John Mullan

Six Hundred Twenty-Four Miles:

John Mullan and the Road That Outran Its Purpose

A Road for an Army That Seldom Came

In the summer of 1859, a party of soldiers and civilians began cutting a wagon road east from Fort Walla Walla in Washington Territory. Three years later the road reached Fort Benton, the head of steamboat navigation on the Missouri River, after 624 miles (Long; Lang). Congress paid for it as a military road. The army marched a column over its full length only once, and the traffic that gave the road its value came from miners, merchants, and emigrants (HistoryNet; Sims). The man in charge, Lieutenant John Mullan, has been honored with monuments more consistently than he has been understood. His road shaped the settlement of western Montana, while his own life after it followed a less orderly course.

An Annapolis Boy and a Railroad Survey

Mullan was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1830 and grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, the eldest of eleven children of an army sergeant (Lang; Sorensen). He studied classics at St. John's College, graduating at sixteen, and entered West Point in 1848 (Lang). Historian Keith Petersen, whose 2014 biography is the most thorough account of Mullan's life, found that the young man collected recommendations from his father's political acquaintances and took them to President James K. Polk, who gave him one of ten at-large appointments (Sorensen).

In 1853 Mullan joined the northern railroad survey led by Isaac Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory (Lang; Sims). Stevens assigned him to explore the Continental Divide for a practicable route. After talking with Indians and missionaries, Mullan recommended a course through the Coeur d'Alene and St. Regis valleys, and Stevens came to agree (Sims). The railroad itself found little support in Congress. The Yakima War and the Mormon War of the late 1850s then showed the army that it needed a second route to Oregon and Washington besides the Oregon Trail. Stevens proposed a wagon road as a first step, one that would demonstrate the route's practicality and draw settlers to it (Sims). On May 15, 1858, Mullan was ordered to begin construction, and Congress appropriated $30,000 (Sims).

A Road Through Contested Ground

Surveying had advanced only a few miles when war broke out among the interior tribes (Sims). Colonel Edward Steptoe's command was defeated near present-day Rosalia, Washington, in May 1858. Stevens's 1855 treaty had grudgingly accepted a road, but Congress had not yet ratified it, which left any construction a trespass (Sorensen). Steptoe reported that Father Joseph Joset, the Jesuit at the Coeur d'Alene mission, had told him the Coeur d'Alenes, Spokanes, and Flatheads had pledged to attack any survey party. Steptoe concluded that Mullan's crew had been spared only by the timing of the battle (qtd. in Sims).

The army answered under Colonel George Wright, and Mullan joined the campaign as topographical engineer, commanding thirty Nez Perce scouts (Sorensen). Wright's forces destroyed hundreds of captured horses, hanged sixteen men, and obtained terms from the Coeur d'Alene and Spokane that included safe passage for soldiers and settlers (Sorensen). Petersen observes that Mullan's field reports say little about the fighting and a good deal about where the road might go (Sorensen). Mullan then traveled to Washington, D.C., and with Stevens's help secured an additional $100,000 appropriation (Sorensen).

Building the Road, 1859-1862

Work resumed in the summer of 1859 with a party of about 230 soldiers and civilians, according to Long. Sorensen, drawing on Petersen, describes it as eighty civilian workers and a 140-man escort. Talkington, writing in 1916, put the working force at about one hundred at the start. Crews used axes, picks, shovels, whipsaws, and black powder to build a roadway twenty-five feet wide (Talkington; Sorensen). Surveyors marked it with mileposts reading "M.R.," for Military Road, which travelers later read as Mullan Road (Sims; Sorensen).

The labor was heaviest in the timber of the Coeur d'Alene country, where the crew cleared more than one hundred miles of dense forest and built bridges across a river that required nearly a hundred crossings (Talkington; Sorensen). By December 1859 the party was 267 miles along and over budget. Washington ordered the expedition disbanded, but Mullan sent an engineer east in winter to appeal, and Stevens helped win a second $100,000 appropriation (Sorensen). The crew wintered in the St. Regis valley and resumed in the spring of 1860 (Sims). The final cost was about $230,000, under $400 a mile (Sims; Talkington).

Montana Ground

East of the Bitterroot divide the work was done in what is now Montana. On May 10, 1860, Mullan assembled about 150 workers west of Superior to cut a six-mile shelf into the mountainside above the Clark Fork. They spent six weeks blasting and digging, and one premature explosion injured a man (Montana Historical Society). Talkington independently records six miles of heavy rock work that occupied 150 men for six weeks. Mullan reached the pass near Helena that now bears his name on July 18 and arrived at Fort Benton on August 1, 1860 (Sorensen; Long).

Commerce followed almost at once. In 1860 the Walla Walla merchant Christopher Higgins and a partner brought $7,000 in goods over the road to open a store, which was later moved to the site of Missoula (Petersen; HistoryNet). Mullan revised the western route in 1861, shifting it north of Lake Coeur d'Alene, and his crew marked the Fourth of July that year in the canyon that now carries the holiday's name (Sims; Sorensen). That winter he built Cantonment Wright at the junction of the Big Blackfoot and Clark Fork rivers. His men completed a four-span bridge 235 feet long across the Blackfoot by March 1862, and Mullan broke camp on May 23 (Bonner Milltown History Center, qtd. Mullan).

Mullan depended on Native help to supply the work. In the spring of 1860 he asked the Flathead for horses and men to haul provisions from Fort Benton, and they supplied what he asked for. He recorded that he paid for the animals and the labor and that the party returned with eleven thousand rations (qtd. in Talkington). The Coeur d'Alene, meanwhile, regarded the road as one of the pressures on their lands. When the government drew their reservation boundaries in the 1870s, it excluded the road corridor and the mission along it (Sims).

