A Colonel’s Ox Trail and His Son’s Law Office:

The Smiths of Kirksville, the Gallatin, and Livingston

Introduction

Montana’s early biographical compendiums, the multi-volume county-by-county tributes commissioned in the boom years after statehood, rarely paused for ordinary lives. They preferred a formula: birth, migration, enterprise, honor. Buried inside that formula, however, is often a genuinely useful record, particularly when the subject’s father had kept a written account of his own. Such is the case with the entry for John T. Smith Jr. of Livingston, a Park County attorney and onetime mayor, in Helen Fitzgerald Sanders’ A History of Montana (1913). The sketch is, on its surface, a lawyer’s résumé. Embedded within it, though, is a first-person narrative attributed to the subject’s father, Captain John T. Smith Sr., describing an 1864 overland crossing from Missouri to the Gallatin Valley in the company of the man for whom the city of Bozeman is named. Read together, father’s frontier passage and son’s professional rise trace, in miniature, the arc of Montana’s transition from contested mining camp to settled agricultural and legal community.

A Missouri Merchant Heads West, Twice

The elder Smith was born in eastern Tennessee on February 25, 1813, and moved as a boy of fifteen with his parents, Josiah and Martha Smith, to Howard County, Missouri (Sanders 1100). He received a public-school education and went into general merchandising at Kirksville, purchasing the stock of Jesse Kirk, the town’s original merchant and the man for whom Kirksville was named (Sanders 1100). In 1850, drawn like thousands of others by the California gold rush, he sold his interests and led an ox-team outfit overland as its captain, arriving in San Francisco after three months on the trail. He tried the hotel trade there for a year and a half before returning east by sea to the Isthmus of Panama, crossing it on foot, and completing the journey to Missouri by ship, rail, and stage (Sanders 1100). Back in Adair County, he turned to farming and stock raising and became one of the organizers of the State Bank at Kirksville, serving intermittently as its president and cashier into the early 1860s (Sanders 1100).

He was, by the account in Sanders, also a public man: a member of the Missouri legislature during the administration of Governor Sterling Price, a Democrat, and an admirer of Stephen A. Douglas. Price did in fact govern Missouri from January 1853 to January 1857, and his term is independently documented as the period in which the state created its first geological survey (Missouri State Archives). Sanders’ claim that Smith helped secure the appointment of George C. Swallow as Missouri’s state geologist, and that Swallow later held the equivalent post in Kansas, likewise holds up: Swallow served as Missouri’s first state geologist from 1853 until 1861 and subsequently directed a geological survey of Kansas in 1865 and 1866 (Page 134). That two verifiable details anchor the sketch’s opening paragraphs lends some confidence to the more personal material that follows, even where it cannot be independently checked.

The Overland Narrative of 1864

The most substantial portion of the entry is not conventional biography at all but an extended first-person account, evidently reprinted from a magazine article Captain Smith had written, describing his family’s departure from Missouri in the spring of 1864. The timing was not incidental. Smith describes the “animosities of the pending Civil War” as having grown intense in Adair County, his property partly confiscated, and his two eldest sons approaching conscription age (Sanders 1100). With a companion named Alexander Foster, two ox teams, his sons Mancil and Robert, a nephew, and a formerly enslaved man identified in the account only as John, Smith set out for Nebraska City with no fixed destination, later joining a larger company bound west along the old California road (Sanders 1100).

News of the Alder Gulch gold strike near Virginia City redirected the party toward Montana. Along the North Platte, Smith’s group crossed paths with Captain John Bozeman, who was organizing a train to scout a route east of the Big Horn Mountains for a fee of five dollars per wagon (Sanders 1100–01). Smith declined to join Bozeman’s company outright, unwilling to bind his men to the toll, but agreed to travel within supporting distance and share campsites, helping scout the route in exchange. The two parties pushed through Powder River country, crossed Goose Creek, the Tongue, the Muddy, and the Little Big Horn, and reached the Big Horn River on the Fourth of July, an occasion the company marked, in Smith’s telling, by killing more than a hundred buffalo (Sanders 1101). This is recognizably the Bozeman Trail’s inaugural traffic: Bozeman and his partner John Jacobs had blazed the route the previous year, and 1864 was the season in which wagon parties began moving over it in numbers toward the Montana goldfields (Distinctly Montana; Encyclopedia.com).

From the Big Horn the party angled northwest along Clark’s Fork to the Yellowstone, crossed near the future site of Livingston, and followed Jim Bridger’s trail westward through what is now Bridger Canyon into the Gallatin Valley. There the routes divided: Bozeman’s group pressed on toward Emigrant Gulch and what became known as Bozeman Pass, while Smith’s detachment continued to Virginia City by way of the Shields and East Gallatin rivers (Sanders 1101). The Alder Gulch they found was still absorbing the shock of the vigilante executions of the preceding winter; Smith recalled being shown a lamp post where five men had been hanged, and a landlord assuring him that a pocketbook left on the sidewalk would be perfectly safe. It is a wry, almost clinical observation, delivered without the moralizing that later popular accounts of the vigilante episode would often supply.

