The Man Who Built the Electric City:

Paris Gibson and the Making of Great Falls, Montana

From Bowdoin to the Big Sky: Early Life and the Road West

Paris Gibson was born on July 1, 1830, in Brownfield, Oxford County, Maine, the son of Abel and Anne Howard Gibson. He attended the common schools and Fryeburg Academy before graduating from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in 1851, and was elected to the Maine state legislature in 1853. His early years showed an aptitude for commerce and civic engagement, but they also exposed a pattern of ambitious projects that did not always survive contact with economic reality.

In 1859 Gibson and his wife Valeria moved to St. Anthony Falls, Minnesota, where he and several business partners established the Cataract Mill, the first flour mill in Minneapolis, and the North Star Woolen Mill. He helped found the first public library in Minneapolis and served on the University of Minnesota Board of Regents from 1871 through 1879.  These were not the actions of a casual speculator. Gibson was a civic-minded builder who understood that successful towns required institutions as much as industries. Yet despite his visible role in shaping early Minneapolis, his business enterprises eventually faltered. He abandoned his failed business interests in Minnesota and, in 1879, migrated to Montana, where he tried sheep ranching at Fort Benton and purchased several acres of land there. 

Fort Benton in 1879 was one of the most consequential outposts in the American West, a river port that served as the commercial artery of the upper Missouri. It was there that Gibson absorbed the rhythms of the Montana frontier and began to look south and west at the landscape that would define the remainder of his life. Drawing on his reading of the Lewis and Clark journals, Gibson traveled from Fort Benton to see the Great Falls of the Missouri. What he found was a series of five cascades set against the broad, flat plain stretching between mountain ranges, and he recognized immediately what the expedition journals had only suggested: that these falls represented a water-power resource unlike anything between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific Northwest.

The Vision at the Falls

Gibson’s own recollection of that first encounter with the Great Falls of the Missouri, preserved in his autobiographical notes, was unambiguous in its ambition. He claimed the falls “constituted the only waterpower site between St. Anthony’s Falls in Minnesota and Spokane Falls in Washington” and determined the area contained coal deposits and other minerals such as silver, copper, and iron, with an abundance of agricultural and grazing land nearby. “I had looked upon this scene for a few moments,” he remembered, “when I said to myself, here I will found a city.” 

This was not idle boasting. Gibson arrived at the falls with a practical understanding of what water power could accomplish. He had already witnessed the transformation of St. Anthony Falls into the industrial core of Minneapolis, and he understood that electricity, still a new technology in the 1880s, was about to remake American industry. He shared his plans with railroad owner James Hill, who recognized that his railroad could benefit from a city in the area and provided Gibson with the capital to proceed. 

The partnership between Gibson and James J. Hill was the central enabling relationship of Great Falls’ founding. Hill, already assembling what would become the Great Northern Railway, needed markets and industrial anchors along his northern route. Gibson needed financing and a rail connection to make his city economically viable. In July 1883, Gibson sent surveyor Herbert P. Rolfe on an expedition to survey and plat what Gibson called “a Minneapolis on the Missouri.” The townsite plat was filed on September 29, 1884, in what was then Choteau County, laid out in a Cartesian grid of one hundred blocks, most containing fourteen lots measuring fifty by one hundred fifty feet.

Gibson had suggested naming the new city “Hillton” in honor of its prominent financier, but the name Great Falls prevailed. Only twelve men constructed homes in that first year, and a single settler, S. A. Beachley, remained through the winter as the sole inhabitant. By the end of the following year, the population had grown to two hundred. What had been an unoccupied bend of the Missouri River was becoming a functioning town.

Building a City: Infrastructure, Industry, and Urban Design

Gibson’s approach to city-building distinguished him from many of his contemporaries in the American West. Where other frontier promoters were content to lay out lots and wait for buyers, Gibson pursued a comprehensive vision that included parks, landscaped boulevards, and deliberate industrial planning. His preliminary planning specified that rail lines would follow the flat land of the river bottom, that industries would line the city to the northeast along the riverbank, and that a landscaped park at the riverfront to the west would provide recreation for residents living in neighborhoods flanking the central business district. 

