Monthly Archives: March 2026

The Twelve Hour Tour.

Michael Shannon

Chapter 24,

Six Months in Billings.

They rolled the old Hog down the eastern palisades of the Rocky Mountains and down onto the high western prairies of central Montana, The ancestral home of the Lakota, Shoshone, Nez Perce, Blackfeet, Flathead, and Crow who had roamed horseback across the undulating prairies of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas for more than three centuries.

The difference was stark. The foothills of the Rockies, bathed in the late summer heat with Billings nestled in the fertile valley of the Yellowstone river and framed on three sides by scenic mountain ranges, Billings is a blend of plains and mountain geographies. The environment is rugged and wild just beyond the city with the spectacular Rimrock standing like stone fence on the north and east.

Fed by numerous tributaries, the Yellowstone River flows in a northeasterly direction through the Yellowstone valley. The valley measures from a few yards to twelve miles in width. Valley soils are deep, well-drained loams and silty clays. Sandstone cliffs, from 300 to 500 feet high, form a landmark border known as the “Rimrocks” to the north and east of the city. Above the Rimrocks, the land is primarily rolling hills with shallow to moderately deep soils of sandy and clay loams. South of Billings, the terrain is characterized by rolling steep hills with high, flat tablelands.

They’d left Arroyo Grande in September when it was still nice California weather but they weren’t prepared for the weather on the great plains. They hit a blizzard and Bruce and Eileen wee very concerned about wether they could get through. Bruce couldn’t see where the road was and so he had Bob walking ahead on the muddy snow covered road to guide the car. It was very cold. The Nash had only a little box heater under the dash board that ran on hot water from the radiator. Little Patsy sat on her mothers lap bundled in blankets trying to keep warm. They finally found an Auto Court and decided to wait it out. There is an old saying in Montana that if you don’t like the weather just wait a few minutes and it will change.

Bruce paid for the room and and sloshed his way to the door and used the key to open the door. Patsy was wearing a little dress and a pair of Maryjanes so Bob, who was already wet and muddy carried his sister in. Bruce had to help Eileen walk, the heels she always wore didn’t help much in the slush. They realized that the were completely Californian in their experience and that this might just be a completely new amd different way to live..

Eileen was born at a ranch in Anaheim. Her family were pioneers there and the Polhemus Ranch was partly on the site of todays Disneyland. Called the Miramonte, the ranch had wonderful views of the mountains to the east, a pretty rare sight today. Bruce grew up in Arroyo Grande so neither of them had any experience in the snow.

All the little room had for heat was a little electic hot plate so Eileen put on a pot and boiled water so the steam would send the temperature and humidity up. Bundled in their clothes and blankets they spent a miserable night huddled together on the bed, Mister Beans too.

As the old saying goes just wait a bit and sure as little green apples they awoke to clear skies and a warm breeze out of the east. It had been a freakish introduction to the vagaries of early Montana winter weather. Before instant communication, long distance travel in the west always had a hint of the disaster hanging about and they felt lucky that they had escaped from a blizzard that might easily have killed them.

It was nice when they finally rolled into Billings. After asking for directions they drove up 31st street to an apartment building on the tree lined and shaded street. Checking in with the landlady they rented an apartment in the otherwise vacant building. Eight rooms and they were the only residents which suited them just fine.*

Patsy standing on the stoop still wearing her short skirt and Maryjanes. Late September 1938.

They had a day or two to settle in and get organized before Bruce had to go to work. The apartment had two little kitchen chairs and a round table which proudly showed the scars, scrapes and dents of a long useful life. They also inherited an old crippled three legged dresser with a sort of peg leg nailed to the side with a folded matchbook strategically positioned to keep it level most of the time. There was a stand alone wardrobe for clothes which stood alongside an old iron framed double bed painted white. The mattress had seen some hard use and would have to go which presented no problem for them. It was just part of the deal when you lived in temporary houses and they were used to that sort of thing. The rent was only eight dollars a month so at least it wasn’t going to break the bank.

Grandma brought a box of dishes and some cooking utensils with her and some folded sheets and blankets. A night or two on the floor presented no problem. Billings was a nice little town and with a little nosing around she would find what ever she needed.

My aunt who had just turned five had the run of the place because her mother thought it was perfectly safe with no other residents. People were a little more casual with their kids then and paid less attention to the occasional bumps, scrapes and bruises. Years of itinerant life had taught them the important thing was to teach children how to look out for themselves.

Billings had a population which hovered around 20,00 souls in 1938 and qualified as Montana’s 3rd largest city behind Butte and Great Falls. The town was slowly climbing out of the depression with the introduction of some light industry, particularly the new sugar beet factory and the local refinery.

