Creating Fiction from History: 1/11/2023

One might say she was born to it; It was in her blood!

Carolina Mae Duggard was born January 16, 1919, in Harlan County, Kentucky, a region of the eastern United States called Appalachia. Her parents, Jim Bob and Lucy, ran the family business, which could be very lucrative but also very dangerous! In fact, it became so dangerous that Jim Bob decided to relocate his little family to a climate that promised to be even more lucrative and hopefully less dangerous. Unfortunately for him though, whoever sold him on the idea neglected to warn him about how wild the west still was. Jim Bob had elected to move his fledgling family to, of all places, Butte, Montana.

Little Carolina was barely a month old when she arrived with her parents in the midst of the Miner’s Strike. Imagine Lucy’s consternation when the 44th Infantry showed up the day after their arrival in the Mining City. Fortunately for Jim Bob, whose wife was about ready to kill him, the City workers soon returned to their jobs and most of the troops withdrew, though Butte remained under federal military occupation for almost a year.

Though she had no real memories of that introductory event, Carolina did have faint memories of later that year when she and her family almost froze during the Coal Strike. Suffice it to say then that the Duggards learned fast that their new home was even more dangerous than the one they had left back east.

It didn’t take Jim Bob long, though, to figure out that the family business he had run back home in the hills of Kentucky could be just as lucrative out west. Carolina was a scant five years old when Lucy finally convinced her husband to relocate them again, this time, over the hill in quiet little Whitehall. At his wife’s request, Jim Bob officially gave up the family business but some years later his barely fifteen-year-old daughter, decided to take up the reins herself.

Pictured here at the age of four, the year before they moved to Whitehall, could be Carolina Mae Duggard, who may have been one of Butte’s original “snake charmers.”

If you would like to create fiction from history with one of the museum’s photos, please contact the Ledger at (406) 287-5301 or email whledger@gmail.com.