Willis, John, 1857-1944

John Willis was born near Columbia, Missouri, in 1856. He left home at age fourteen and worked on the plains as a cowhand, mule-skinner, buffalo hunter, horse breaker, and cattle butcher. In the 1870s, he moved through the mountain regions: he owned a saloon in Denver, another in Socorro, New Mexico; he mined in the Black Hills; ran whiskey to Alberta; and hunted buffalo and freighted in Montana. He settled in Thompson Falls, Montana, in 1882, where he ran a general store until it burned down in 1890. Willis guided Theodore Roosevelt on hunting trips in the late 1880s and several European aristocrats on trips in the 1890s. He moved to a ranch near Fort Peck in the late 1890s and ranched there until 1908, when he moved to Glasgow and entered first the machinery, then the insurance business. He was a member of the northern Montana delegation that persuaded Roosevelt to enact the Milk River Irrigation Project in 1905, and he was elected a Democratic representative to the Montana legislature in 1915. Willis moved from Glasgow to Arizona in 1926, then to California, where he died in 1944.

From the guide to the John Willis Collection, circa 1915-1944, and 1967, (University of Montana--Missoula Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library Archives and Special Collections)

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