In 1885, Gibson founded the Great Falls Water Power and Townsite Company, bought all of the land for the townsite, and actively recruited settlers for the new town. He also built the Park Hotel. By 1887 he had helped secure a railroad line through Great Falls, and that same year was elected a director of the First National Bank. The railroad connection was not incidental. Hill organized the Great Falls Water Power and Townsite Company in 1887, with the goal of developing the town, providing it with power, sewage, and water, and attracting commerce and industry. The same year, Hill’s engineers began surveying the route of the Montana Central Railway southward from Great Falls to Helena and Butte, linking the city to the great copper mines that would provide a reliable industrial market for its electricity.

The centerpiece of Gibson’s industrial strategy was the Black Eagle Dam. On September 12, 1889, the Boston and Montana Consolidated Copper and Silver Mining Company signed an agreement with the Great Falls Water Power and Townsite Company under which the power company agreed to build a dam supplying at least 1,000 horsepower by September 1890. In exchange, Boston and Montana agreed to build a $300,000 copper smelter near the dam. Construction proceeded rapidly. The dam first began generating electricity in December 1890 and was considered officially open and operational in March 1891. It was the first hydroelectric dam built in the state of Montana. 

The consequences for the city were immediate. Under Gibson’s direction, the Great Falls Light and Power Company built the dam at Black Eagle in 1890, and in the same year Gibson co-founded the Boston and Montana Smelter Company in Great Falls, which became the major smelter for Butte copper. Great Falls had, within a decade of its founding, become not merely a trading town but the industrial hub of central Montana, processing ore from the copper mines that were generating extraordinary wealth for investors across the region.

Gibson believed that beautiful surroundings shaped a diverse population into a contented community, and Gibson Park, along with double-lined boulevards planted between 1888 and 1913, became central to his legacy. He reserved 886 acres for city parks, ensuring that elm, ash, and fir trees were planted on every street and boulevard.  Given that Great Falls sits on the arid upper Great Plains and receives only about fifteen inches of rain per year, this was not a casual undertaking. The Park Commission spent $157.92 in 1897 to ship non-native trees including elm, white ash, white birch, and golden willows to Great Falls from the east. Gibson himself noted that “owing to the extraordinary effect of the chinook winds in the winter, many varieties of trees that can be grown successfully in the Mississippi Valley States will not flourish here.” 

Political Career: From Mayor to the United States Senate

Great Falls was incorporated as a city in 1888, and Gibson was elected its first mayor. He was very active in civic affairs both as mayor and as a private citizen, advocating railroad expansion in Montana and making improvements to the city, including the extensive parks system and the expansion of electric power lines to all homes. His civic role extended beyond local administration. In 1889 he was a delegate to the State Constitutional Convention and was elected to the Montana state senate the same year. 

Gibson was present at the founding moment of Montana statehood, participating in the drafting of the legal framework that would govern the new state. His elevation to the United States Senate came under unusual circumstances and had its origins in one of the most scandalous episodes in Montana’s early political history. William A. Clark, the copper king, had long sought a Senate seat and in 1899 achieved it through what was widely understood to be systematic bribery of state legislators. The Senate’s Privileges and Elections Committee stressed that the Senate had a duty to demonstrate by its action that senators could not retain seats procured by corruption. Before the Senate could formally act, Clark resigned in a fury. The Montana governor then appointed Gibson as Clark’s replacement. Gibson, a Democrat, was elected to fill the vacancy and served from March 7, 1901, to March 3, 1905. He did not seek reelection. 

Gibson was seventy-one years old when he entered the Senate. His tenure was that of a practical westerner more interested in the development of his state’s resources than in national political maneuvering. He did not seek reelection, and returned to Great Falls to continue his business interests and oversee the city whose growth he had done more than any other individual to initiate.

