History of Sand Coulee, Montana 1880 through 1900

Abstract

Sand Coulee is now a bedroom community for Great Falls, laying twelve miles east and south of the larger city. Both town and city had their start at almost exactly the same time during the early 1880s. Sand Coulee was well known throughout the territory because of the tremendous coal field that J. J. Hill exploited to fuel his Great Northern Railway that connected the Twin Cities of Minnesota with the Pacific Northwest. The biggest repository of Sand Coulee history is a small history written by Ruby Giannini titled "A History of Sand Coulee" and a book titled "The Gulch Area History" written by a committee of area residents. "The Gulch Area History" is a genealogy of the area. These two books are the only ones specifically written about Sand Coulee and neither includes documentation. This thesis is heavily documented so that those who disagree with this history or its conclusions will be able to compare sources. Because of Sand Coulee's coal mining importance, its history resides in many newspapers, magazines, official state reports and history books. The footnotes and bibliography of this thesis give the historian a sense for the wide range of material available in bits and scraps about Sand Coulee. This thesis covers areas that are relatively unexplored in Sand Coulee's history, but there is still a lot of history to be written about Sand Coulee.