Bozeman News

Journey to Anaconda

A Homestead in Opportunity

By Caroline Patterson, Guest Writer, 10-04-10

Jeanne, Sallie and Tom Vergeront get as close as they can to their family history, a cattle fence with a "no trespassing" sign near the property proved up near Anaconda in 1870 by Gwenllian Evans.

When Tom Vergeront drove his 9-year-old daughter to soccer games around the state, he jokingly told her to “bow down her head” as they passed Anaconda in deference to her female ancestors there. This was before they learned the full story of one of them, Gwenllian Evans, Montana’s first female homesteader and Tom’s great-great-great grandmother.

Evans, a widow from Wales, proved up in 1870 on land in what is now Opportunity. She stayed in the Deer Lodge Valley from 1869 until the time of her death on Feb. 13, 1892, and lived, according to her obituary “a life full of years and noble deeds.”

None of this, however, was known to her descendents. Not to Gwenllian’s great-great-granddaughter, Sallie Vergeront, whose grandmother was left behind in Cadoxton, Wales, when Gwenllian emigrated in 1868. Not to her great-great-great-granddaughter, Jeanne Vergeront, a museum planner from Minneapolis. Not to her great-great-great-grandson Tom Vergeront, who recently took a job at a mill in nearby Deer Lodge, or her great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Kali, the former 9-year-old who’s now an accounting major at Montana State University in Bozeman. 

The connection to this family’s history happened last year when Kali picked out a Christmas gift for her grandmother, “Montana Women Homesteaders” by Sarah Carter, a book I edited in 2007. As she wrote Kali’s thank-you note, Sallie Vergeront thumbed through the book and stopped at page 17.

As we stood on the streets of Anaconda seven months later, Sallie read it to me: “The distinction of Montana’s first woman homesteader should probably go to Gwenllian Evans who filed a statement on May 12, 1870, testifying that, on April 20, 1870, she had settled on 160 acres of land on Warm Springs Creek near Anaconda.”

On page 17, the Vergeront family began unraveling their relations to Gwenllian Evans, the widow from Wales who became and early postmistress.

When she originally read that passage, Sallie said she felt a chill of recognition. She went on to read about the “widow from Wales that arrived in Anaconda in the late 1860s” who ran one of “Montana’s early post offices.” This, she realized, must be her great-great grandmother, the first of many solo women among the nearly 200,000 people who homesteaded in Montana in the early 1900s.

Sallie immediately phoned her daughter, Jeanne, in Minneapolis and Jeanne found Carter at the University of Alberta, where she works as a professor in the history and classics department. They exchanged information about Gwenllian Evans and discovered that Sallie’s hunch was correct: The first woman homesteader in Montana was, indeed, her great-great-great grandmother.

“I feel like I’m meeting my destiny,” says Sallie Vergeront, a slim, white-blonde woman in her eighties, as I step out of my car in front of the Anaconda Historical Society.

With her are her daughter, Jeanne, and son, Tom, who recently moved to Deer Lodge Valley to work at the Sun Mountain Lumber Mill. As we walk along narrow streets lined by 1890s brick buildings and shadowed by the famous smokestack of the Washoe Smelter, their excitement is so infectious, my head swims with “begets.”

Evans’ May 1870 affidavit

On the picnic table of the Anaconda chamber, surrounded by vintage farm wagons as we go over family trees, I notice the matrilineal repetition of names—Gwenllian, Margaret, Gwenllian, Margaret― that reach down four generations from the Gwenllian Evans that crossed over from Cadoxton, South Wales. Sallie has the same names recorded in her Welsh family Bible.

Together, we study Evans’ May 1870 affidavit, written in an elegant script: “I , Gwennllian Evans, a native of Breconshire in Wales, but now a resident of the County of Deer Lodge and Territory of Montana do declare upon oath that it is bon-fide [sic] my intention to become a citizen…to renounce…all allegiance and fidelity to all and any foreign Prince, Potentate, State and Sovereignty…particularly to Victoria II, Queen of Great Britain.” Her homestead patent for 160 acres was approved in 1872 in what is now Opportunity: Section 4, Township 4-N, Range 10-W, Serial number MTMTAA 056560.

Gwenllian Evans was the mother of Morgan Evans, land agent for famed industrialist Marcus Daly. According to historian Bob Vine, Daly pointed to a cow standing in a beautiful valley 25 miles west of Butte and said, “Main Street will run north and south in a direct line from where she stands, right through that cow.” Created in the late 1883—first named Copperopolis—Anaconda was renamed for Daly’s mine in Butte.

