Virginia City

On May 26, 1863, six men found gold in Alder Gulch and word spread like wildfire. Miners covered the hillsides with tents, brush shelters and crude log cabins. On June 16 the town plat of Virginia City, Montana was laid out. Alder Gulch extended fourteen miles west of Virginia City and up to a quarter of mile wide and was sometimes was called the "Fourteen Mile City." At its peak in 1864 the Gulch's population reached 30,000 people and Virginia City had an estimated 5,000 inhabitants. Alder Gulch had most of Montana's population and in 1865 Virginia City was designated Montana's Territorial Capital - a designation it kept until 1875.

Miners kept order by electing their own officials and establishing "miner's court." But miners were not the only inhabitants as merchants, service providers, gamblers, prostitutes, thieves and con-men all came to seek their fortunes. Montana's vigilante movement was born during the winter of 1863-1864 when residents took law into their own hands. Justice (or non-justice) was swift with the vigilantes hanging two dozen men in less than a month.

By the 1880's most independent miners had moved on or gone to work for companies digging gold. In the 1890's huge dredges began to work the gulch extracting free gold and burying the small settlements with their gravel waste which remains today. In 1942 most gold mining operations had ceased operation and Virginia City was mostly a ghost town. Charles and Sue Bovey began buying the dilapidated buildings in the mid-1940's and the town became the focus of a large scale project launching one of the first preservation efforts in the West.

Charles Bovey reconstructed some buildings using vintage materials. Others he stabilized or restored and still others he built to resemble buildings long disappeared. The Boveys began amassing collections of antiquated inventories and artifacts to add to those already in place in the long unused buildings. Virginia City was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and in 1997 the State of Montana purchased the Bovey properties. Virginia City once included more than a thousand buildings and about 237 remain today. Of those more than 50 are first generation buildings dating from the height of the gold rush of 1863 - 1865. Virginia City boasts the largest collection of gold rush era buildings in the West and had more Western and Mining artifacts than any place except the Smithsonian Museum. Today Virginia City has 150 permanent residents.

While camping at Virginia City we were blessed with a visit from Doug and Ann Craw and David and Patsy Kessler, RVing friends who drove 97 miles from Anaconda, Montana to visit us. We along with Don and Gloria Martin toured historic Virginia City, ate lunch at Main Street Cafe, dessert of homemade ice cream and did a lot of visiting and talking.

Camping on Big Hole River

Big Hole National Battlefield is located ten miles west of Wisdom, Montana. It was at Big Hole in 1887 a tragedy occurred. The Nez Perce Indians were a peace loving tribe that were forced off their land by a lying and scheming U.S. Government. Chief Looking Glass and Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce to Big Hole in Montana where they were setting up camp. The 7th U.S. Infantry under command of Col. John Gibbon found the Indians and waited until dawn when they began shooting at tepees killing children, women, old men and warriors, killing 60 - 90 people. Of course the Nez Perce returned fire and killed 29 soldiers and wounded 40 more. We will tell more about the Nez Perce when we write about the Indian nations and tribes Lewis and Clark encountered on the expedition. (We forgot to take our camera so we don't have any pictures of the battlefield.)

Bannack

Bannack, Montana, the first capital of the Montana Territory, is located miles from nowhere and it is hard to realize it was once a capital. It was capital only one year before the seat of government was moved to Virginia City for ten years and finally to Helena. Bannack is now a Montana State Park and once a year the old town becomes populated again during Bannack Days. We attended Bannack Days in 2000 and again this year. The town is full of original (not restored or reconstructed) buildings dating from the mid-1860's. We witnessed a gunfight in the street, listened to music and singing, watched panning for gold, ate kettle-corn and studied the history of Bannack.

We stayed five days at Fishtrap Fishing Access on the Big Hole River between Wise River and Wisdom, two very small towns. Camping is free with sites right on the river and of course Norm and Don did some trout fishing. The valley advertised only 10.6 inches of rain annually but we had some rain each of the five days. But still we had a relaxing time and were not bothered by phone calls or email since there was not a cell phone tower in the area.