One of the most brutal labor intensive crops grown at the time, sugar beets used a legion of itinerant laborers who did almost all of the planting, weeding and production by hand. The infamous “Cortito” or short handled hoe was prominent in the fields. Known by Mexican laborers as the “Brazo de Diablo,” or the devils arm, it was the only weeding tool in use at the time.** It would be forty years before it was phased out of existence.

Thinning sugar beets in the Yellowstone valley, Treasure County Montana near Billings Montana 1939

There were around twenty refineries in Montana at the time though most people wouldn’t likely think of the state as a major oil producer. Yale Oil ran a refinery right outside Billings and received crude from the wells which had been drilled in the southeastern part of the state.

Signal landmen had contracted for some leases near the small town of Broadview which was about forty miles northwest of Billings and Bruce and his crew were sent to set up and drill a wildcat. The region is in the northern portion of the Crazy Horse Mountain Basin/Bull Mountain Basin region, which was surveyed for oil potential during that the thirties. Montana was well known for its light crude which was a high quality product and when refined made a very good quality gasoline. Cars in the late thirties were far more sophisticated than they had been twenty years before. V8 motors needed a higher grade of gasoline than the old four banger Model T’s. Signal was advertising its Purepull gasoline which had lead added and known as Tetrathyl which ran smoother in the new and modern engines.***

With a long history of drilling and production Signal geologists believed that a wildcat might be worth a try and Mosher agreed to sent my grandfather and his crew up to Montana to have a go on the chance that a new field could be brought in.

Walt and Ray would be flying in to Billings soon so setting up the household was going to be done in a hurry.

Chapter 25

How its done.

*North 31st street is still there. Built in 1910 a room can be rented for just 875 a month. Eight rooms, four baths, one with a tub. when the Halls lived there. It now has two apartments with full baths and is estimated to be around four hundred thousand if it was on the market. It’s walking distance to McKinley Elementary school where Patsy went to the first grade while they lived there. It’s one of the few old survivors left in downtown Billings.

**Kaz Ikeda who volunteered to go north to Idaho to work the beets in 1944, said, “Anything to get out of the concentration camp at Poston, Arizona,” Kaz told me it was the most brutal work he ever did and this from a farm boy who grew up in the fields of Arroyo Grande, California. He always said,”The joke was on me.”

***Ethyl gasoline, introduced in 1923, was a leaded fuel additive developed by General Motors and Standard Oil to eliminate engine knock and increase efficiency, using tetraethyl lead. Despite early cases of severe lead poisoning among workers, the product was marketed heavily as “Ethyl” to hide its lead content. It dominated the market for decades before being phased out starting in the 1970s due to extreme environmental and public health risks.

Michael Shannon comes from an oil field family. Bruce and Eileen Hall were his mothers parents.

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EVERYTHING TENDS TO REMIND ME OF SOMETHING.

Michael Shannon

One Decade in America.

Voting Rights Act. March on Washington. Has anybody seen my old friend John, or Martin or Bobby, where have they gone? The Prague Spring. The Mop Tops, Surfin’ USA. The Tet Offensive, Rolling Thunder, The Au Shau Valley, My Lai. Walter Reed, Letterman, Tripler, Balboa, Aiea. The Evacs, 71st, 93rd, 312th, NSA Da Nang. Steppin’ into Darkness. Riots. Cleveland, Miami, Los Angeles. Watts Towers. School Busing. Hippies, Yippies and Nixon Comin’. Last Prince of Camelot takes a girl for a swim. The Silent Majority. Apollo 11. The Hog Farm. The Chicago Seven, Judge Sirica. The Days of Rage. Winterland, Carousel and the Fillmore. Soul on Ice. The Panthers. The Weathermen. I came across a child of God. Monterey Pop. Yagur’s Farm. Altamont, The Grateful Dead, Hells Angels and the end of the The Summer. The Lizard King dies, Janis, Jimi, Cass Elliot. Manson Family, Bugliosi, Squeaky Fromme. Cambodia, Laos. Tin Soldiers. Four dead in Ohio. Angela Davis, Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Apollo 13. Granny glasses. Tie Dye. Attica. Watergate. Nixon Quits, Flees. No gas. Vietnam ends. Welcome Home Boys and Girls.

Just One Decade in America.

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THE TWELVE HOUR TOUR

Chapter 22, Out of State

Michael Shannon

Grandpa called her the “Oil Hog.”*

This story is not really about a trip to Montana in 1938 to drill an oil well as much as it is about certain women in my family who always had their sights set on the far distance. Dreamers and carriers of hope in baskets. They saw something off in the far distance that drew them outward and forward.

