Havre, Montana burned twice in one day. The first fire started in the back of Gross

and Lebert's hardware store with a chinook wind still blowing. The second came around noon, when a clerk

at the Stringfellow Drug Store opened the trap door to the cellar and got a face full of smoke. The rush of

air lit what had been smoldering below, and it went east through the block, taking the Hotel Havre and the

Metropolitan, then jumped the street. Great Falls put Engine 151 on the line with a tank car of water and

covered the distance fifty minutes faster than the scheduled passenger run. Nearly sixty buildings were

gone. Not one person died.

In February the city council ordered all new downtown construction to be brick or stone. The wooden frontier

town was finished. But the owners were not going to sit in a Montana winter waiting on brick walls, so they

dropped into their own basements. Steam tunnels already ran under the streets and Shorty Young had already

dug passages between his own buildings. They tied into all of it and connected the rest as they went, and

what came out was something nobody planned: an underground town.

Timeline of Events

1879: The Army begins building Fort Assinniboine, the largest military post ever built in Montana.

1891: The settlement takes the name Havre, after Le Havre in France. It incorporates in 1893.

January 14, 1904: Two fires burn nearly sixty buildings. Fort Assinniboine sends soldiers to stop the looting

and fifteen people are arrested. No cause is ever established.

February 1904: The city council requires brick or stone for all new downtown construction.

1910: Havre's population has more than tripled, to 3,624.

February 28, 1918: Long George Francis, six foot six and a future Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame inductee,

is convicted of stealing a bay mare. He skips sentencing and hides in the Bears Paw Mountains. He kept a

saddlery in the tunnels.

October 1918: A state raid on Shorty Young's Border Saloon, run with two improperly deputized men, recovers

one quart bottle holding about three drinks of whiskey. The Attorney General's own office calls the raid

illegal and the raiders are the ones arrested.

December 31, 1918: Montana's prohibition takes effect, a year ahead of the rest of the country. The

underground is ready before the ink dries.

Historical Significance

On a given afternoon down there you could get a shave at the Fountain Barbershop, buy sausage from the

Pioneer Meat Market, have Doctor Wright pull a tooth in an office with an x-ray machine, eat a tamale from

Tamale Jim, drink at the Sporting Eagle, and never come up for daylight. There was a bordello, a drugstore,

an ice cream shop, a funeral parlor. Wah Sing ran a laundry where cowboys left a change of clothes, bathed,

and picked up the clean set on the way out. Three opium dens ran in those corridors, mostly as pain relief

for railroad workers wrecked by the work; Montana had outlawed opium smoking in 1891, which did nothing

but push it further down. For the Chinese community, the underground was both a place to earn a living and

a place to be left alone. Shorty Young ran the gambling, the prostitution, and the bootlegging, with an

escape tunnel that started under his stage and ran several hundred yards west. He fought local, state, and

federal government, and he usually won.

Sources

Havre Beneath the Streets museum

Great Northern Railway division point records

Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, Long George Francis

Montana Attorney General's office records, 1918

If you liked this: Episode 188, Lewistown, Montana. Another Montana story where the respectable version of

events did not survive a closer look.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs,

and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at

mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 213 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

In 1871, two Kentucky drifters named Philip Arnold and John Slack walked into a San Francisco mining broker's

office carrying a buckskin pouch of rough stones: diamonds, rubies, and sapphires they claimed to have

pulled out of American soil. What followed was one of the most audacious swindles in American history.

By Asbury Harpending's account, the stones were pronounced genuine by Charles Lewis Tiffany himself, though

only a tenth of the sample was sent for appraisal. Civil War General George McClellan, Congressman Benjamin

Butler, and newspaper editor Horace Greeley joined as investors only after the appraisal came back. Mining

engineer Henry Janin, who had inspected more than 600 mines and never endorsed a failure, called the diamond

field wonderfully rich. Bank of California founder William Ralston and a syndicate of the wealthiest men

on the West Coast paid Arnold and Slack $660,000, roughly $17.7 million today. The scheme came apart only

when geologist Clarence King, leading a federal survey of the fortieth parallel, went to the site near the

Wyoming and Colorado border and found cut gems mixed in with the rough ones. The field had been salted with

stones bought in London and minerals gathered from Navajo country in the American Southwest.

Timeline of Events

1829: Philip Arnold is born in Hardin County, Kentucky.

Early 1871: Arnold and Slack deposit their stones at the Bank of California.

1871: Charles Tiffany examines a tenth of the sample and pronounces the stones genuine; the appraisal comes

back at $150,000.

Summer 1871: Arnold travels to London and buys rough gems from Leopold Keller.

June 1872: Henry Janin inspects the salted mesa near the Wyoming and Colorado border and declares it

wonderfully rich.