Granite

In 1879, Charles McLure discovered silver on a mountain top near present-day Philipsburg, Montana. McLure and others invested $130,000 in Ruby Mine and the next ten years the mining operation paid investors $100,000 in dividends. Overall production ran $33 million and nearby BiMetallic Mine produced another $11 million. In 1890, Granite's population totaled 5,200 citizens with 3,000 miners plus merchants and families. In its heyday the town had four churches, a hospital, a Miners Union Hall, mercantile stores, a bank, boarding houses, saloons, gambling houses and many small houses. It was the eleventh largest town in Montana. In 1893 the "silver doom" hit and 3,000 people left town in twenty-four hours. Today the town stands much as when the people left. Some buildings have rotted, some are rotting and the few brick and stone buildings show only their skeletons as the roofs and interior walls are long gone. Ruby Mine is a ghost of its glorious past with many machines and implements where the miners left them. There is a badly washed out dirt road four miles up the side of a mountain to get to Granite, but drive very slowly and you will be rewarded once at the top.

Butte

Butte, the "Richest Hill on Earth - a mile high and a mile deep," aptly describes the city. Billions of dollars of gold, silver, copper, manganese, zinc and lead have been extracted from the hill where uptown Butte sits. The city is over a mile high in elevation with mine shafts as deep as a mile below the surface. More than 200 mines operated 24-hours a day and today fourteen of the original headframes still grace the hill. The miners called them "gallows frames" because working far below ground could be deadly. Headframes held the hoisting gear needed to lower cages of miners and bring up ore. There are more than 3,500 miles of underground passages beneath Butte and with all the short slopes and connections the total is expanded to more than 10,000 miles. 

In 1917 a fire broke out in the shaft of Granite Mountain Mine and killed 168 miners, the worst hard rock mining disaster in the nation. The same year unions were formed and the U.S. military was called in to keep the mines open. The United States was entering World War I and needed minerals from the mines so the military ruled the city for three years.

At its peak Butte had a population of nearly 100,000 making it the largest city in the northwest. Today the city counts about 34,000 inhabitants. Butte is one on the largest National Historic Landmark Districts consisting of 4,500 buildings.

The Berkley Pit was an open pit mine where all other mines were underground. The Pit is 1,800 feet deep, 7,000 feet long, 5,600 feet wide and nearly three miles in diameter. It operated from 1955 until 1982 and when it closed it was the largest truck-operated open pit copper mine in the United States. During its operation 1.4 billion tons of ore was removed and most was shipped by train to the nearby town of Anaconda's smelters. Water has filled the Pit with a acidity of 2.5, about the same as vinegar.

William Andrew Clark, a wealthy mine owner also owned the city's streetcar lines and a stamp mill. By 1885 he was part-owner of 46 mines in and near Butte. He built a 34-room house named the Copper King Mansion that today is worn on the outside, but beautifully decorated inside where guided tours are given. Clark built the house in 1884 for a cost of $260,000, a half-day's income, as he made $17 million a month and that was in 1884.

With mines and smelters operating around the clock spewing toxic waste the city often needed to turn on street lights in the daytime for residents to see. The pollution covered many miles killing all vegetation with affects as far as fifty miles away. When farmers complained Anaconda Company (one of the larger companies) simply bought the farms. Today the U.S. Government's largest cleanup project is in Butte.

We took an excellent narrated trolley tour to get an overview of Butte and learn its history. Then we toured the beautiful county courthouse that cost most then the Capitol in Helena. It has a domed rotunda and paintings that rival most state capitol buildings. We also toured the Copper King Mansion, visited a memorial where the 168 miners were killed, drove around town and looked at old buildings, houses and the mine headframes. Finally we toured the World Museum of Mining at the site of the old Orphan Girl Mine where we learned "everything" about hard rock mining in Montana. Old mining trains, steam engines and every apparatus know to hard rock mining is located on the grounds for inspection. Can you imagine walking in a small steel cage with several other miners and being dropped up to a mile below the surface to work in a mine shaft for $3 a day?

We stayed at Fairmont RV Park between Anaconda and Butte. It is a very nice campground that advertises free WiFi (wireless internet), a free high-speed line and the old stand telephone line for internet users. But both the WiFi and high-speed line did not work and the park's management was not concerned about getting them working. That was a big disappointment as Norm planned to use WiFi to catch up on a lot of internet work.