From Jawbone to Senate:

Thomas C. Powers and the Making of Montana’s Commercial Empire

Thomas Charles Power arrived in Fort Benton in the summer of 1867 with a small stock of merchandise acquired on credit — what the historical marker now standing near that spot on the Missouri levee describes as goods bought “on jawbone.” That phrase, meaning on nothing more than the promise of future payment, captured both the financial audacity and the characteristic resourcefulness of the man. Within three decades, Power had transformed that modest inventory into one of the most diversified business enterprises in the American West, served as one of Montana’s first two United States senators, and helped shape the economic structure of an entire region. His career offers a revealing window into the Gilded Age of the northern plains: the intimate entanglement of commerce, politics, Indigenous trade relations, and the raw competition for territorial advantage that defined Montana’s transition from territory to state.

Early Life and the Missouri River World

Thomas Charles Power was born on May 22, 1839, near Dubuque, Iowa, the son of Irish immigrants Michael W. Power and his wife. He attended public school and graduated from Sinsinawa College with a degree in engineering, then worked as a land surveyor in Dakota Territory until 1860. Between 1861 and 1867, he engaged in trade along the Mississippi River and eventually became president of a steamer line, an experience that gave him both a practical grasp of commercial logistics and a familiarity with the rhythms of river-based freight. When Power first traveled to Montana Territory in 1864, likely drawn by the gold rush that had transformed the region, he found a landscape already being remade by the convergence of resource extraction, military presence, and Indigenous trade. Three years later, he returned to stay (Montana Historical Society Research Center, Archives, Helena, Montana, Thomas Charles Power Papers, MC 55, 1868-1950, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv03773, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

Fort Benton in the late 1860s was no ordinary frontier town. As the head of commercial navigation on the Missouri River and the eastern terminus of the Mullan Wagon Road, it served as the central hub of a freighting network stretching across what would become Montana, Idaho, and well into the Canadian territories. Historians have noted that entrepreneurs such as T.C. Power and his competitors developed Fort Benton into the territory’s largest banking and mercantile center, supplying military garrisons, mining camps, homesteaders, and the Northwest Mounted Police across the border (“Fort Benton Historic District,” National Historic Landmark, Historic Montana, https://historicmt.org/items/show/1, accessed 18 Apr. 2025). Power stepped off the steamboat Yorktown at Fort Benton on June 14, 1867, with his initial stock and immediately opened a general mercantile firm. Two years later, his brother John W. Power became his business partner, and the firm became T.C. Power and Bro., the commercial identity under which its founder would build his greatest enterprises.

Building the Northern Trade Network

The firm’s growth in the 1870s and 1880s was rapid and expansive. Power and his brother quickly recognized that Fort Benton’s position at the intersection of overland and river commerce gave them a structural advantage that few competitors could match. According to historian Henry C. Klassen of the University of Calgary, writing in a 1991 study published in Great Plains Quarterly, the Fort Benton merchant houses — T.C. Power and Bro. prominently among them — played a decisive role in shaping the development of the Montana economy through their trade with the southwestern Canadian prairies. Klassen demonstrated that this cross-border commerce was not incidental but constitutive: “The principal Fort Benton merchant houses that traded with the southwestern Canadian prairies from the late 1860s to the early 1890s helped determine the growth and vitality of the Montana economy” (Klassen, Henry C. “Shaping the Growth of the Montana Economy: T.C. Power and Bro. and the Canadian Trade, 1869-93.” Great Plains Quarterly 11.3, Summer 1991, pp. 3-24, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/610/, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

The company’s reach extended well beyond retail trade. As the Blackfoot peoples moved northward following the contraction of bison populations on the southern plains, Power and Bro. followed, establishing trading posts to engage the lucrative buffalo robe trade. A historical marker erected near the original firm’s site in Fort Benton records that Power’s freight operations were among the largest in the region, and that in 1875 he purchased the steamboat Benton, which became the flagship of what the firm’s own promotional record described as the upper Missouri’s greatest steamboat line. The distinctive “Block P” insignia between her stacks, repeated on a dozen other vessels, became recognizable across the region (T.C. Power and Bro. Historical Marker, Fort Benton Community Improvement Association, Fort Benton, MT, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=142248, accessed 18 Apr. 2025). In 1874, Power formalized this transportation dimension of his business by founding the Fort Benton Transportation Company, which dominated commerce on the upper Missouri in the years before the arrival of railroads made river traffic commercially impracticable.

