“How the place got its name, though, is a story that has deservedly outlived the town itself.”
Well over a century since he left the White House in March 1913, Republican William Howard Taft of Ohio is not remembered much beyond his 340-pound girth. He was a lightweight when it came to policy, considered by most historians as just an average president. An affable but lackluster one-termer, it’s hard to claim he made much of a lasting difference.
Oklahoma claims to be the only state in the Union with a municipality named for America’s 27th President. Located in Muskogee County in the eastern side of the state, the town of Taft is home to fewer than 200 people as of the 2020 census.
But wait! What about Taft, Montana? Sadly, so little is left of it now that it hardly qualifies as a ghost town. Once home to more than 3,000 residents (mostly railroad workers and prostitutes), it burned to the ground in The Big Fire of August 1910, the largest single wildfire in U.S history.
Exit 5 on I-90 in the Treasure State’s Mineral County is marked “Taft” even though there’s little to see but a pile of sand, a few old railroad ties, and a hint here and there of where a building might have stood. How the place got its name, though, is a story that has deservedly outlived the town itself. A good telling of it is found in Timothy Egan’s 2009 bestseller, The Big Burn.
It was 1907. A stone’s throw from the Idaho line, the town was a large work camp without a name but with a notorious reputation. It was described by a Chicago Tribune reporter as “the wickedest city in America.”
In Spokane, Washington’s Spokesman Review newspaper in 2010, Jim Kershaw wrote, “At one point the town had 23 saloons. It also had, according to one contemporary letter-writer, ‘300 women and only one decent one.’”
Timothy Egan says one could “buy the basics” there, by which he means the following:
…a woman, a man, a horse, a place at a card table or a spin of a roulette wheel, a fat steak for $1, a quart of whiskey for $1.25, a bunk for 25 cents. One nearby shop advertised “shoes, booze and screws,” and they weren’t talking about hardware. It was an easy place for an outlaw to hide, because everyone…provided camouflage; a decent man would stand out like a cactus on an ice floe.
William Howard Taft was U.S. Secretary of War in 1907, and less than two years away from becoming Teddy Roosevelt’s successor in the White House. His train stopped briefly in this surly corner of western Montana. From a platform on his rail car, he gave a speech to a crowd composed of, in Egan’s words, “whores and saloon-keepers, fugitives, timber thieves, claim jumpers, and cardsharps.”
The morally upright Taft lambasted the place as “a blight on the American landscape” and admonished the folks to clean up their sewer of sin. The locals apparently took that as a compliment and decided by acclamation to name the town after him.
Taft himself was elected President of the United States in 1908, so he held the office at the time the fire wiped Taft, Montana, off the map. He visited the state two more times—Helena, Anaconda and Butte in 1909 and then Butte again in 1911—but never returned to that snake pit in the Bitterroots. He won Montana in 1908 but came in third in the state when he ran for re-election in 1912.
In 1921, President Warren Harding appointed Taft to a post the Ohioan had wanted for a long time: Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He served there for nearly a decade, during which time he changed his diet and exercise routines and dropped a hundred pounds. Poor health prompted him to resign in February 1930. He died a month later at the age of 72.
So now you know how Taft, Montana, got its name. It might be the only example of a town christened for a man who ripped it a new one, if you know what I mean.
(Lawrence W. Reed writes a monthly column for the Frontier Institute in Helena, on whose board he serves. He is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education and blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.)
