camp included many ethnic groups, numerous saloons and prostitutes, and substantial violence. When construction was finished, the camp was abandoned. In 1882 the Northern Pacific platted Livingston, Montana, a major division point, repair and maintenance center, and gateway to Yellowstone National Park. Built in symmetrical fashion along both sides of the track, the city grew to 7,000 by 1914. Several structures built between 1883 and 1914 still exist and provide a physical record of the era and indicate the city's role as a rail and tourist center. The Northern Pacific depot reflects the desire to impress the tourists who disembarked here for Yellowstone Park, and the railroad's machine shops reveal the city's industrial history. Women In Montana, very few single men attempted to operate a farm or ranch; farmers clearly understood the benefits of marriage and family. A wife and numerous children could help the head of the household handle many chores, including child-rearing, feeding the family, manufacturing clothing, managing housework, feeding the hired hands, and, especially after the 1930s, handling the paperwork and financial details. Efforts to write woman suffrage into Montana's 1889 constitution failed. Montana women, especially "society women", did not strongly support the suffragists. However, help from national leaders and the efforts of Montana supporters of suffrage such as Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973), led to success in 1914 when voters ratified a suffrage amendment passed by the legislature in 1913. In 1916, Rankin, a Republican, became the first woman ever elected to Congress. She was elected again in 1940. Rankin was a peace activist, who voted against American entry into both World War I and World War II. The status of women in the 19th-century West has drawn the attention of numerous scholars, whose interpretations fall into three types: 1) the Frontier school influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner, which argues that the West was a liberating experience for women and men; 2) the reactionists, who view the West as a place of drudgery for women, who reacted unfavorably to the isolation and difficult work environment in the West; and 3) those writers who claim the West had no distinctive effect on women's lives, that it was a static, neutral frontier. Cole (1990) uses legal records to argue that the Turner thesis best explains the improvement in women's status in Montana and the early achievement of suffrage. Women's clubs expressed the interests, needs, and beliefs of middle-class women around