In the summer of 1936 a sheepherder from the country around Fort Benton came into town sick, to St. Clare Hospital, and his dog came with him. The man died a few days later, and his coffin was carried up to the Great Northern depot and put on the train east to his family. The dog watched it go. The next day he was back at the station, looking over every passenger who stepped down, and he went on doing it, train after train, for the next five and a half years.
He came to be called Shep, and once the Great Falls Tribune told the story he became famous. People wrote to the Great Northern from all over the country, so many that the railroad assigned a secretary to answer them, and travelers made the detour off the main line to see him meet their train. He was old by then and going deaf. On the morning of January 12, 1942, he slipped on the rails as a train came in and was killed.
Boy Scouts carried his coffin to a bluff above the depot, and railroad employees put up a marker and a painted cutout of a dog, lit at night so conductors could point it out to passengers. When passenger trains stopped running through Fort Benton the lights went out and the grave was neglected, until townspeople took it back in hand. In 1994 the town unveiled a bronze of Shep by the Browning sculptor Bob Scriver, his front paws on a rail, on the levee by the Missouri; the grave is up Cemetery Road, still looking down on the old depot.
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