These are apparently two of the original series of Captain Mullan monuments, of which I believe thirteen were made and placed along the Mullan Road, which stretched 624 miles from Fort Benton, MT to Fort Walla Walla, WA. Mullan surveyed and built the road in the years 1853 to 1860. It was the first road to cross the Rocky Mountains into the Pacific Northwest.
Designed by Western frontier artist Edgar S. Paxson and fabricated by Western Montana M & G Company, the original statues of Captain John Mullan were fourteen feet tall, cut from white Vermont marble and placed on concrete bases. They were initially placed at various points along The Mullan Road. The monuments were apparently dedicated in 1916, with one being moved from its original location to Circle Park, a small plaza in front of the old Great Northern Railway Depot, in the late 1940s or early 1950s. The other, now near the original site of the first monument, was placed in Two Rivers Memorial Park in Bonner about 1996. Its original location is unknown.
See the photo below of the monument being erected at the depot.
On August 03, 2014 The Missoulian published an article on the monuments and Captain Mullan and his road, which is reproduced below.
Mullan Road remains stamped on Missoula
August 03, 2014 8:00 am • By Kim Briggeman
John Mullan traveled through the Missoula Valley at least 16 times from 1853 to 1883. He left behind the military wagon road that bears his name, which became, roughly, the secondary highway to Frenchtown which bears that name.
Two of the 13 Edgar Paxson-designed statues of Mullan erected in Montana and Idaho are in or around Missoula, at Circle Square on North Higgins and on the banks of the Blackfoot River east of town.
The Mullan Road ran 624 miles from Walla Walla, Washington, to Fort Benton, connecting steamboat ports on the Columbia and Missouri rivers. Mullan made two construction sweeps through here, in 1860 and in late 1861. He didn’t have much work to do in Missoula, or Hellgate Ronde, and so didn’t spend much time here.
In the summer of ’60, he was quickly followed by merchants from the west, who set up a trading post at Hellgate and in 1864-65 moved east to establish the city of Missoula.
Mullan’s wagon road was subject to constant permutations. Today you approximate the route by driving east from Frenchtown on Mullan Road, past ranchettes, subdivisions and Council Grove, where the Hellgate Treaty of 1855 was signed. One ramification of the treaty was to open Indian country to road construction.
Historic surveyor Bill Weikel of Missoula is a Mullan Road enthusiast. He has traced the likely route of the first Mullan Road through Missoula as the alley between Main Street and Broadway. It probably crossed Rattlesnake Creek in the vicinity of the back parking lot of Burger King.
No one knows the precise route, but the legacy of Mullan’s work remains stamped on Missoula more than 150 years later.
From The Missoulian