The West Old & New November Vol. II Issue XI | Page 12

The Sweetgrass Hills
Along Montana’s Hi-Line they mark the International Boundary
between the U.S. and Canada
Officially designated on government maps as the Sweetgrass Hills or Three Buttes, the tallest, East Butte is eight thousand feet above sea level.
There are actually four buttes, east, middle and west and a smaller one called Hay Stack Butte.
The Sweetgrass Hills were chronicled by Lewis & Clark. In June 1805, Captain Lewis was following the Missouri River and noted a lofty single mountain in the distance. He called it Tower Mountain.
In 1853 Major Isaac Stevens, en route to the Washington Territory sent members of his party to the summit of the East Butte to survey a possible railroad route to the West Coast.
In 1874, Captain W. J. Twining, Commissioner Archibald Campbell with infantry and cavalry engaged in surveying the International Boundary
between the U.S. and Canada.
The land around the hills had been designated Indian land. By 1883 cattle ranchers began allowing their herds into the virgin grasslands.
In 1885 four miners in open defiance of an Interior Department ban against mining on the Indian reservation struck a rich deposit of placer fold
in a gulch near Gold Butte, which is south west of the main butte. A few months later approximately one hundred miners were working the
ground. In the 1930s gold dredging was conducted at the site of the original mining efforts.
In 1888 Congress withdrew the reservation barriers and the hills became official cattle country. Settlers came into this section of land and it
became the headquarters for some of the largest ranchers with sheep and cattle. The grazing of the abundant grass was approximately one hundred miles east, west and south of the hills.
In 1904 Charlie Russell owned a ranch near West Butte called the Lazy KY Ranch with cowboy writer Con Price. He also painted them.
The West Old & New Page 12