Sun River Crossing

The bride in the panel was Electa Bryan, sister of Martha Vail, who lived with her husband James at the government farm on the crossing. Her sister distrusted Henry Plummer, and Electa wanted to wait for a minister, but on June 20, 1863 a Catholic priest married them at the farm. She found Bannack lonely, and on September 2 she left for Iowa and never saw him again. Vigilantes hanged him in January 1864. In 1874 she married again, a widower named James Maxwell, and had two sons.

What the plaque says

Sun River Crossing When John Mullan built a wagon road across western Montana in 1860, he utilized a ford across the Sun River just a few yards west of here that had been used by the Indians for generations. In 1862, the crossing was the site of a government farm intended to demonstrate farming techniques to the powerful Blackfeet Indians. Electa Bryan married the notorious Montana outlaw Henry Plummer at the farm in 1863. Johnny Healy established a trading post on the east side of the ford about 1862 to trade with his Blackfeet neighbors and travelers on the Mullan Road. After the gold strikes in southwestern Montana in the early 1860s, traffic between the mining camps and Fort Benton made the Sun River Crossing an important place. Healy and John Largent built a toll bridge at the ford in 1867. A settlement quickly grew up near the bridge and prospered because of the heavy traffic on the road. The arrival of the railroad in Great Falls in 1887 did not diminish the importance of Sun River Crossing and it continued to thrive until after 1900. Today, the community and the bridge ( in its fourth incarnation ) attest to the strategic importance of this place to the history of Montana.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Shaw Indian School — 5.0 mi
  An Army post turned boarding school, whose Native girls went to the 1904 World's Fair as an exhibit and came home champions.
• C. M. Russell Museum — 20 mi
  The cowboy artist's house and log studio, and the story of Nancy Russell, who turned his bar-tab paintings into a career.

More markers nearby

• Fort Shaw — 5.5 mi
• The Sun River Leaving — 6.8 mi
• Black Eagle — 21 mi
• Twenty-Eight Mile Station — 21 mi