Havre, Montana: The Secret Tunnel Empire Beneath the Streets

On January 14, 1904, Havre, Montana burned twice in one day. The first fire started in the back of Gross

and Lebert's hardware store with a chinook wind still blowing. The second came around noon, when a clerk

at the Stringfellow Drug Store opened the trap door to the cellar and got a face full of smoke. The rush of

air lit what had been smoldering below, and it went east through the block, taking the Hotel Havre and the

Metropolitan, then jumped the street. Great Falls put Engine 151 on the line with a tank car of water and

covered the distance fifty minutes faster than the scheduled passenger run. Nearly sixty buildings were

gone. Not one person died.

In February the city council ordered all new downtown construction to be brick or stone. The wooden frontier

town was finished. But the owners were not going to sit in a Montana winter waiting on brick walls, so they

dropped into their own basements. Steam tunnels already ran under the streets and Shorty Young had already

dug passages between his own buildings. They tied into all of it and connected the rest as they went, and

what came out was something nobody planned: an underground town.

Timeline of Events

1879: The Army begins building Fort Assinniboine, the largest military post ever built in Montana.

1891: The settlement takes the name Havre, after Le Havre in France. It incorporates in 1893.

January 14, 1904: Two fires burn nearly sixty buildings. Fort Assinniboine sends soldiers to stop the looting

and fifteen people are arrested. No cause is ever established.

February 1904: The city council requires brick or stone for all new downtown construction.

1910: Havre's population has more than tripled, to 3,624.

February 28, 1918: Long George Francis, six foot six and a future Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame inductee,

is convicted of stealing a bay mare. He skips sentencing and hides in the Bears Paw Mountains. He kept a

saddlery in the tunnels.

October 1918: A state raid on Shorty Young's Border Saloon, run with two improperly deputized men, recovers

one quart bottle holding about three drinks of whiskey. The Attorney General's own office calls the raid

illegal and the raiders are the ones arrested.

December 31, 1918: Montana's prohibition takes effect, a year ahead of the rest of the country. The

underground is ready before the ink dries.

Historical Significance

On a given afternoon down there you could get a shave at the Fountain Barbershop, buy sausage from the

Pioneer Meat Market, have Doctor Wright pull a tooth in an office with an x-ray machine, eat a tamale from

Tamale Jim, drink at the Sporting Eagle, and never come up for daylight. There was a bordello, a drugstore,

an ice cream shop, a funeral parlor. Wah Sing ran a laundry where cowboys left a change of clothes, bathed,

and picked up the clean set on the way out. Three opium dens ran in those corridors, mostly as pain relief

for railroad workers wrecked by the work; Montana had outlawed opium smoking in 1891, which did nothing

but push it further down. For the Chinese community, the underground was both a place to earn a living and

a place to be left alone. Shorty Young ran the gambling, the prostitution, and the bootlegging, with an

escape tunnel that started under his stage and ran several hundred yards west. He fought local, state, and

federal government, and he usually won.

Sources

Havre Beneath the Streets museum

Great Northern Railway division point records

Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, Long George Francis

Montana Attorney General's office records, 1918

If you liked this: Episode 188, Lewistown, Montana. Another Montana story where the respectable version of

events did not survive a closer look.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs,

and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at

mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 213 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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