Archives West Finding Aid

Granville Stuart was born August 27, 1834, near what is now Clarksburg, West Virginia. In 1837 he moved west with his family to Iowa. After their father went to California in 1849, Granville and his brother James Stuart followed west to join him in 1852. The Stuart brothers remained there prospecting until 1857 when they attempted to return to Iowa. However, the Mormon War in Utah blocked the trail and caused the brothers to go north to what later became Montana. They prospected for gold in the Deer Lodge Valley, making the first strike at Gold Creek in 1858. During the 1860s Granville and James worked mainly as prospectors and small merchants in various Montana mining camps. After James' death in 1873, Granville suffered financial reverses, and by 1876 had become a bookkeeper for Samuel T. Hauser's First National Bank of Helena. In 1879 he formed, with Hauser, Andrew J. Davis and Erwin Davis, a cattle-raising enterprise, Davis, Hauser and Company, using the brand DHS. The partners made Stuart general manager and superintendent of the company, a position he held until the spring of 1887. From 1894 to 1898, Stuart served as United States ambassador to Paraguay and Uruguay, a post he obtained through the assistance of Hauser and Russell Harrison. He returned to Montana in 1899, and in his final years, served as librarian of the Butte Public Library. Granville Stuart was the first secretary of the Montana Historical Society and served as its president from 1890 to 1895. In 1886 to 1887, he was president of the Society of Montana Pioneers, and for seven years he served as president of the Board of Stock Commissioners, resigning his post in 1891. Although he never completed the history of Montana the legislature commissioned him to write, he did publish Montana As It Is in 1865, and in 1925, a selection of his and James' journals was published under the title, Forty Years on the Frontier. Granville Stuart died in Missoula on October 2, 1918.