Made in Montana: Montana's post office murals

General Sully at the Yellowstone-1864 drew on Ralston's knowledge of eastern Montana landscapes as well as the history he had studied at the state historical society. As Ralston explained: "Like a lot of others, I hated to see it [the Old West] go. Now [that] it is history . . . I've made it my lile's work to try and make the Old West live again on canvas." His representation, though, left something to be desired. When Rowan reviewed the painting's progress, he advised Ralston that a number of the pioneers looked "studio manufactured." Unfortunately, whether short on time or inclination, Ralston left them as they appeared in his initial vision.28

The second artist chosen from the Glasgow entries was Montana native Henry Meloy, who taught art at Columbia University in New York City. In mid-September 1941 Rowan wrote to inform Meloy that Section officials deeply admired his design and that they wanted him to design the Hamilton post office mural. Meloy's finished mural, Flathead War Party, shows the tribe preparing to attack the Blackfeet, with Mount Como, a Bitterroot Valley landmark, in the background. An accomplished artist, Meloy knew to focus on historical topics and local scenery.29

The last post office mural installed in Montana was Leo Beaulaurier's Trailing Cattle. Impressed by the sketch Beaulauner submitted for the Glasgow competition, Rowan invited him to create a mural for the Billings post office in October 1941. Beaulaurier's mural featured long-horns in the foreground, with the browns and whites of the animals contrasting with the blended blues of the river and sky. This design, like Ralston's, related a brief period in western history, one that gave the mural a sense of place and time and also played to easterners' sensibilities about the West. It was the subject that sold the Section on this particular design. Billings residents also embraced the mural. Postmaster Mearl L. Fagg wrote that people were "pleased with the theme of the picture in that it fits in with our country and records a history of actual scenes that many have seen in the past."30

In spite of the initial enthusiasm with which Montanans embraced the post office murals, they have largely faded from the public's consciousness in the intervening sixty years. For some people, the murals became a mute reminder of hard times that no one wanted to repeat; for others, they seemed a quaint remnant of the distant past. In recent decades, as advances in communications eroded the importance of the local post office, fewer people visited to socialize or look at a mural. One Billings postal employee described it bluntly: "I saw the mural when I first started work here, but haven't paid attention since."31

Despite their waning popularity, the murals have been maintained in their original condition. In 1976 Verona Burkhard cleaned and varnished the Deer Lodge, Dillon, and Hamilton murals while visiting the state. The Billings and Sidney murals were cleaned and assessed in 1983. In Sidney the construction of a new post office and a new museum, the Mon-Dak Center, in the 1970s raised controversy over the question of whether the mural should be moved from its original location.32 Today, the Montana post office murals, all still hanging where they were originally installed, capture the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt's vast economic vision, one in which the arts and humanities went hand and hand with economic recovery.