This program was made possible in part by the Big Sky film Grant, The Greater Montana Foundation, The Montana History Foundation, and Humanities Montana.

[reflective, upbeat music plays] ♪ - I think that we can find our heroes and our role models in every corner of Montana and among every ethnic and racial group.

It is our job to make sure that children and youth find admirable people from the past.

- She's a Black female public utilities owner promoting tourism at the site of a lynching.

And there has to be a story there.

She was one of the first Native American registered nurses in the United States.

- What the press said, "For the first time in the history of Montana there sat a woman in the speaker's chair and she was accorded a thunderous ovation!"

♪ [Narrator] Sarah Bickford first stepped foot in Montana in January of 1871.

Born enslaved in Washington County, Tennessee, Sarah was freed after the Civil War.

She was hired by Major John Luttrell Murphy to nanny his two children as the four of them traveled to the mining town of Virginia City, Montana.

- Virginia City must have been very exciting for Sarah when she arrived.

In 1871 it is in its hay day.

It's the territorial capital, there's still a mining boom that's happening, there's new buildings going up all over the place.

All of their ambitions are to make Virginia City the premiere city in Montana territory.

They actually call it the "Social City" because it's the place where you go if you want to see a play, or go to a fun Saloon or do those kinds of things that had been in short supply on the Montana Frontier.

- I think she is an interesting person to try to understand Race in Montana.

There is a handful of other women and families who come to Montana after the Civil War.

Sometimes as Sarah Bickford was as in the employ of a white family and they end up staying here.

And it's not that there wasn't racism in Montana, but there also wasn't the kind of organized structure, at least in the 19th century, of Jim Crow, of segregation, that there would have been had they stayed in the South.

[Narrator] Upon completing her service to Major Murphy, Sarah settled in Virginia City and found work at the Madison House Hotel.

Sarah soon met and married an Irish miner named John Brown.

The couple had three children, but only her eldest, Eva, lived past the age of three.

Along with the hardship of losing her children, Sarah also contended with an abusive husband who routinely beat her.

In 1880, after a particularly brutal attack, Sarah sued John for divorce and was granted custody of Eva.

Unfortunately, tragedy struck again when Eva died from pneumonia just a year later at the age of seven - leaving Sarah completely alone.

- Within a decade of coming to Virginia City you can imagine all the things she has been through.

She's had a marriage that's ended in a divorce, she's had three children, all three of her children have died.

It would have been an extremely difficult chapter.

[Narrator] After Eva's death, Sarah left Virginia City and returned to her family in Tennessee.

But shortly after her arrival, she realized that Montana held a more promising future for her.

- So Sarah picks herself up, she carries on in the most inspiring of ways.

And this is a critical juncture where we know that she chose to come back to Montana.

She makes an active decision that Montana's the place for her and she's coming back to it.

After returning to Virginia City, Sarah married another miner - Stephen Bickford.

Unlike her first husband, Stephen was a prominent citizen and held a number of successful mining claims throughout the area.

And like John Brown, Stephen was white.

Their marriage was a testament to Sarah's social standing, and the people of Virginia City saw nothing wrong with the marriage even though the interracial couple did make news in the nearby cities of Butte and Helena.

She has four children in this marriage to Stephen Bickford.

All of them live, live into adulthood and go on to lead full and incredible lives in their own rights...

So, things get much happier after her first marriage...fortunately.

[Narrator] In 1888, Stephen purchased two-thirds of the crude water system that supplied Virginia City with drinking water.

Soon after, Sarah took a lead role in the operations of the water company.

- Sarah is very instrumental in helping with the day-to-day operations.

What customers need, what bills and what amount.

Where do they need pipes fixed.

Sarah is actually the person who modernizes all their water pipes and starts laying iron pipes to replace the wooden ones.

[Narrator] In 1900, Stephen died most likely of congestive heart failure and left his stake in the water company to Sarah.

She continued to run it with their partner until 1915, when partner Phillip Gohn signed over his entire interest in the water company to Sarah for the token sum of $1.

- It's enormously significant that Sarah Bickford acquires the water company.

She's more than likely the first and the only African-American female public utilities owner in the nation.

Everyone in Virginia City has to get their water from her.

There's no one in town who's rich enough or powerful enough or connected enough that they can get water from anywhere else.

They have to go through Sarah.

So, that certainly would have been a unique opportunity and she's very aware of it.

[Narrator] After taking over the water company, Sarah rented and eventually purchased a notable Virginia City landmark - the Hangman's Building.

She moved her office to the building and then went about making upgrades to attract tourists.

