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Friday, September 3, 2021

Mondak: Flashback -- One Hundred Years Ago -- Nothing About The Bakken -- September 3, 2021

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From wiki:

Mondak is a ghost town in Roosevelt County, Montana, United States, which flourished c. 1903–1919, in large measure by selling alcohol to residents of North Dakota, then a dry state.[2]

Mondak—a portmanteau derived from Montana and adjacent North Dakota—was created in 1903, mostly by local investors who realized that profit could be made by selling beer and liquor to North Dakotans. Because of its strategic location on the Missouri River and the Great Northern Railway, Mondak quickly became a thriving village. 
The first building was constructed in 1904, and Mondak soon boasted a bank, two hotels, three general stores, and several grain elevators. It also eventually had a church, a newspaper, a two-story brick school, and a part-time electric generating plant. Locally raised grain and cattle were shipped to Minneapolis on the Great Northern, but the town's most profitable business remained alcohol sales.

During its heyday, Mondak had at least seven saloons and a number of warehouses to store alcohol. Gambling and prostitution were never legal but always winked at. 
There were many accidents involving inebriated men, and the crime rate was high for the size of the community. On April 4, 1913, a black construction worker, J. C. Collins, shot and killed Sheridan County Sheriff Thomas Courtney and a deputized citizen, Richard Bermeister, when they tried to arrest him at the company's office.[5] [6] Hours after Collins was jailed in Mondak, a mob of local residents stormed the building and lynched him, hanging him from a telephone pole and then making "a futile attempt to burn his body."

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