Deer Lodge Montana

Deer Lodge Montana
Today was a really interesting day. We started out at Mary and Jim’s home in Hamilton and my package from the 3 G store arrived so in the next day or so I should be able to set up my internet connection again. Last night coming home from the restaurant we spotted two deer on the street where Mary and Jim live and this morning there were two wild turkeys in their backyard along with about three wild turkey chicks. They do have their wildlife here in Montana.
I dropped Bev at the airport in Missula after a lunch at Costco and gassing up further down the road. It is now just Scruffy and I and we are off on our adventure.
I may have mentioned that I needed something to do while going east and one of the things that came up was to find the scallywags, con men, flim flam artists, ner do wells and other notorious villains of the west. I thought this was a task that I might do well at ferreting out these villains. Well, little did I know but down the road in Deer Lodge Montana was the Old Montana Prison. Well I thought what better place to look for these characters than the prison.
It really is quite a museum now and stands right on the main street of Deer Lodge. Large stone walls 24 feet high and 4 feet wide at the top. All of the walls and most of the buildings were built by prisoners. Cell block buildings and all of the other things a prison would need (barber shop, laundry, shower areas, kitchen, dining room, chapel, the tag room where license plates were made, hospital, Siberia for hard to deal with prisoners, the maximum security area, the women’s prison, the black hole cells, and the hole and even a theater and the yard for recreation.
The prisoners due to lack of funds in the Montana budget were given jobs and many of the roads, hospital buildings etc in the state were built with prison contract labor. This is how the warden got funds for the prison. They even ran and owned about 10 ranches in the area and sometimes less than 50% of the prison population was within the prison.
There was even a prison riot in 1959 and several people were killed and the national guard had to be called out to restore order.
Life was not easy here and the prison was always overcrowded. Prisoners could learn some trades as these were necessary for the running of the prison such as upholstery, mattress making, woodworking, and license plate making.
Well tomorrow I will continue my pursuit of the little known chicanery of the west.

1 Cell Block
2 Riot damage from National Guard
3 Block guard
4 Big Yard for exercise
5 Your room awaits