Medicine Tree mystery: Along Mullan Road near Nimrod, hill scoured for sacred site

NIMROD Gene Tripp descended into a world of green moss, green grass and evergreen pines on Medicine Tree Hill on a recent April morning.

Two old roads ran side by side up the westslope overgrowth. One especially caught Tripps fancy, and he called to his companions above to come and take a look.

You know they used that other one to go up and work on the pipeline and stuff, said Tripp, who lives in the river valley above and owns much of the land over and beyond the hill. But there was no reason for this one to be here. Especially these ruts.

No reason unless it was a rare remnant of the original military wagon road cut over this forgotten hill. That track quickly became known as the Mullan Road, carved 624 miles through the Northern Plains and Rockies from Walla Walla, Wash., to Fort Benton in two swoops from 1859 to 1862.

The ruts in which Tripp stood were shin deep, with all the right attributes of wooden wagon wheels chain-locked to scoot down the hillside. They say tens of thousands of people flocked to Montana and its new gold fields in the 1860s, many of them on the Mullan Road. By happy (for some) coincidence, Congress had just sprung for $230,000 to build the road to move military troops and supplies into the Pacific Northwest before and during the early Civil War years.

There had to be a few wagons going up and down this thing to do what it did here, Tripp noted.

It might be a stretch but not much of one to call this a section of the road that built Montana. When Lt. John Mullan finished it in 1862, there was no such thing as a Montana in these parts. The tracks Tripp and his guests were tracing were in Washington Territory. A few months short of two years later theyd been annexed into the new Idaho, then Montana territories.

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From the sky, the mile-long finger known as Medicine Tree Hill seems to beckon travelers upstream. Down in the valley it all but begs you not to notice it.

Interstate 90 and the current channel of the Clark Fork River have to bend to get around its steep north slope 30 miles east of Missoula. Attention tends to wander to the north side, where a waterfall and thermal hot spring make for interesting summer splashing, not to mention extralegal roadside parking.

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Medicine Tree mystery: Along Mullan Road near Nimrod, hill scoured for sacred site