The History of Montana Smuggling - Part I begins a series which will explain the strategic importance of the Montana smuggling operations for both liquor and drugs but also for other contraband such as weapons - and for illicit access into the United States. The series provides background for journalists, in light of the emerging drug scandal in Montana.
Illegal booze flowed across the borders from Canada in a Milk River current of danger, death and extremely high profits. Zurich writer Beverley Badhorse has examined bootlegging on the Hi-Line, tracing many people and the trails they took to avoid capture from federal agents. From Canada to Denver, whisky, beer and even French champagne filled the glasses and tastes of Americans. Stills dotted coulees in Blaine County. Remnants of some are reported to still exist. More than just illicit liquor poured across the border into Blaine County as Beverley reports in this the first of a series of articles on bootlegging and smuggling.
The Chinook Opinion, Reform Montana, and Deep Times invite your inquiry and comments concerning this series.
All trails criss-crossing the Montana Hi-Line were arteries for bootleg traffic during Prohibition. Blood and gunshots spattered county maps. Competitors posed more danger than the law. The pipeline carried not only whiskey and beer, but aliens, prostitutes, rustled beef and silk stockings.
Smuggling was a way to feed families as drought cracked the earth, those without hope abandoned their livestock, and survivors ate thistle salad. Illegal stills operated in coulees and mountain draws. Home breweries and wineries abounded. One man imported grapes by the ton. Bars mixed their own rum, using molasses shipped from Glacier Products in Kalispell.
Bootleggers in the U.S. and Canada took to the already worn outlaw trails Jan. 17, 1920, the date the Volstead Act took effect. At midnight on April 7, 1933, beer was delivered to the White House and Bavarian drinking resounded on Broadway in New York City.
The experiment in national morality had failed. The intervening 13 years, however, confused people of all ages about right and wrong, as it broke down national morality, created a huge illegal industry, and welded together criminal elements.
An outlaw postal system more efficient than the U.S. mails was created. The law had no information network to compare. If a pile of glacial rock was flagged, the driver moved a couple of rocks and found a massage.."Clear to Roundup," or "Harlem's been compromised." A lightning-blackened tree might be a repository. Reports were picked up at speakeasys and even banks by drivers doing back door banking in the night.
Helpful people in Chinook, Hingham and Shelby along the routes also were key to this system. Outright pay-offs were made to some men available to make emergency repairs, the owner of a team of horses was kept in harness overnight to pull touring cars across a boggy crossing. Cash might be slipped under a dinner plate at the table. Messages, too, were passed by these supporters.
The human element played a role, for many outlaws were caring and thoughtful. A driver might nurse apple seedlings from Denver for a Hi-Line homestead wife, the plants tightly packed to survive a gun battle and kept moist by waters of all the rivers between. Parts for a binder or tractor picked up in a distant city might save a man's wheat crop. Clothing for ragged children mysteriously appeared at the door.
Pat Thomas, a tough bronc rider from a dried-up homestead west of Big Sandy, was one of the most powerful of the bootleggers, remembered warmly by his daughter Marge, now 81, for his good deeds and his family loyalty.
He had a compelling need for money: To buy an expensive ultraviolet light machine so a Havre doctor could treat little Marge's serious blood eczema; no such equipment existed for hundreds of miles.
Red hair flying, Marge once kept his bullet-riddled radiator filled with beer as Thomas (alias Jack/Jerry Miller) jockeyed his Hupmobile into Denver and safety. Sprawled precariously on the hood, she poured quart after quart into the steaming radiator.
Marge often went with her father, the pair posing as tourists, he in bib overalls. She acted as a spotter of lawmen who dogged his trail, and at age 12 did backdoor banking for him in Malta. Sometimes, she says, they stopped to pick chokecherries or to fish.
She recalls fondly that he ramrodded one of the nation's most powerful cartels and was wanted dead or alive in 47 states.
Thrice wounded by federal agents, captured and tortured by rivals, his convoys often shot up, Thomas nevertheless built a liquor pipeline that stretched across the U.S. in a crime network set in motion in Havre.
He once swam the Milk River in ice breakup, with sacks of beer on his back.
By the time prohibition ended, Thomas controlled liquor businesses in six Fort Peck boom towns. He finally died of cancer from a hernia that broke a healing stomach ulcer after pushing his auto out of Fort Peck gumbo. He left a fleet of cars garaged in Denver, which Marge never located.