Gwenllian Evans became the town’s first postmistress and lived in an elegant home, near her son. Morgan Evans’ home with its mansard roof and long windows was known as Gwendale. He was well-known in the area as Daly’s friend and as owner of a 1,000-acre farm in Opportunity that raised cattle, grain, hay and Hambletonian trotting horses.

Sallie Vergeront at the gravesite of her great-great grandmother, who died in 1892.

“Until the book,” Jeanne explains, “Gwenllian Evans’ existence was a missing piece.”

“It’s a very good time to have a grandmother’s trunk in the attic,” said Carter, the book’s author. “There is tremendous interest in women’s history, among academics and a broad reading public, and in the lives of ordinary and not just extraordinary women. And there are so many hidden stories still to come to light.”

Sallie’s mother, Gwenllian’s great-granddaughter, died when Sallie was 20. “She would have known this history, she would have been able to fill in this gap,” Sallies says and grows quiet. “I knew about Morgan Evans. I knew that his sister, Margaret, my great-grandmother, had died in Wales leaving six children. I knew we had family who’d live in the Anaconda area. But I really knew nothing about Gwenllian Evans.”

After lunch, we pile in my Subaru and drive to the homestead in Opportunity, or “Oppor” as the residents in Anaconda call it, a wide-open, windy spot with a spectacular view of the 10,000-foot Pintler Mountain Range. With Tom’s guidance, we drive to the exact site of the homestead—or as close as we could get, which is a cattle fence near the road probably 500 yards away from the original homestead. And there it is: Against a bowl of blue sky, rafts of white clouds and a black silhouette of the Pintlers so rugged they look like a painted backdrop from a high school play, we are staring at the place settled by the first Montana woman homesteader.

We stand at the fence—which bears a no-trespassing sign—and try to envision Gwenllian Evans’ home built in 1880 on Mill Creek. Built from bricks from Salt Lake City and lumber shipped “from the east,” as Ed Taylor described it in an article for the March 8, 1936, Judith Basin Star. We try to envision the house with its “great double entrance doors and interior door and staircases of walnut” with “tall windows in the 16 rooms,… plush-covered furniture… [and] sixteen-foot wall mirrors.”

We see, instead, a berm of land, a network of unused ditches and several clumps of ratty willow bushes.

“It’s nice to see the view that she saw, to see where the weather came from and the spectacular wide open spaces,” Jeanne says, wistfully.

“Well,” Sallie says, staring out, “It’s not like she was Christopher Columbus and discovered a continent.” This is, after all, a Superfund site, the location of nearly 100 years’ worth of Butte mining and the Anaconda smelter. Anaconda was supposed to be the state capital. Another town was picked. Gwenllian Evans homestead should still be here, but when the smelter folded, the family moved on.

Sallie, of course, echoes what everyone is feeling. After all this excitement, there isn’t much to look at that’s of historical significance.

But this journey isn’t, after all, about the dead. It’s about how the dead affect the living. It is about Kali giving her grandmother a book that filled in a piece of missing history and about Sallie calling her daughter to help her investigate. It is about the two of them traveling hundreds of miles to Montana to meet Sallie’s son Tom and the three of them working together—tracking down maps and archival material—to find the gravesite of Gwenllian Evans.

It’s about the Vergeronts sharing this interesting piece of local history with the people in Anaconda—at the historical museum, the copy shop, and the chamber of commerce. It’s about Tom who, upon moving 10 miles down the road from where his grandmother was born in 1884, stayed up “until 1 in the morning” trying to find out who his relatives were and what they did.

And it is about Sallie, who searched her great-great-grandmother’s grave later that day at the cemetery on a hillside on the southside edge of Anaconda, high above town. As she knelt, she read the marker: “Gwenllian Evans, born in Cadoxton, South Wales, April 15, 1802, Died February 13, 1892.” Below the dates, she reads the epithet: “In remembrance of our dear grandma.”

Below them, there is the growl of a motor, then gears grinding down as a pickup truck climbs the hill. At the overgrown cemetery, a woman jumps out, slamming the door, shouting. “Wait! Don’t leave! I’m your relative.” She is Barbara Evans Olin from Lake Worth, Florida. She is, as it turns out, a great-great-great granddaughter of Gwenllian Evans. And on the ground above Evans’ bones, another family story starts.

Caroline Patterson is a writer and editor who lives with her two children in Helena, Montana. She has written articles for Sunset, Seventeen, Outside and Via and was the editor for “Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart.” She is currently at work on a novel.

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