She installed a ladies restroom to entice female travelers.

And she installed a trap door in the ceiling to expose the famous beam that was used to hang five outlaws in the early days of Virginia City.

- The Hangman's Building is a crucial landmark in Virginia City history.

It's best known for a moment in early 1864 when a group of vigilantes decided there was too much lawlessness in this territory.

They were going to clean it up.

And they lynched five men side-by-side from a beam in this building which wasn't finished yet.

And after that it's finished and it has a long life and a really colorful history as a lot of different things.

It's a drug store, it's a meat market, I think it serves as the post office for a little while.

And Sarah really sees an opportunity there to say, I can buy this building and I can preserve it for what it is.

So then we have to ask ourselves why Sarah, as a very self-aware African-American woman would choose to preserve a building that's most famous for being the site of a lynching.

[Narrator] In 1931, Sarah passed away suddenly around the age of 80.

At the time of her death she was still running the water company from her office in the Hangman's Building.

- Virginia City really does mourn that loss.

The newspaper talks at length about one of the pioneer mothers of Virginia City passing away and lots of very prominent people in the community attend her funeral.

She certainly is an integrated part of it and her death is very felt.

I think it's really important to acknowledge that we find her in what's maybe the last place you'd expect to find an African-American woman.

Promoting tourism at the site of a lynching in early 1900s America.

She's a critical part of the legends of the state, so we need to account for that.

[Narrator] In the late 19th century, Montana presented few economic opportunities for women.

East of the Mississippi, women could earn money in textile mills or factories.

And although wages were poor, the jobs provided some opportunity.

In Montana, women were mostly limited to domestic service, or teaching.

The work was far from steady and the pay was low.

But there were some, like Maggie Smith Hathaway, who thought women should demand more.

- Who was Maggie Smith Hathaway?

Maggie Smith Hathaway was a woman who knew what she wanted to have happen and she made it happen.

[Narrator] Maggie Smith was born in Ottawa, Ohio in 1867 to a prominent Methodist preacher and a suffrage activist mother.

Maggie was an early leader in her church and youth groups, but education was her passion.

By the time she was 15, Maggie had already begun teaching school in rural Ohio.

Maggie followed her family to Stevensville, Montana in 1894, where she continued to teach.

Heavily influenced by her parents' activism, Maggie rejected the typical role of women in the schools and rose to become the county superintendent of schools in Helena, Montana.

In 1911, at the age of 44, she married Benjamin Tappan Hathaway, a deputy superintendent of the State Department of Public Instruction.

But tragically, Benjamin died a mere six months after their marriage.

Devastated by the loss of her husband, Maggie returned to live with her parents at their home in Stevensville.

- Her mother decided she was going to get back into life.

Her mother pushed her back and said, "You need to be active, you need to get out of here and do what you were born to do."

Which is to be an activist on behalf of these issues.

With the encouragement from her mother, Maggie picked herself up and began a tour of rural towns and cities of Montana to advocate for women's suffrage and prohibition.

She is on the speaking circuit, she travels as many miles as Rankin does.

Almost 6,000 miles across Montana in a car driving, advocating in every small town.

She earned the nickname the "Whirlwind" at that time for her activism.

She's also a very effective public speaker, and is very charming.

And so her ability to reach out to the ordinary person seems to me to be quite extraordinary and one of her well-developed gifts.

- And Montana has a Montana Federation of Women's Clubs, that's the umbrella organization for a lot of these groups.

So this is where Maggie Smith Hathaway would have cut her teeth in these women's organizations.

Learn how to run a meeting, learn how to write a petition, learn who is going to be sympathetic to the causes that she is espousing.

[Narrator] Through Maggie's tireless campaigning, Montana voters passed a referendum in 1914 giving women the right to vote.

And once the right to vote is secured, women such as Emma Engals and Jeannette Rankin turn their attention to political office.

Many of Maggie Hathaway's supporters believe she should run for office as well.

- How Hathaway decides is, Rankin calls her up.

She's a Republican, Hathaway is a Democrat, but Rankin calls her up and asks her if she will work on her campaign.

And she says, "In a flash I decided and told her no, that I was going to run for the legislature."

[Narrator] In 1916, Jeannette Rankin became the first woman to be elected to the U. S. House of Representatives.

A year later, Maggie Smith Hathaway and Emma Engals became the first women elected to the Montana Legislature.

- I find what is fascinating in that first week, she is appointed to be the chair of this committee on public morals, charity and reform.

That is unbelievable as a legislator to think that a freshman would be appointed the chair of the hot-topic issue committee of the day.

