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HELENA—HELGESEN

were negroes; (1910) 8772. It is served by the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley (Illinois Central), the St Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern (Missouri Pacific), the Arkansas Midland, and the Missouri & North Arkansas railways. Built in part upon “made land,” well protected by levees, and lying within the richest cotton-producing region of the south, the rich timber country of the St Francis river, and the Mississippi “bottom lands,” Helena concentrates its economic interests in cotton-compressing and shipping, the manufacture of cotton-seed products, lumbering and wood-working. The city was founded about 1821, but so late as 1860 the population was only 800. During the Civil War the place was of considerable strategic importance. It was occupied in July 1862 by the Union forces, who strongly fortified it to guard their communications with the lower Mississippi; on the 4th of July 1863, when occupied by General Benjamin M. Prentiss (1819–1901) with 4500 men, it was attacked by a force of 9000 Confederates under General Theophilus H. Holmes (1804–1880), who hoped to raise the siege of Vicksburg or close the river to the Union forces. The attack was repulsed, with a loss to the Confederates of one-fifth their numbers, the Union loss being slight.

HELENA, a city and the county-seat of Lewis and Clark county, Montana, U.S.A., and the capital of the state, at the E. base of the main range of the Rocky Mountains, 80 m. N.E. of Butte, at an altitude of about 4000 ft. Pop. (1880) 3624; (1890) 13,834; (1900) 10,770, of whom 2793 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 12,515. It is served by the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific railways. Helena is delightfully situated with Mt Helena as a background in the hollow of the Prickly Pear valley, a rich agricultural region surrounded by rolling hills and lofty mountains, and contains many fine buildings, including the state capitol, county court house, the Montana club house, high school, the cathedral of St Helena, a federal building, and the United States assay office. It is the seat of the Montana Wesleyan University (Methodist Episcopal), founded in 1890; St Aloysius College and St Vincent’s Academy (Roman Catholic); and has a public library with about 35,000 volumes, the Montana state library with about 40,000 volumes, and the state law library with about 24,000 volumes. The city is the commercial and financial centre of the state (Butte being the mining centre), and is one of the richest cities in the United States in proportion to its population. It has large railway car-shops, extensive smelters and quartz crushers (at East Helena), and various manufacturing establishments; the value of the factory product in 1905 was $1,309,746, an increase of 68.7% over that of 1900. The surrounding country abounds in gold- and silver-bearing quartz deposits, and it is estimated that from the famous Last Chance Gulch alone, which runs across the city, more than $40,000,000 in gold has been taken. The street railway and the lighting system of the city are run by power generated at a plant and 40 ft. dam at Canyon Ferry, on the Missouri river, 18 m. E. of Helena. There is another great power plant at Hauser Plant, 20 m. N. of Helena. Three miles W. of the city is the Broadwater Natatorium with swimming pool, 300 ft. long and 100 ft. wide, the water for which is furnished by hot springs with a temperature at the source of 160°. Fort Harrison, a United States army post, is situated 3 m. W. of the city. Helena was established as a placer mining camp in 1864 upon the discovery of gold in Last Chance Gulch. The town was laid out in the same year, and after the organization of Montana Territory it was designated as the capital. Helena was burned down in 1869 and in 1874. It was chartered as a city in 1881.

HELENSBURGH, a municipal and police burgh and watering-place of Dumbartonshire, Scotland, on the N. shore of the Firth of Clyde, opposite Greenock, 24 m. N.W. of Glasgow by the North British railway. Pop. (1901) 8554. There is a station at Upper Helensburgh on the West Highland railway, and from the railway pier at Craigendoran there is steamer communication with Garelochhead, Dunoon and other pleasure resorts on the western coast. In 1776 the site began to be built upon, and in 1802 the town, named after Lady Helen, wife of Sir James Colquhoun of Luss, the ground landlord, was erected into a burgh of barony, under a provost and council. The public buildings include the burgh hall, municipal buildings, Hermitage schools and two hospitals. On the esplanade stands an obelisk to Henry Bell, the pioneer of steam navigation, who died at Helensburgh in 1830.