Legacy and the Measure of a Founder

Paris Gibson died in Great Falls on December 16, 1920, and is buried at Highland Cemetery. He had lived long enough to see the city he imagined as a sheep rancher at Fort Benton grow from a single winter settler to a functioning industrial metropolis. By 1890 the population of Great Falls had already reached 4,000, and the Black Eagle Dam had been constructed to provide power for industry and agriculture. By the early twentieth century, Great Falls was one of the largest cities in Montana, with a copper smelter employing more than a thousand workers, rail connections to the major western lines, and a parks system that made it distinctive among frontier cities.

The Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, housed in the sandstone building completed in 1896 as the city’s first high school, was described at the time as the most distinctive building in Great Falls. Its design, with cathedral-like dimensions and a four-faced clock tower, emphatically stated its ideological purpose as a monument to education.  That a city barely a decade old could commission such a structure reflects the degree to which Gibson’s confidence in the place had propagated through the population he recruited and shaped.

Gibson’s legacy is not without complexity. His partnership with James J. Hill bound Great Falls tightly to the railroad’s economic interests, and the city’s development as a smelting and processing center meant that its prosperity was always contingent on the mineral wealth of Butte and the policies of eastern capital. The main trunk of Hill’s Great Northern Railway ultimately bypassed Great Falls to the north, a setback that revealed the limits of even a founder’s influence over the powerful interests he had helped to summon. Gibson’s model of urban development also reflected the assumptions of his era: an industrial city organized around resource extraction, with the natural falls of the Missouri converted from a geological spectacle into a commercial asset. The Indigenous peoples whose territories encompassed the Missouri River corridor for centuries before Gibson’s arrival are largely absent from his own account of the city’s founding.

What remains striking is the degree to which Gibson’s vision was coherent and deliberate. He was not an accidental founder, carried west by the general tide of migration. He came to Montana having read the journals of Lewis and Clark, recognized a specific resource opportunity, cultivated the right financial partnership, and executed a plan that included not only industrial infrastructure but parks, trees, boulevards, schools, and a sense of civic proportion. In 1913, Arthur L. Stone of The Missoulian wrote that Gibson was “hale and hearty — and he is living to see his ideals realized and his fondest hopes fulfilled.”  That assessment, written when Gibson was eighty-three, captured something true about the arc of his career. He built what he said he would build, in the place he said he would build it, for the reasons he stated from the beginning.

Works Cited

“Paris Gibson Collection, 1914-circa 1939.” Archives West, Orbis Cascade Alliance, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library Archives and Special Collections, University of Montana, Missoula. https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv05476. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Roeder, Richard B. “A Settlement on the Plains: Paris Gibson and the Building of Great Falls.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 42, no. 4, Autumn 1992, pp. 4-19.

“Gibson, Paris, 1830-1920.” Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC), University of Virginia Library. https://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w6tf0zh2. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

“Great Falls Northside Residential Historic District.” Historic Montana, Montana National Register Sign Program. https://historicmt.org/items/show/46. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

“Paris Gibson.” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. https://bioguideretro.congress.gov/Home/MemberDetails?memIndex=G000164. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

“Great Falls Central Business Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places Nomination, National Park Service Gallery. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/1aad086e-a12e-4ed6-87a2-fb2b0e59c8f8. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

Hallsell, Troy A. “Unnatural Nature: Trees and the Early Development of Great Falls, Montana, 1883-1916.” The Metropole, Urban History Association, 22 Oct. 2020. https://themetropole.blog/2020/10/22/unnatural-nature-trees-and-the-early-development-of-great-falls-montana-1883-1916/. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

“History.” City of Great Falls, Montana. https://greatfallsmt.net/community/history. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

“The Election Case of William A. Clark of Montana (1900).” United States Senate Art and History. https://www.cop.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/contested_elections/089William_Clark.htm. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

“Visit Us.” Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, Great Falls, Montana. https://www.the-square.org/our-historic-building. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​