[Narrator] Hathaway wasted no time in the legislature.

On day two of the session she introduced two bills, one of which asked Congress to support a national suffrage amendment to the Constitution.

That bill passed the House on day five of the session.

In her third week, Hathaway made her maiden speech on the floor - a speech supporting age restrictions in pool halls.

- I am blown away by this.

Making that first floor speech, I'm going to tell you there's hardly a legislator whose hand doesn't shake when they do that.

She said, "The time had come, the hour had struck when a woman's voice should be heard."

- And what the press said, "For the first time in the history of Montana there sat a woman in the speaker's chair and she was accorded a thunderous ovation."

That is very impressive to me as a legislator.

It shows the depth of her leadership and her skills in assuming that job in an environment.

That's not just because she's the only woman in it, that is a tremendous accomplishment for any man or woman who is becoming a legislator for the first time, or even the second or the third.

[Narrator] Maggie went on to win reelection two more times.

She became known as a champion of issues regarding women and children.

In 1921, the Democrat caucus elected her minority floor leader, making her one of only two women in the nation to receive that distinction.

No other woman would hold a leadership post in Montana until the late 1970s.

After a failed bid for United States Congress, Maggie pivoted to work within the government.

In 1925 she was appointed Chief Administrative Officer for the Bureau of Child Protection - a position she was well-suited for considering her tenacious advocacy on behalf of children.

The bureau handled all aspects of child welfare, and is known today as the Department of Health and Human Services.

Maggie was the first woman in Montana to head a state agency.

- I would say that the work she did, being the secretary, the chief, of the Bureau for Child Protection, is in many ways as important as the work she did as a legislator, her advocacy as an activist and a lobbyist on behalf of women and suffrage, and her work as an educator.

She really affects the structure and the professionalization of education and teaching, she then implements all of that activism and her moral positions in legislation, and then she puts them all in place again in terms of the way the state still continues to deal with the needs of children in our state.

So, she has a legacy that spans easily 50 years.

And the impacts of those legacies are the ones that we still deal with today.

[Narrator] Maggie Smith Hathaway continued to advocate for women's rights, child welfare, education, and temperance throughout the 1940s.

She died in 1955 at the age of 89.

- When I would sit in the chair in the legislature and a very difficult vote was coming up, I would close my eyes for a second and I could envision these women in that room.

The ghosts of those women are in that room, and you are not there sitting making that vote by yourself, they're holding your hand.

You are that legacy and and you hand it on to the next person who comes into that seat.

They are important for that reason.

- I think that it's really important when we talk about Montana to consider the land that was home to Native Peoples before it ever was labeled Montana.

[Narrator] Before European settlement, Native tribes roamed freely across Montana living off the bounty of the land and its resources.

After the Indian wars of the mid 1800s, Native Americans were forced to move within the boundaries of the reservation system.

Today only nine percent of Montana's land is reserved for the native population.

- I think that one of the things that we might tend to forget is how limited Native peoples literal mobility was, right?

They couldn't leave the reservation without permission, they couldn't go to a school of their own choice, and they are living in a state that is built upon lands that have been taken from them.

[Narrator] At the turn of the century the reservation was like a prison without walls for Native people.

Born to a Lakota mother and Crow father in 1903, Susie Walking Bear entered the world on the Crow Reservation only 20 years after the last of the Indian Wars had ended.

Reservation life was not only hard physically, but emotionally and culturally as the native heritage was stripped away.

In 1900 the policy of the U.S. government was to force Native people into American-Anglo society, giving up every bit of their traditional ways, from how they dressed to how they worked to how they celebrated with dance.

Many of the tribe's adults battled hardships as their community culture deteriorated.

- I think the Native peoples, like other racial minorities, had to make these hard decisions.

Do I try to assimilate?

Do I try to choose to survive by adopting the customs and cultures of white people to the degree that I will be permitted to do that?

The ideas of the 19th century toward Native Americans, toward new immigrants, that they should learn to speak English, to dress like white people, to practice marital customs of Anglo American society; we know tribes like the Cherokee did that and they still were forced off their lands.

[Narrator] Young Susie attended school at the local Catholic Mission in Pryor and then at a boarding school in Crow Agency.

Her mother died when Susie was young and she was raised by an aunt.

- They were terrible.

Boarding Schools were considered by some of our people to be slave camps basically because they had to do all of the chores for the Nuns and the Priests.

And they got scolded when they talked their language, they got beaten actually.

Of course the little boys had long hair and they got their hair cut.