In the mid-thirties Signal Oil Company was developing along sevral lines of business in an attempt to survive. Like many companies in the boom and bust business, whichever it might have been, growth was the only bastion of continuance.

By 1938 Signal’s primary business was refining. In order to refine they needed crude oil which they cracked and distilled and supplied to the filling stations that Sam Mosher had acquired up and down the west coast. The key to it all was oil and that meant control of enough wells to adequately supply the refineries. Drilling the first company well at Hydrocarben Gulch in Goleta had been a success, a near thing but still a series of good producing wells. Carefully buying up likely leases or abandoned wells in Long Beach, Santa Fe Springs and in the Elk Hills around Maricopa he had developed a sort of insurance that allowed the company to assure a steady supply of crude.

Mosher and his team were one of the first west coast outfits to pursue serious vertical integration. This is a strategic business model where a company gains control over multiple stages of its supply chain such as production, distribution, and retail, rather than relying on external suppliers. By acquiring or developing these stages, firms improve efficiency, reduce costs, enhance quality control, and insure supply chain stability.

To that end Signal was casting a net of geologists far and wide across the US looking for possibilities. For a primarily west coast operation they saw that expanding their map could be a positive move. Mosher acquired a number of wells in west Texas. In May of 1923, diggers struck oil in Big Lake, and it became the first commercial oil site in the Permian Basin. The discovery of oil in the region propelled Big Lake into a thriving oil production center, and the area still has a rich history connected to the industry to this day.

The first big Wildcat in Big Lake was the so-called Santa Ria No. 1, which was named for the Patron Saint of the Impossible, was the first commercial oil site in Big Lake. Wildcatters who live by boom and bust have a perfectly tuned sense of Irony as can be seen by tales of life along the cutting edge of discovery. Lucky Seven, Devils Hole and Six Shooter being examples of Oil Patch whimsey.

In September of 1938 Bruce and Eileen were living on Short Street in Arroyo Grande while Bruce tended wells from Maricopa to Casmalia where he first started in 1919. He was on the road all the time flying back and forth on a moments notice when word came down from headquarters in Long Beach that he was being sent to Montana. He was to take over drilling operations on a new well outside of Billings Montana. Just like all the other moves they packed up, rented out the house and hit the road. Bruce Eileen, Bob who had just moved home from his sister Mariel and her husband Ray Long’s ranch where he had gone to live and attend Sierra high school, the idea being that he would not be moved around as much as the girls had. Patsy who had just turned six was along for the ride too and don’t forget, Mister Beans the Boston Terrier who sat on grandma’s lap for the trip.

Robert (B0b) Hall up on Brownie with Bobby dog, Miramonte, California 1937

It was a long lonely trip by car. What was once referred to as the wild west was stil lightly populated and the road to Montana was long, lonely and mostly unpaved. In fact there was no direct route between central California and Billings.

Flying was also out of the question. There was no direct air service from California. Only Northwest Airlines flew to Billings and that was from Seattle to Chicago with a stop in Billings. The plane itself was a Lockheed Electra model 10 which had famously carried the aviatrix Amelia Earhart to her doom the year before, not an uncommon thing at the dawn of commercial air before radar and GPS.

In any case paying for a flight to the middle of nowhere wouldn’t have been the company way so drive it was. There were only two ways to go, north to Portland along highway 5 then east up the Columbia River. Turn at Umatilla, go north again to Holmes Washington and then head east again towards Spokane.

On the trip up the Columbia they stopped and wondered at the brand new Bonneville dam. At a cost of 88.4 million dollars it was, at the time the most expensive federal project ever built. Boulder dam on the Colorado completed just two years before came in at 50 million and in 1940 the Missouri River’s Fort Peck topped out at nearly a hundred million dollars. All three were paid for by the Public Works Administration and built under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers. Designed for flood control and generation of electricity they served some of the more remote parts of the country, they were also designed to put Americans back to work during the depression. An added bonus that these huge projects provided was a skilled engineering workforce leading up to the second world war.

Crossing the panhandle of Idaho they hit Butte Montana once known as the Richest Hill on Earth. In 1938 it was just a ghost of what it once was. Much of it abandoned and boarded up but its fame and decadence was well known western history.

Butte was first settled in 1864 as a mining camp. Right along on the Continental Divide, Butte exploded the late 19th century with the discovery of Gold, Silver and Copper. I was Montana’s first major industrial city. In its heyday between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was one of the largest copper boom towns in the American West. Employment opportunities in the mines attracted surges of European and Asian immigrants, particularly the Irish. Today Butte still has the largest population of Irish Americans per capita of any U.S. city.

