My dad, Murry Giles, is shown kneeling and steadying the ladder outside Tower 7 the night of April 16, 1959. Armed state troopers climbed atop the wall to discourage inmates from attempting to break out. Tower 7, known also as “the main gate,” had fortified doors at street level that led into the prison. New prisoners walked through those doors to a life in the bars. Photo/Old Montana Prison
By Kevin S. Giles
Do high places bother you? Would you walk on a narrow wall 22 feet above the sidewalk? A wall lacking a railing?
When I read my father’s Montana State Prison hiring papers from 1958, after he applied for a guard job, handwriting near the bottom caught my eye. “Walked the wall OK,” someone wrote.
I didn’t fully grasp the significance of that notation until I began researching for my book, Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance, years later. The prison required applicants to “walk the wall” because tower guards rotated after an hour or two. Whether performing this feat was seen by administrators as a practical skill or a test of courage, I don’t know. The date on my dad’s application shows he walked the wall in winter. How did he avoid falling?
When younger, no fear of heights
My caution around high places wasn’t as abundant when I was younger. I walked icy catwalks at the sawmill, on purpose, to tease my older co-worker who feared heights. When fire broke out atop a two-story building at the same sawmill, someone in authority told me to climb up to put it out. It was graveyard shift and evidently we had no fire crew to help. Up I went, holding onto a vertical metal ladder (bolted to the building) with one hand, the other steadying a heavy fire hose over my shoulder. Being a teenager, I didn’t know better.
Jerry’s Riot tells the story of the 1959 takeover of Montana State Prison by career criminal Jerry Myles and his 19-year-old boyfriend, Lee Smart.
I was older when I researched Jerry’s Riot, my book about the 1959 Montana prison riot. Somehow I came to the conclusion that to understand guards of that era, I should do as they did. I persuaded workers at the old prison (by then a museum) to let me walk the wall. They gave me permission while advising along the lines of, “Don’t fall off or there will be hell to pay.” (I can disclose this because these men are now deceased.)
On a windy summer day we unlocked the lower door to Tower 1, the southeast corner tower. We took the stairs upward to the small room where, on three shifts around the clock, guards watched movement inside the walls. The room had no plumbing. By then I had interviewed former tower guards who told me that tower duty was the worst form of torture. Regulations forbade tower guards from reading and other distractions. Buckets were used as toilets.
‘Walking the wall’ meant taking a risk
Especially at night, when inmates were asleep in their cells, tower guards fought to stay awake. A captain or lieutenant making hourly rounds waved at the windows of each tower to confirm guards waved back.
Metal railings extended 25 feet or less from each of the corner towers. After that, anyone “walking the wall” took a huge risk. I was about to find out for myself.
Gusts of wind tugged at me
Ahead of me, a wiry little man scurried along the wall as if born from it. He carried a ring of keys to unlock doors on either side of each tower. Once I passed the comforting presence of the hand railing, I understood why “walking the wall” scared mere mortals like me. The sandstone wall, three feet wide, reaches a point halfway to Tower 7 where it’s higher. Two steps lead to the higher portion. They’re not as wide as the wall. A miscalculation means a tumble to the sidewalk below. “You had better be careful up there!” a man called from the prison yard. On the other side of the wall, the street side, drivers in passing cars honked their horns.
I felt blood rising to my brain. Gusts of wind pushed at me. I said quiet thanks for reversing my initial decision to wear smooth-soled leather shoes, as guards would have done. My sneakers gripped the loose gravelly surface enough to keep my balance. My shuffling between towers seemed like the longest walk of my life. Perhaps it was knowing true stories of guards who had fallen and hearing vivid descriptions of their injuries. Perhaps it was the wind blowing me off balance. Perhaps it was curious looks from tourists below me as they inspected the old prison. Perhaps it dawned on me that I no longer was nineteen years old climbing a ladder, in the dark, at the sawmill.
I remembered the 1959 prison riot
When I got to the railing outside Tower 7 my mind turned to the 1959 riot. I stood at the exact spot where my father knelt to help armed state troopers climb onto the wall from a ladder on the street side. (A photograph of that incident illustrates this story.)
Inside Tower 7, also known as the “main gate,” broad windows look down on the security doors leading into the white building known as Inside Administration. It was here where guards lowered keys, in sequence, to allow guards and other prison officials to unlock doors between the street and the prison.
The walk from Tower 7 to Tower 6 at the northeast corner proved much the same as the first. This is where sandstone changes to granite before construction of the 1912 cell house. Again I came to two steps, but this time they declined. Narrower than the wall, they left no room for a careless stumble. When I reached Tower 6 I had walked the entire eastern wall. The tower looks down on the exercise yard for “Siberia,” a group of disciplinary cells. A tower guard’s pistol once fell from his holster into the prison yard. Former Deputy Warden Jim Blodgett, then a guard, recalls five prisoners being housed in the isolation cells at the time. All of them denied finding the pistol. It later was found buried in the snow inside the walls.
Historic view of where bazooka rounds hit
I experienced no trouble on the next stretch, along the northern wall of the prison to Tower 5, because railings extended all the way. This portion of the wall found its way into prison lore when highway patrolman Robert Zaharko machine-gunned bullets through windows of Cell House 1 during the 1959 riot. The prison hospital, adjacent to the cell house, harbored the legendary Turkey Pete and other older inmates (including two injured hostages) during the disturbance. And outside Tower 5, on the southern side, two National Guard soldiers fired three bazooka rounds at the corner of the cell house to persuade instigators Jerry Myles and Lee Smart to surrender. From my vantage point at Tower 5, I saw what those soldiers had seen. I later would interview them for first-hand accounts.
You’ll find further detail in Jerry’s Riot.
No 1 rule, don’t look down
At Tower 5, the wiry little man and I observed we couldn’t continue around the wall because of work being done on it. A plastic tarp or similar obstruction covered a portion of the west wall to Tower 4, the largest “yard” tower. We returned the way we had come. My second walk along the long unrailed stretch of the east wall felt no less perilous than the first. I kept my eyes on the next tower rather than looking down.
The prison discontinued the practice of “walking the wall” soon after my dad went to work there. In lean state budget years, the prison sometimes didn’t staff a few of the towers, encouraging a few escapes over the south wall. Prisoners know everything.
Old Montana Prison opens for tours in the summers. No one is allowed to “walk the walls,” a hazardous throwback to an era when bosses paid far less attention to worker safety. Because of my research for Jerry’s Riot, I explored every nook and cranny in the prison, seeing places I never knew existed. Those experiences helped me write an informed account of the infamous disturbance.
Would I walk the wall again, if offered?
No.
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Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.