Bear Creek and Western Railway Company - 1910's dated Montana Railroad Stock Certificate
Inv# NP1035 Stock
Unissued Stock printed by Pioneer Press, St. Paul. Apparently a line that went from Twin Bridges to Cooke City, MT.
Bearcreek is an incorporated town in Carbon County, Montana, United States. It is part of the Billings, Montana Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 91 at the 2020 census. Bearcreek uses the Mayor/Council form of government. Bearcreek owes its existence to area coal mining that began in the 1890s to supply coal for the Northern Pacific Railway and the Anaconda Company. The Bearcreek Post Office was established on November 22, 1905, with Sarah Criger as the town's first postmaster. The town was platted and incorporated after the arrival of the Montana, Wyoming & Southern Railroad in 1906.
The Montana, Wyoming and Southern (or MW&S) was an independent privately owned short rail spur built in 1906 from the main Northern Pacific Railroad (NP) line at Bridger, Montana through Belfry and on to the mines in and around Bearcreek. The tremendous amounts of coal extracted from the Bearcreek mines all traveled over this 21 mile long spur. The MW&S was built by speculators hoping it could be immediately sold to the NP who used the high grade coal from the Bearcreek mines in their engines. However, since the MW&S's single outlet to the wider world was all through the NP terminus at Bridger, the Northern Pacific did not buy this short line but sought to control it through business interactions. The MW&S was forced to operate on its own under constant financial pressure from the NP, and even though it shipped large volumes of high grade coal from Bearcreek it was often in financial and operational difficulties. The Bearcreek mine owners were in turn completely dependent on the MW&S to move their shipments. The MW&S existed as a vacillating and weak but critical link to the continued prosperity of the community of Bearcreek. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearcreek,_Montana
A stock certificate is issued by businesses, usually companies. A stock is part of the permanent finance of a business. Normally, they are never repaid, and the investor can recover his/her money only by selling to another investor. Most stocks, or also called shares, earn dividends, at the business's discretion, depending on how well it has traded. A stockholder or shareholder is a part-owner of the business that issued the stock certificates.
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