Butte is in the wonderfully named Silver Bow county. Famous for as being the site of various historical events involving the mining industry and active labor unions and socialist politics, the most famous of which was the labor riot of 1914. Despite the dominance of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, Butte was never a company town. Other major events in the city’s history include the 1917 Speculator Mine disaster, the largest hard rock mining disaster in world history.

Every miner’s family knew what the sound of the screeching steam whistle meant when it was yanked hard and tied down. The high pitched scream pierced the Butte valley for those to know that men had died under the rock.

The Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine disaster of June 8, 1917, occurred as a result of a fire in a copper mine, and was the most deadly event in underground hard rock mining in United States history. Most men died of suffocation underground as the fire consumed their oxygen. A total of 168 miners were killed. Some left notes written while they waited in hopes of rescue. A few managed to barricade themselves behind bulkheads in the mine and were found after as long as 55 hours. Some of the notes written by the miners while they waited to be rescued can be viewed at the site of the memorial to those that died.

“It takes my heart to be taken from you so suddenly and unexpectedly, but think not of me, for if death comes, it will be in a sleep without suffering …” – Manus Dugan to his wife and mother in a note written as he waited behind a bulkhead to die.

Disaster was always on the menu in those old mining towns but the wages were good and a man new to the country with little education was willing to roll the dice to feed his family.

The Dumas House circa 1905. Montana historical photo

In a walk around the old town in September of 1938 took them down to the rows of whiskey bars and saloons known as the Line or “The Copper Block”, centered on Mercury Street, where the elegant bordellos included the famous Dumas House. Behind the brothel was the equally famous Venus Alley where women plied their trade in small cubicles called “cribs.” The red-light district brought miners and other men from all over the region and remained open in 1938. Pretty scandalous but Bruce and Eileen hardly turned a hair as nearly twenty years in and around the oil patch left few surprises when it came to what people had and did do to survive

The Spectator Mine. Montana Historical photo.

They stayed the night then saddled up and drove on down to Bozeman. Bozeman in 1938 was an entirely different town that the rolicking, rowdy ex-boomtown of Butte. In July 1806, William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, took a side trip, visiting the Gallatin Valley as he traveled east from Three Forks, Montana, following the Gallatin River. Journal entries from Clark’s party briefly describe the future Bozeman as the “Valley of the Flowers,” which came from the southwest Montana native tribe’s apt description of the pristine Gallatin Valley land. It was known as “The Garden Spot of Montana.”

When the Halls passed through the valley it was still a major wheat producer and one of the largest pea producers canning and shipping peas all over the country. For Bruce and Eileen and their kids the attraction was certainly not the peas. Hating peas, boiled, baked or steamed is major point of pride in our family. ***

Bozeman had been the gateway to Butte for the Boomers heading up to the richest hill to strike it rich. It was a much more hospitable place and in the late 30’s and was already home to the States University. The Northern Pacific railroad had a division point there and the fertile lands in the Gallatin Valley were host to large cattle and wheat ranching operations. 120 miles east, Billings was going to be a different experience altogether.


Before motels there were auto courts One or two room cabins for rent by the night. Bozeman Montana 1938

The next morning they headed east towards Billings. The Nash’s hood was thrown open and she got a couple quarts of oil for breakfast and leaving behind her calling card on the motor courts parking lot they motored out leaving a plume of fragrant oil drifting on the cool mornings air. Broadview Dome #1 waited, so did a vastly different life than the one they had lived in California.

1700 miles of every kind of road imaginable from dirt and mud holes, gravel much of it unpaved and now it was just 120 miles to Billings and the new well.


Traveling Eest towards Billings, Montana 1938. Robert Hall Photo

Next it’s on to Billings and Back to Work,

Chapter 23 of the Twelve Hour Tour.

*In 1932, when the Oil Hog was new, Nash prices varied by series, with the Series 980 4-Door Town Sedan having a base price around $895. Six years old, ancient for a 1930’s car she leaked motor oil like a sieve and needed pretty careful attention. It was quite a trip to take through lonesome and wild country but that was Bruce and Eileens way. It seems like adventure always called to them.

*Most of the photos in this chapter are from two albums of photos taken by Bruce and his son Bob and compiled by my grandmother. The beautifully annotated photos are described in by mother’s fine hand with white India ink on black felted album paper. It is a cherished family keepsake as you might well imagine.

**Many Many of the snapshots in the albums are the exact same ones that a traveler may well take today.

***The family Pea History. https://atthetable2015.com/2025/10/16/the-great-pea-war-2/

Michael Shannon lives in California and is a grandson of Bruce and Eileen Hall.

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