HELENUS, in Greek legend, son of Priam and Hecuba, and twin-brother of Cassandra. He is said to have been originally called Scamandrius, and to have received the name of Helenus from a Thracian soothsayer who instructed him in the prophetic art. In the Iliad he is described as the prince of augurs and a brave warrior; in the Odyssey he is not mentioned at all. Various details concerning him are added by later writers. It is related that he and his sister fell asleep in the temple of Apollo Thymbraeus and that snakes came and cleansed their ears, whereby they obtained the gift of prophecy and were able to understand the language of birds. After the death of Paris, Helenus and his brother Deïphobus became rivals for the hand of Helen. Deïphobus was preferred, and Helenus withdrew in indignation to Mount Ida, where he was captured by the Greeks, whom he advised to build the wooden horse and carry off the Palladium. According to other accounts, having been made prisoner by a stratagem of Odysseus, he declared that Philoctetes must be fetched from Lemnos before Troy could be taken; or he surrendered to Diomedes and Odysseus in the temple of Apollo, whither he had fled in disgust at the sacrilegious murder of Achilles by Paris in the sanctuary. After the capture of Troy, he and his sister-in-law Andromache accompanied Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus) as captives to Epirus, where Helenus persuaded him to settle. After the death of Neoptolemus, Helenus married Andromache and became ruler of the country. He was the reputed founder of Buthrotum and Chaonia, named after a brother or companion whom he had accidentally slain while hunting. He was said to have been buried at Argos, where his tomb was shown. When Aeneas, in the course of his wanderings, reached Epirus, he was hospitably received by Helenus, who predicted his future destiny.

Homer, Iliad, vi. 76, vii. 44, xii. 94, xiii. 576; Sophocles, Philoctetes, 604, who probably follows the Little Iliad of Lesches; Pausanias i. 11, ii. 23; Conon, Narrationes, 34; Dictys Cretensis iv. 18; Virgil, Aeneid, iii. 294-490; Servius on Aeneid, ii. 166, iii. 334.

HELGAUD, or Helgaldus (d. c. 1048), French chronicler, was a monk of the Benedictine abbey of Fleury. Little else is known about him save that he was chaplain to the French king, Robert II. the Pious, whose life he wrote. This Epitoma vitae Roberti regis, which is probably part of a history of the abbey of Fleury, deals rather with the private than with the public life of the king, and its value is not great either from the literary or from the historical point of view. The only existing manuscript is in the Vatican, and the Epitoma has been printed by J. P. Migne in the Patrologia Latina, tome cxli. (Paris, 1844); and by M. Bouquet in the Recueil des historiens des Gaules, tome x. (Paris, 1760).

See Histoire littéraire de la France, tome vii. (Paris, 1865–1869); and A. Molinier, Les Sources de l’histoire de France, tome ii. (Paris, 1902).

HELGESEN, POVL,[1] Danish humanist, was born at Varberg in Halland about 1480, of a Danish father and a Swedish mother. Helgesen was educated first at the Carmelite monastery of his native place and afterwards at another monastery at Elsinore, where he devoted himself to humanistic studies and adopted Erasmus as his model. None had a keener eye for the abuses of the Church; long before the appearance of Luther, he denounced the ignorance and immorality of the clergy, and, as lector at the university of Copenhagen, gathered round him a band of young enthusiasts, the future leaders of the Danish Reformation. But Helgesen desired an orderly, methodical, rational reformation, and denounced Luther, whose ablest opponent in Denmark he subsequently became, as a hot-headed revolutionist. Christian II. was also an object of Helgesen’s detestation, and so boldly did he oppose that monarch’s measures

  1. He wrote his name Heliae or Eliae.