In this lecture and book signing by John Shontz, you’ll meet the tens of thousands of men and women, rich and poor, highly educated and illiterate, who came to western Montana from across the globe more than 110 years ago to build a railroad engineering marvel — the St. Paul Pass Tunnel — and the last western American boom town. Lost to history for decades, Taft was “rediscovered” near the Montana and Idaho border during a 2018 archaeology expedition. Today’s famous bike trail, the Hiawatha Trail, is at the core of this raucous story, relayed in the new book “Taft, Montana: The Construction of the St. Paul Pass Tunnel and America’s Wickedest City; Building What is Today’s Hiawatha Trail.”
The program will be taped and posted on the Montana Historical Society’s YouTube channel
