A Wonderful Piece of Engineering: The Big Side Cut

Seventeen years after the cut was finished, a general came to see whether it could still carry a wagon. On September 5, 1877, William Tecumseh Sherman left Frenchtown for Walla Walla with his aide, Colonel Orlando Poe, a cavalry escort, five wagons and six soldiers wounded at the Big Hole. From the Point of Rocks, just west of here, the road climbed so steeply that the men double-teamed the wagons up and roped them to trees to lower them down. It took fifteen days to reach Walla Walla, and in 1879 Sherman won $20,000 to reopen the road.

What the plaque says

A Wonderful Piece of Engineering: The Big Side Cut The Mullan Road is carved into the face of the mountains high above the Clark Fork River west of here. Lieutenant John Mullan tried to keep his wagon road as close to the river as possible. But when his work crews ran up against a mountain spur that reached all the way to the edge of the river, he was forced to seek an alternate route. Mullan later wrote that "to make this six-mile cut through rocky spurs was an undertaking that I almost feared to attempt." On May 10, 1860, he assembled his entire work force of 150 citizens and soldiers at the west side of the spur. For the next six weeks, his men dug, whittled, and blasted their way up the mountain side to an altitude of a thousand feet above the river. A premature explosion while clearing a path through the rocks wounded one man and severely stunned another. When completed in June 1860, the Big Side Cut segment was the most awe-inspiring of the entire 624-mile Mullan Road. A traveler wrote of the Big Side Cut in 1862 that it was "a narrow wagon track which left no room for careless or uncertain driving."

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ninemile Remount Depot — 6.5 mi
  The Forest Service's mule ranch, built because the fires of 1929 ran out of packers.
• Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center — 21 mi
  The base of the crews descended from the first two men ever to parachute onto a forest fire.
• Fort Missoula — 25 mi
  An 1877 Army post that held Italian seamen and Japanese immigrant men behind its fence in World War II.
• Fort Fizzle — 25 mi
  A log barricade built to stop the Nimiipuu in 1877. They climbed the ridge behind it and walked around.

More markers nearby

• Glacial Lake Missoula — steps away
• The Natural Pier Bridge — 0.8 mi
• Flying High Across the Big Sky — 1.2 mi
• A Wonderful Piece of Engineering: The Big Side Cut — 12 mi