The Montana Historical Society’s description of Power’s archival papers underscores the breadth of his activity during this period. Those papers document his involvement in military and Indian trade, steamboating, freighting, stagecoach lines, mail contracts, cattle and sheep ranching, mining, banking, bridge building, and townsite development. In 1879, he organized the first of several stagecoach lines serving northern and central Montana, which eventually linked with the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railroad at Billings. After settling in Helena in 1876, Power established a second business base there, and T.C. Power and Bro. grew into a prominent mercantile company serving both the northwestern United States and western Canada (Thomas Charles Power Papers, 1868-1950, Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena, MT, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv03773, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

The Blackfeet Trade and Its Complications

Power’s business relationship with the Blackfeet Nation was extensive and profitable, but it was also legally contentious. The Montana Historical Society’s finding aid for the Power Papers notes that among his subject files is documentation of his prosecution in 1873 and 1874 for alleged fraud in his dealings with the Blackfeet Indians and with the federal government. The specific allegations concerned his role as a contractor supplying goods under the annuity system — the mechanism by which the federal government fulfilled treaty obligations to Native peoples through the distribution of goods managed largely through private traders (Thomas Charles Power Papers, 1867-1950, Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena, MT, http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv64648, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

The federal annuity system in this period was notoriously prone to corruption. Merchants who served as contractors had both the opportunity and the structural incentive to supply inferior goods, inflate invoices, or divert portions of annuity supplies for private sale. Whether Power engaged in such practices, and if so to what degree, cannot be determined from the available public record; the prosecution documents remain in the archival collection, and the outcome of any formal legal proceedings is not clearly established in the secondary literature. What is clear is that his commercial relationships with the Blackfeet, and with the broader network of Indigenous trade in the region, formed a central part of the firm’s economic base during its most active period of expansion.

Political Ambitions and the First Montana Senate

Power’s shift toward formal political life came in the 1880s as Montana moved toward statehood. He served as a delegate to the abortive 1884 Constitutional Convention but chose not to participate in the 1889 Convention that finally produced Montana’s constitution and statehood. As a Republican, he ran for governor in 1889, winning his party’s nomination on the first ballot. However, he lost the general election to Democrat Joseph K. Toole in what proved to be an unusually divided outcome: Toole was the only Democrat on the statewide ticket that year to win election.

The circumstances of Power’s arrival in the United States Senate were contentious even by the combative standards of Gilded Age politics. Montana’s first state legislature was evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, a deadlock rooted in disputed election returns from Silver Bow County — the Butte mining district — where both parties sent competing delegations to Helena. As historian William L. Lang analyzed in a 1987 article in Montana: The Magazine of Western History, the contest over these seats descended into procedural chaos, with Democratic senators refusing to attend sessions and some fleeing the state to prevent a quorum (Lang, William L. “Spoils of Statehood: Montana Communities in Conflict, 1888-1894.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 37.4, Autumn 1987, pp. 34-45).

The Republican-controlled legislature ultimately elected Power to one of Montana’s two Senate seats. He took office on January 2, 1890, and was seated by the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate over the opposition of Democratic contenders. The seating of Power and fellow Republican Wilbur Fisk Sanders drew national attention, with the New York Times headlining one account as “Theft of Two Senators,” reflecting the intensity of partisan feeling that accompanied the admission of new western states and their Senate seats into an already closely divided upper chamber (Archives West, Thomas Charles Power Papers, 1868-1950, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv03773, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

