Havre

Before it was Havre the camp was Bullhook Bottoms, a cluster of traders drawn by Fort Assinniboine. When the railroad made it a division point, the town held a meeting to choose a better name, and the first ended in a brawl. At the second the original settlers were given the decision. Someone proposed France, for the many French among them, and Gus Decelles proposed Havre, after his parents' hometown of Le Havre. Havre carried it, and the town incorporated in September 1893.

What the plaque says

Havre Cowpunchers, miners, and soldiers are tolerably virile persons as a rule. When they went to town in the frontier days seeking surcease from vocational cares and solace in the cup that cheers it was just as well for the urbanites to either brace themselves or take to cover. The citizens of any town willing and able to be host city for a combination of the above diamonds in the rough had to be quick on the draw and used to inhaling powder smoke. Havre came into existence as a division point when the Great Northern Railroad was built and purveyed pastime to cowboys, doughboys and miners on the side. It is hard to believe now, but as a frontier camp, she was wild and hard to curry.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wahkpa Chu'gn Buffalo Jump — 0.5 mi
  Two thousand years of bison kills in a bluff behind a Havre shopping mall, with the bones left lying where they were found.
• Havre Beneath the Streets — 1.2 mi
  Basement storefronts under a railroad town that burned twice in one January day in 1904, furnished now as a tour.
• Fort Assinniboine — 5.7 mi
  The brick border post whose Buffalo Soldiers deported the Cree in 1896, and whose land became the Cree's reservation twenty years later.

More markers nearby

• The Havre Air Force Station — steps away
• Fort Assinniboine — 5.5 mi