Neighbors on the East Gallatin

Smith’s account of what followed corroborates, in its particulars, the documented founding of Bozeman. After sending his formerly enslaved traveling companion John off to paid work in a Virginia City restaurant, Smith returned to the Gallatin Valley with Bozeman, and with Daniel Rouse purchased a small ranch and cabin on the East Gallatin River for fifty dollars, a debt his sons discharged by ten days’ labor for Rouse (Sanders 1101). Bozeman and Rouse then platted the townsite that would bear Bozeman’s name; the historical record confirms that John Bozeman, Daniel Rouse, and William Beall laid out the town in August 1864 (Distinctly Montana). Smith declined Bozeman’s offer of a one-third interest in the new town, doubting, as he put it, that the county seat would ever be located there (Sanders 1101).

The winter that followed he spent hunting, by his own account killing a large grizzly bear, a moose, and numbers of deer and antelope, and surviving a spring bread shortage before planting a modest wheat crop in 1865 (Sanders 1101). He also presided over the newly organized Gallatin County’s first Democratic convention, an occasion he used to relay an anecdote about a Republican delegate’s exposure and the convention’s subsequent purge of Republican representatives — a small but telling glimpse of how partisan organization took root even in a settlement barely a year old (Sanders 1101). In the fall of 1865 he left the valley by Mackinaw boat down the Yellowstone, part of a fleet of fifty-five craft that reached St. Joseph, Missouri, in twenty-three days of continuous rowing (Sanders 1101–02). He returned to Montana with another emigrant train in 1866, then went back to Missouri in 1868 to see his seven children through school, closing out his Montana affairs the following year; a herd of twenty cows he had kept had, by his account, grown in value to $4,500 (Sanders 1102). He settled permanently in the Gallatin Valley in 1879 and died there in his eighty-fourth year, on June 21, 1896, an elder of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church for sixty-three years (Sanders 1102).

A Son’s Different Frontier

John T. Smith Jr., born in Kirksville in 1850, grew up alongside the institution that would shape his early career: Joseph Baldwin’s North Missouri Normal School, founded at Kirksville in September 1867 and adopted three years later as Missouri’s First District Normal School (Truman State University; Sanders 1102). According to Sanders, the younger Smith’s “first experience in the field of politics” came campaigning for state funding to secure the school’s public adoption, an effort that succeeded when the legislature appropriated $100,000 for the institution — a detail consistent with the documented campaign Baldwin waged through the late 1860s to have his private school absorbed into a state system (Truman State University). Smith completed the four-year course, graduated as the youngest member of his class in 1872, and briefly taught chemistry, geology, and history at the school before turning to law, gaining admission to the Missouri bar in 1874 (Sanders 1102).

He built a general practice at Butler, in Bates County, serving a term as county attorney beginning in 1876, before relocating to Livingston, Montana, in 1890 (Sanders 1102). There he established the firm of John T. Smith & Son, served as mayor of Livingston in 1899 and 1900, and became a fixture of the regional bar, serving continuously as president of the Park County Bar Association and helping organize the Eastern Montana Bar Association in 1905, of which he was likewise president (Sanders 1102). By 1913 he had also taken up ranching in Park County on some 3,800 acres. His son Vard, educated in law at the University of Nebraska, joined the firm and was elected Park County attorney in his own right in 1912 (Sanders 1102).

Conclusion

The Smith entry is unusual chiefly for what it preserves rather than for what it claims. Sanders’ county-history format, built to flatter its subjects, here happens to carry inside it a working pioneer’s own description of the roads, rivers, and river crossings by which Montana Territory’s mining and agricultural settlements were first stitched together, alongside a plainer account of how the next generation converted frontier standing into a courtroom and a Rotary-club sort of civic respectability. The father’s journey belongs to the Bozeman Trail’s brief, documented opening season; the son’s career belongs to the more mundane, and no less real, work of building county institutions once the territory had become a state. Neither is exceptional on its own. Read as a pair, they are a serviceable sketch of how one Missouri family experienced the passage.

Works Cited

Distinctly Montana. “Following John Bozeman’s Footprints.” Distinctly Montana, distinctlymontana.com/following-john-bozemans-footprints. Accessed 8 Sept. 2026.

Encyclopedia.com. “John M. Bozeman.” Encyclopedia.com, www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/us-history-biographies/john-m-bozeman. Accessed 8 Sept. 2026.

Missouri State Archives. Office of the Governor: Sterling Price, 1853–1857. Finding Aid 3.11, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, www.sos.mo.gov/cmsimages/archives/resources/findingaids/rg003-11.pdf. Accessed 8 Sept. 2026.

Page, Leroy E. “George Clinton Swallow, the Other Kansas State Geologist.” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, vol. 99, no. 3–4, Dec. 1996, pp. 134–45.

Sanders, Helen Fitzgerald. A History of Montana. Vol. 2, Lewis Publishing Company, 1913, pp. 1100–02.

Truman State University. “Joseph Baldwin.” University History, Truman State University, exhibits.truman.edu/universityhistory/?p=285. Accessed 8 Sept. 2026.