The Senate Years and Western Policy

Power served in the Senate until March 3, 1895 — a single term. The archival finding aid prepared by the Montana Historical Society characterizes his service as creditable, noting that he concentrated on the state’s major economic interests: the free coinage of silver, irrigation, the disposal of the public domain, and the wool tariff. The free silver issue was of particular consequence in Montana, whose Butte mines produced significant quantities of silver and whose broader agricultural and debtor communities favored the inflationary monetary expansion that free silver advocates promised. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, passed during Power’s first year in the Senate, required the federal government to purchase monthly quantities of silver, though it fell short of the unlimited coinage that strict silver advocates demanded (Britannica, “Free Silver Movement,” https://www.britannica.com/event/Free-Silver-Movement, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

Power’s alignment with silver interests reflected his commercial base as much as any ideological commitment. The fortunes of Montana’s mining economy, the ranching operations he had invested in across multiple counties, and the banking institutions he presided over were all sensitive to currency policy. His Senate activity on the public domain, irrigation, and the wool tariff similarly tracked the economic interests of the region he represented. His one term in the Senate ended his active participation in formal politics, though his commercial and civic influence in Helena continued for decades.

Late Career and Legacy

After leaving the Senate, Power continued to diversify his business holdings with the same opportunistic energy that had characterized his Fort Benton years. Between 1880 and 1920, he invested in cattle and sheep ranching, lumber, coal, electric power, hotels, automobile distribution, banking, grain milling, oil, and irrigation, among other enterprises. He served as president of the American National Bank of Helena and operated the Power Motor Car Company, an early automotive dealership that represented his capacity to adapt to the economic transformations of the early twentieth century. The town of Power, Montana, in Teton County, was named in his honor (Montana History Portal, Thomas C. Power, Billings Public Library Collection, https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/84694, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

Power died at his home in Helena on February 16, 1923, at the age of eighty-three. His wife, Mary G. Flanagan Power, outlived him, and the settlement of his estate generated its own archival record at the Montana Historical Society. The Power family photograph collection, also held at the Historical Society, documents generations of a family whose patriarch had transformed a few dollars of borrowed inventory on a Missouri River levee into one of the most extensive commercial networks the northern plains had ever seen.

Thomas C. Power’s significance in Montana history lies not simply in the scope of his personal accumulation but in the structural role his operations played in knitting together a dispersed, resource-rich territory into something resembling an integrated regional economy. His steamboat lines moved goods and people across distances that would otherwise have been prohibitive. His stagecoach networks connected isolated settlements to the rail corridors that were themselves reshaping the West. His cross-border trade with Canada preceded and in some respects anticipated the transnational economic relationships that would define the northern plains in the twentieth century. And his Senate career, however brief and disputatious in its origins, placed a representative of Fort Benton’s mercantile elite at the center of the national debates over currency, public land, and water that would determine the region’s long-term development. He was, in the fullest sense, a figure of the Gilded Age: resourceful, pragmatic, willing to operate at the edges of legality, and consequential far beyond the borders of the state he helped build.

Works Cited

“Fort Benton Historic District: National Historic Landmark.” Historic Montana, Montana State Historic Preservation Office, https://historicmt.org/items/show/1. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Klassen, Henry C. “Shaping the Growth of the Montana Economy: T.C. Power and Bro. and the Canadian Trade, 1869-93.” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, Summer 1991, pp. 3-24. University of Nebraska Digital Commons, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/610/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Lang, William L. “Spoils of Statehood: Montana Communities in Conflict, 1888-1894.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 37, no. 4, Autumn 1987, pp. 34-45.

Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena, Montana. Thomas Charles Power Papers, 1868-1950. MC 55. Archives West, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv03773. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena, Montana. Thomas Charles Power Papers, 1867-1950. MC 55a. Archives West, http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv64648. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Montana History Portal. “Power, T.C.” Billings Public Library Digital Collection, https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/84694. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

“T.C. Power and Bro.” Historical Marker. Fort Benton Community Improvement Association, Fort Benton, MT. Handbook of Texas Online / Historical Marker Database, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=142248. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

“Free Silver Movement.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Free-Silver-Movement. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​