The Cattle Queen in the Water

Hollywood came to the mountains around Saint Mary once, on this side of the Divide, to shoot a picture called Cattle Queen of Montana. Barbara Stanwyck played the queen, and a future president named Ronald Reagan played alongside her. They took the title and left the rest of it on the bottom of Lake McDonald. There was a real Cattle Queen, and by one employee handbook's unkind account she looked nothing like Barbara Stanwyck. Libby Collins ranched with her husband, Nat, near Choteau, and she's said to be the first woman who rode along with her cattle on a train out of Montana to see them sold in Chicago. In the eighteen nineties, word came of mineral strikes in these mountains, and Libby Collins headed up to find her fortune. Her claim lay in the McDonald Creek valley, over west of the Divide, with her brother and a man named Frank McPartland for partners. August of eighteen ninety-five, she and McPartland were rowing to his cabin on Lake McDonald. They got into a fight over a bottle of whiskey. The boat went over. The fight went on in the water, with her struggling to get him to let go of her. Sound carries on that water. Folks on the shore at George Snyder's hotel heard the commotion, saw the rowboat turned over, and put out to help. They plucked Libby Collins out of the lake. McPartland had already gone under. All of that comes from one handbook's telling. An inauspicious end to their partnership, it calls it, dry as a bone. So two partners in a mining claim go out in a boat, and one comes back. Some wondered if she'd done it on purpose, to enlarge her stake. Nothing was ever proved. She worked that claim for several years. Hollywood gave her Barbara Stanwyck's face and none of this story. The map has it, if you know how to read one. There's a McPartland Mountain in this park, believed to be named for him, and there's a Cattle Queen Creek. His name sits on rock, and it holds still. Hers is on running water, and you know what a creek does. It gets away.