Summer 1872: Arnold and Slack are paid $660,000 for their claims.

October 1872: Clarence King investigates and finds cut gems and impossible gem ratios.

November 25, 1872: King's telegram exposes the fraud and the hoax collapses.

1873: Arnold returns $150,000, keeps the rest, and becomes a banker in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

1875: William Ralston drowns in San Francisco Bay during his customary swim; whether it was a stroke or

something he chose remains disputed.

February 8, 1879: Arnold dies of pneumonia after being shot the previous August.

1896: John Slack dies in White Oaks, New Mexico, working as a coffinmaker.

Historical Significance

The Great Diamond Hoax exposed a fatal weakness in Gilded Age investment culture. The same hunger for

the next big strike that had built San Francisco could be turned against its wealthiest citizens. Charles

Tiffany's humiliation led directly to his hiring of George Frederick Kunz, America's first true gemologist.

Clarence King became a national figure and was later appointed the first director of the United States

Geological Survey. The case proved that scientific evidence could beat speculation and greed, at least

once. The salted mesa is still called Diamond Peak, and hikers occasionally turn up remnants of Arnold's

planted garnets more than 150 years later.

Sources

Smithsonian Magazine

WyoHistory.org, Wyoming State Historical Society

Newspapers.com archives of 1872 San Francisco press coverage

Reports of the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel

If you liked this: Episode 174, Osage County, Oklahoma. Another story about what sudden mineral wealth does

to the people standing closest to it.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs,

and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at

mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 212 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

Shawneetown, Illinois was laid out in 1810, which makes it one of the oldest towns in the state. Before

Illinois was a state, this was already a place. Two things put it on the map: salt from the works nearby,

back when no household or smokehouse could run without it, and the Ohio River, which in 1810 was the

interstate. If you were moving people or freight through the middle of the country you moved them on that

water, and Shawneetown was a place you had to stop. In 1816 the first bank in the Illinois Territory was

chartered there, run by a man named John Marshall out of his own log cabin and then the brick house he

built, which is still standing.

Then the river started coming for it. From eighteen eighty-four through nineteen thirty-seven, the town

kept building its wall higher. In eighteen eighty-four, the river passed through a gap in an unfinished

levee. In 1898 a finished one let go on a Sunday afternoon and drowned twenty-five people. In 1913 the

town put another hundred and thirty thousand dollars into making it taller. By the mid-1930s the wall was

built to hold back a sixty-foot river. Sixty feet of river, held off by packed earth, by people who had

three floods in living memory and nothing bigger than that to imagine.

Timeline of Events

1810: Shawneetown is laid out on the Ohio River, one of the oldest towns in Illinois.

1812: It becomes the seat of Gallatin County, loses the seat to Equality in 1826, and takes a quarter

century to get it back.

1816: The first bank in the Illinois Territory is chartered at Shawneetown.

1839 to 1841: The town breaks ground on a Greek Revival bank building reported to cost eighty thousand

dollars.

February 1884: The Ohio comes up and goes straight through the gap in an unfinished levee.

April 1898: A ten-foot section of the finished levee gives way onto Market Street on a Sunday afternoon,

and the break opens to nearly half a mile. Twenty-five people drown, including Sheriff Charles Galloway's

wife Sylvester and his daughters Dora and Mary, nineteen and twelve. About 143 houses are wrecked or float

off and more than a thousand people end up in state tents.

1913: Another flood, another round of damage, and another $130,000 into the levee.

January 24, 1937: A steamboat comes up from Memphis and takes more than five hundred people off, with the

river inches under the top of the wall.

January 1937: The Ohio crests at Shawneetown at 65.6 feet, about five and a half feet over the top of the

wall.

Historical Significance

There is a thing a river wall does that nobody puts in the county history. When it gets tall enough you

cannot see the river anymore. It is right there, a couple hundred yards off, and gone from your day. Kids

grow up on the Ohio and have to climb something to look at it. The wall stops being a defense, starts being

scenery, and then stops being anything at all. In 1937 the water came over the top and kept coming, and the

town, which sits low behind that wall, went under about fifteen feet. The bank stayed up; water climbed

two stories on it and left a mark on those columns you can still find today. Shawneetown had roughly four

hundred homes. When the water pulled back weeks later, twenty of them were fit to live in. The streets

were still there and the lots were still there. Nineteen houses out of every twenty standing on them were

beyond living in.

Sources

WPA Guide to Illinois

Hanneman Archive accounts of the 1898 levee break

Gallatin County historical records

National Register of Historic Places documentation, Shawneetown Bank

U.S. Geological Survey Ohio River gauge records

If you liked this: Episode 170, Ottawa, Illinois. Another Illinois town where the industry that built it

decided what its people were worth.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs,

and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at

mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 211 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters