These are Handsome Falls in Great Falls

This is a picture of a steam train traversing a bridge that crosses the Missouri River in Montana. The water falls is known today as Rainbow Falls.

However, their original name was Handsome Falls, named by none other than the explorers Lewis and Clarke. The train on the bridge belonged to the Montana Central Railway. It was a railway company which operated in the American state of Montana from 1886 to 1907. It was constructed by James Jerome Hill's St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway, and became part of the Great Northern Railway in 1889. James Jerome Hill, primary stockholder and president of the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway (StPM&M), established the Montana Central Railway on January 25, 1886. Few railroads served Montana at that time. But Butte, Montana, was a booming mining town that needed to get its metals to market; gold and silver had been discovered near Helena, Montana; and coal companies in Canada were eager to get their fuel to Montana's smelters. On September 18, 1889, Hill changed the name of the Minneapolis and St. Cloud Railway (a railroad which existed primarily on paper, but which held very extensive land grants throughout the Pacific Northwest) to the Great Northern Railway. On February 1, 1890, he transferred ownership of the StPM&M, Montana Central, and other rail systems he owned to the Great Northern. For a while the subsidiary railroads still ran under their own names. The Montana Central Railway stopped that in 1907. From the National Park Service website: On June 14, 1805, as Lewis explored the Great Falls of the Missouri River, he encountered “one of the most beatifull objects in nature, a cascade of about fifty feet perpendicular streching at right angles across the river from side to side to the distance of at least a quarter of a mile. here the river pitches over a shelving rock, with an edge as regular and as streight as if formed by art, without a nich or brake in it; the water descends in one even and uninterupted sheet to the bottom wher dashing against the rocky bottom rises into foaming billows of great hight and rappidly glides away, hising flashing and sparkling as it departs the sprey rises from one extremity to the other to 50 f. I now thought that if a skillfull painter had been asked to make a beautifull cascade that he would most probably have pesented the precise immage of this one.” Accordingly, Lewis and Clark named this landmark waterfall “Handsome Falls.”

The picture on the front of the post card was taken in 1902. Today, there is a hydroelectric dam between the bridge and water falls. The post card was printed, and probably published, by Heyn's Elite Studio at 10 – 5th Street North, Great Falls, Montana. They were regular advertisers in the Great Falls Tribune newspaper. The Bulletin of Photography (1916) reported that “Louis Heyn of the Elite Studio sold an interest in his business” to employee Harry J. Keeley.