Park celebrates 100th anniversary

A recreation area considered by many to be a hidden gem of the region turns 100 today.

Sept. 7, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the bill that turned part of the military reservation of Fort Assinniboine into a recreation area that would become Hill County's Beaver Creek Park.

The creation of that area was tacked on to a bill more decades in the making - the creation of Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation also using part of the military reservation of the fort, which was decommissioned in 1911.

The band of Chippewa led by Chief Rocky Boy, or Stone Child, had moved west from Pennsylvania, according to a web page of Chippewa Cree Cultural Resources Preservation Department. Once in Montana, the band associated with, off and on, a band of Cree led by Chief Little Bear from what would become Alberta.

The bands both wandered the state for several decades, with some unsuccessful attempts to move them onto existing reservations or integrate them into other communities. Rocky Boy - and prominent Montanans including Paris Gibson, Frank B. Linderman and Charles M. Russell - worked for more than a decade to find a home for Rocky Boy's band, resulting in the 1916 law creating "a reservation for Rocky Boy's Band of Chippewas and other such homeless Indians in the State of Montana as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to locate thereon."

The bill also addressed the land on Beaver Creek, which had been used for centuries as a rest or recreation area by Native Americans, soldiers from Fort Assinniboine after it was created in 1879 and eventually people from Havre.

After the fort was decommissioned, some prominent Havre residents filed mining claims along the creek in an attempt to ensure it would continue to be open for recreation.

The 1916 bill went further - it withdrew 8,880 acres of land along Beaver Creek from control of the Department of the Interior to create a campground, at no expense to the federal government. The bill also set aside 920 acres of land - later made part of the park - for Havre to use for building a reservoir. That is where Beaver Creek Reservoir was created in the 1970s.

Because people were concerned the designation could be lost, Hill County Commission later paid  $27,760.44 for a patent on 9,253.48 acres in Beaver Creek Park, turning it into a county-operated park.

In 1952, the county paid $2,670 for the 920 acres patented to Havre for reservoir purposes, and later bought a small amount of land from private landowners as well as buying right-of-way access for the state-owned Bear Paw Lake, built in the 1950s by Fish, Wildlife and Parks - then Fish and Game - to provide trout fishing access.

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Editor's note: For more on the centennial of Beaver Creek Park, watch for a special section coming out Sept. 27.