The fabric of society that initiated and briefly sustained prohibition was woven of complex elements. Interlocked were drought and depression, World War I, organized crime, Bible-thumping morality, ill-conceived homestead laws, and the desire of women to vote. The anti-alcohol movement allied such unlikely groups as the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTV), the Prohibition Party, fundamentalist churches, the Anti-Saloon League, the National Dry Federation, the suffragette movement, and the powerful Non-Partisan League (NPL). Protestants were pitted against Catholics and Jews, country cousins against city slickers.
Pat Thomas negotiated with Al Capone's syndicate in Chicago for territory, payoffs and protection; Capone controlled an area east of a straight line drawn from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan to Texas.
The Klu Klux Klan got into the act in Colorado, and the Black Hand (Mano Negro) in Wyoming.
Prohibition dissenters had included President William H. Taft and acid-tongued lawyer Clarence Darrow. Taft asked, "Why enact a law that is not enforceable?" Darrow urged spending money, instead, to improve the working man's condition "and he will take care of his own morals."
Darrow, of course, was right. Instead of being the greatest piece of moral legislation in the history of the world, Prohibition created a huge new industry and set the state for widespread lawlessness and corruption. It corrupted police and elected officials, farmers, businessmen and even children. It created alliances between crime syndicates, distillers, bankers,bank robbers, judges, lawmen and counterfeiters.
Perhaps the most destructive effect of prohibition was that it created disrespect for the law and glamorized crime. Rumrunning was done on such a large scale that it soon drew like a magnet all criminal elements into its network, beginning an endless cycle of crime.
Anti-liquor laws in the U.S. brought an economic surge to the also drought-stricken Canadian provinces. Though "dry," they modified their laws to allow production and export of liquor and beer. Smuggling skills perfected over half a century moving U.S. alcohol to Canada, now easily reversed the flow from north to south. Provincial police and Royal Canadian Mountie vigilance extended only to sales made north of the border.
Largest of Canada's liquor exporters were the Bronfman brothers, Abe, Harry and Sam, who had distilleries at Yorkton and Regina, Saskatchewan and a liquor warehouse at Govenlock six miles north of the border on the Wild Horse Trail. They also exported products from Dominion Distributing Warehouse, which still produces Seagrams. Schenley's also originated in prohibition. The single-store town of Govenlock made a fortune on bootlegging. Starting when Canadian provinces went dry, it boomed when the tables reversed and the U.S. went dry.
The Govenlock family warehouse became a liquor export house. At this western rail terminal, carloads of liquor were unloaded for export south. Saskatchewan wheat shipped east on the return run.
On a typical day in Govenlock, cars with license plates from all parts of the U.S. began to pull in about 3 p.m. Drivers spent the afternoon in Grant Brothers' Pool Hall often playing high stakes poker. In the evening cloth-top touring cars were backed into warehouses for loading. Border crossings were made at night in cars equipped with auxiliary leaf springs to handle the extra weight. Garages often doubled as warehouses, also offering auto repairs and sleeping facilities.
The 12 percent Canadian beer was packaged three burlap sacks to the barrel, each sack containing 24 quart bottles compactly wrapped in straw. A barrel wholesaled for $20 and sold in the U.S. for $144. A car loaded with 14 barrels of beer and five cases of whiskey brought up to $2,500 profit (profit per 12-bottle case of whiskey was about $35).
As vast as the import business was, however, it could not quench the thirst of America. A major cottage industry sprang up in the U.S., as billions of gallons of home brew bubbled in old mine shafts, in vacant shacks, and up remote coulees, several of them around Chinook and Harlem. The cunning required to make and market illicit booze created colorful local undergrounds in each city, township and county.
These entrepreneurs were tragi-comic figures, creative and daring. Raids of stills could end in tragedy. Bootleggers died and so did the raiders. New law enforcement tactics were needed to catch both the bootleggers and the corrupt sheriffs, police, lawyers and judges who joined such risky ventures.
NEXT--The girl who remembers the rise of a bootlegging dynasty.
RHOADES
CAR
4 Wheel Bikes That Drive Like a Car!, Street legal,Multi-speed, 1-2 & 4 seaters-FREE
LITERATURE