Their traditional clothes were taken away and they were stripped from their parents.

It was really, really a terrible time in history for our people.

[Narrator] Taken in by missionaries, Susie continued her studies while enduring ridicule.

At the age of 16, she left the reservation for Oklahoma with her foster mother and continued her schooling at the Bacone Indian School.

After finishing her eighth grade level, Susie went with her guardians to Massachusetts and continued to study at the Northfield Seminary.

Her guardians paid her tuition, but Susie earned her room and board by working as a housemaid and babysitter.

Assimilating into white society was difficult, but she remained focused on improving her life and that of her people.

- When she was trying to decide what kind of education she wanted to get, she figured that going into nursing she could help her people in a good way.

And that's why she chose nursing.

[Narrator] In 1924, at the age of 21, Susie was accepted at the Franklin County Memorial Hospital in Greenfield, Massachusetts to study nursing.

She completed her internship at Boston General Hospital.

Graduating in 1927, Susie became the first registered nurse of Crow descent and one of the first Native American nurses to graduate in the United States.

Always driven to help Native people, she took a position in Minnesota before returning to her homeland on the Crow Reservation.

Not long after, she met and married Thomas Yellowtail, a Crow religious leader and the source of strength for Susie throughout her life.

- So together was very unique because my grandfather had native herbs that he doctored people with.

Being raised by my grandmother and my grandfather we were raised that way as well.

Even though my grandmother was a registered nurse a lot of times we would have the natural medicines that my grandfather used to doctor people with.

[Narrator] For more than 30 years, Susie constantly pushed for effective improvements to the Indian Health Services.

She advocated for traditional tribal healers to attend Native patients and created the Community Health Representatives outreach program on reservations.

This led her to confront many terrible practices within the reservation health system.

- There was a time when our doctors were not even getting the consent of the young women and they were sterilizing them.

And it was not just at Crow, this was nationwide that this was happening to Native women.

And in fact it even happened to my grandmother.

That was atrocious, there's no other word for it.

But she fought against that.

She fought very hard to stop the sterilization of Native women.

[Narrator] Susie's advocacy and hard work fighting for her Native people received state and national attention.

She sat on the boards of directors for numerous Indian related agencies and associations.

From the 1930s on, Susie and her husband played an important role in the resurgence of cultural activities and expression, like dance.

They were among the federal government's American Indian goodwill ambassadors to several foreign nations in the 1950s, sharing their cultural heritage and Susie's fine beadwork with people around the world.

The Yellowtails worked and served as a connection between cultures, always advocating for improvements on the reservations for their people.

- As Native people, when we had to start living in the Western world, it was hard for them to transition.

And even today, we've had to learn to travel two paths - the white man's path and our Native path.

And that was what was unique about my grandparents, in that you can walk two paths.

Using the best of both worlds, still practicing and keeping your traditional ways alive and that's who makes us who we are as Native people.

[Narrator] In 1962, Susie received the President's Award for Outstanding Nursing in Health Care, and in 1978 the American Indian Nurses Association named her the Grandmother of American Indian nurses.

Susie died on Christmas Day in 1981, but her legacy continues with one granddaughter and three great-granddaughters who are registered nurses and followed in her footsteps.

After her death she was inducted into the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans in the Capitol Rotunda in Helena, and in 2002, she was the first Native American to be inducted into the American Nurses Association's Hall of Fame.

I think I would like her to be remembered as a person that was most welcoming of other cultures, other faiths, but also she let everyone know her belief ways and her practices and her core values.

And it made her who she was: such an outstanding individual.

And I think as history goes forward a lot of our stories don't get told.

And I want my grandmother's story to be known for generations to come.

And the impacts that she had for not just Crow people, but all Native people.

[reflective, upbeat music plays] ♪ - Montana women did just as much to create our state as Montana men did.

So why would we not be studying them?

[Narrator] The women of Montana's history books represent only a small fraction of the mothers and daughters who helped build this state alongside men.

Reflecting on the past, we can not imagine the everyday realities these women faced.

We also cannot fully understand the choices they had and the decisions they made.

But given the chance, we can appreciate the complex world they lived in and the grit it took to make their imprint on that world.

- We teach history from the perspective of primarily unique white individual men, we need to change the way we teach history, and we need to have more materials out there for people to understand the contributions of all kinds of women.

[Narrator] As generations of strong Montana women continue to build a better future for their communities, we remember those who risked their livelihoods and reputations to forge a better Montana.

May they not be forgotten.

[reflective, upbeat music plays] ♪ ♪ ♪