Use and Disuse

The road's military role was brief. A column of about three hundred soldiers under Major Blake traveled the route in 1860, after which the army concluded it had no immediate need for it (Sims). Lang dates the army's single use to 1864. No money was set aside for maintenance, and bridges washed out and trees fell across the roadway (Long; HistoryNet). The Civil War diverted the army, and Stevens, the road's principal advocate in Congress, was killed at Second Bull Run in the days after Mullan finished (Sims).

Gold discoveries in southwestern Montana in 1862 gave the road a different purpose. The main supply route into the new camps ran from Fort Benton along the road's eastern portion, and Lang describes it as the only wagon route linking the Idaho and Montana camps with St. Louis and Portland. Walla Walla, at the western end, was the largest town in Washington Territory by 1870, with 1,394 residents (Long). A frequently repeated figure, that twenty thousand people used the road in 1866, comes from a memorial the Washington legislature sent to Congress to obtain repair funds, so it is better read as advocacy than as a count (Talkington; Sims). Wagon emigrants largely avoided the road after 1867 (HistoryNet).

General William T. Sherman crossed it in 1877 and urged that it be reopened, and soldiers repaired it in 1879 (Sims; HistoryNet). The Northern Pacific, completed in 1883, followed the Clark Fork route Mullan had proposed in his 1863 report (Sims). Petersen notes that Mullan came to prefer a route near Lake Pend Oreille in retrospect (Sorensen). The Yellowstone Trail adopted much of the corridor in 1916, and it became U.S. Highway 10 and, later, Interstate 90 (Sims; Sorensen).

After the Road

Mullan married Rebecca Williamson of Baltimore in 1863 (Lang; Sorensen). He wanted the governorship of the new Idaho Territory, lost it to William Wallace, and made a last-minute appeal to Abraham Lincoln that failed (Sorensen). He resigned his commission in 1863, farmed near Walla Walla, and invested in ventures that failed. Lang dates his bankruptcy to 1866. He became a lawyer in San Francisco in 1867 and, with a partner, dealt in public land in ways Petersen describes as ethically and legally questionable (Lang; Sorensen). In 1878 California appointed him to collect money the federal government owed the state, on a commission of twenty percent. He moved to Washington, D.C., but California dismissed him, and its Supreme Court ruled against his claims (Sorensen). He died on December 28, 1909, in debt and bedridden, and was buried in Annapolis (Sorensen; Lang).

Petersen's assessment is unsentimental. He portrays a driven, egotistical man whose loyalty to his family did not extend to many others, and whose views of Native people he calls racist, although Mullan wrote respectfully of individuals such as the Yakama leader Owhi (Sorensen). A reviewer for HistoryNet calls him persistent and prone to irritating politicians (HistoryNet).

Memory and Monument

In 1916 the Society of Montana Pioneers took up a proposal by Charles Warren to mark the road, which a newspaper editor had said no longer resembled a highway (Petersen). The Society erected seven Vermont marble monuments in Montana, each between eleven and eighteen feet tall, from a design by the painter Edgar S. Paxson. Six more went up in Idaho. David O'Keefe, who had worked on the road in 1861 and 1862, attended the first unveiling in Missoula (Petersen). Petersen calls the buckskin-clad figure on the monuments romanticized, though not wholly inaccurate.

A Note on Sources and Discrepancies

Sources disagree on several points, and the text above follows the better-supported account. Long and Sorensen place Mullan's arrival at Fort Benton on August 1, 1860, while Talkington dates it August 1, 1862, which conflicts with the other sources and with the 1860 army march. The army's single end-to-end use is dated 1860 by Sims and 1864 by Lang. Crew sizes vary by season and by author. The report of a drowning as the project's only death rests on Petersen's research as reported by Sorensen alone.

Works Cited

Bonner Milltown History Center and Museum. "The Mullan Road." Bonner Milltown History Center and Museum, www.tworivershistory.net/early-history/mullan/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026.

HistoryNet Staff. "Book Review: John Mullan, by Keith C. Petersen." HistoryNet, 9 June 2015, historynet.com/book-review-john-mullan-by-keith-c-petersen/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026.

Lang, William L. "John Mullan (1830-1909)." The Oregon Encyclopedia, Oregon Historical Society, 2 June 2014, updated 30 July 2026, www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/mullan_john/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026.

Long, Priscilla. "Lt. John Mullan and a 230-Man Crew Begin Building Mullan's Road (Mullan Road) from Walla Walla in Spring 1859." HistoryLink.org, Essay 5225, 16 Feb. 2003, historylink.org/File/5225. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026.

Montana Historical Society. "A Wonderful Piece of Engineering: The Big Side Cut." Historical marker, Quartz Flat Rest Area, Interstate 90, Superior, MT. The Historical Marker Database, 7 Sept. 2018, www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=123054. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026. 

Petersen, Keith. "Mullan Road Monuments." Washington State Magazine, Summer 2014, magazine.wsu.edu/web-extra/mullan-road-monuments/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026.

Sims, Cort. "Mullan Road." National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1990, npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/90000548.pdf. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026.

Sorensen, Eric. "Lost Highway." Washington State Magazine, Summer 2014, magazine.wsu.edu/2014/04/29/lost-highway/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026.

Talkington, Henry L. "Mullan Road." Washington Historical Quarterly, vol. 7, 1916, pp. 301-06, journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/WHQ/article/view/5520/4594. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026.