Newspaper reports and family records indicate that Julius J. LaDuke (1849–1927) was a typical turn-of-the-century entrepreneur who made and lost his fortune several times over. Born Julius J. LeDuc in 1849 in Beauharnois, a small village south of Montreal, Quebec. LaDuke immigrated to the United States in the 1870s, just as America’s Western frontier was closing and entrepreneurial endeavors were growing. During a decade of traveling through the American West, Julius married Elizabeth Kappes, only to see her die in 1879. He and his two small children (Matilda and Jerry) soon settled in Conejos, Colorado, where he worked as a lumber dealer. Needing help with his expanding business and a mother for his children, he was joined by his brother Onesime, who brought Celina Bougie, a distant cousin, to become Julius’s new wife.

The two brothers enjoyed financial success during their Colorado years, owning a lumber mill, mines, and a toll road. But in 1889, Onesime was murdered during a business trip, a major setback for the family. The murderer, Abram Ortiz, was later arrested and hanged—the scaffold reportedly built with lumber from the LaDuke mill—the last execution under an old Colorado state law that permitted counties the privilege of conferring the death penalty.

Selling his assets in Colorado LaDuke moved north, and in the 1890s, the family resettled with Celina’s family in south-central Montana. There they purchased several properties and staked mining claims, including the location where a hot spring resort would later be constructed.

In 1905, Lester LaDuke, age 4, son of Julius LaDuke and Celina Bougie, fell into a bathing spring at LaDuke Hot Springs and was scalded to death.

After selling the hot springs in 1908, LaDuke moved to nearby Livingston, where he used his profits to purchase residential and retail properties, including the 100 block of North Main Street that once housed the “Bucket of Blood Saloon” and the “LaDuke Pool Room”, a billiard hall. His financial luck worsened, however, in 1914 when his wife divorced him and received most of his savings, about $14,000, and his residential properties.

The divorce record states that LaDuke had grown belligerent and distrustful. He alienated his family and slipped into poverty, forcing him to move to the “Park County Poor Farm”, where he eventually died in 1927. He was buried in an unmarked potter’s grave in Livingston’s Mountain View Cemetery.

www.museum.upenn.edu/expedition volume 50, number 1 expedition, “Taking in the Waters” at LaDuke Hot Springs Resort By: Benjamin W. Porter and Athna May Porter.