Mine Spooks

Waino Nyland came to Butte as a child from Finland in the early 1900s. He remembered that the first disaster his family experienced occurred when a lever broke on a hoisting engine as a cage was taking four men down into the mines. The cage fell twenty-two hundred feet, killing the riders. The bodies of the four men, one of them Nyland’s next-door neighbor, came out of the wreckage in pieces. The men’s spirits, according to Nyland, still haunt the mine. If you look down the shaft when the time is right on certain days, four pairs of lonely eyes stare back at you, looking up from the bottom of their deep, dark grave. Most don’t like to talk about ghosts, but all Butte miners have heard unexplained noises deep in the mines, had shovels or buckets disappear, and know about the phantom ring. Every hoisting engineer has answered a ring for a hoist-up where no one is working. If he sends a cage down in answer to the ring, it invariably comes back empty. And all miners know to watch out for the white goat on Anaconda Hill. He can turn up anywhere, because all Butte mines are connected, and sneak up from behind. If you are too close to the edge of a shaft, he’ll butt you right in.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Medicine Tree

The Medicine Tree south of Darby on U.S. Highway 93 once towered over the landscape. The four-hundred-year-old Ponderosa pine was a timeworn icon, a site sacred to the Salish-Kootenai tribes. According to a legend handed down by local tribes, a monstrous bighorn sheep terrorized the southern Bitterroot valley. Coyote used his guile to trick the ram into charging a small tree to prove his strength. The ram's large curled horns sank deeply into the trunk and trapped him there. Coyote cut off his head and promised that in the generations to come, there would be no more wicked creatures and the tree would be a place of peace and good luck. But the real facts are just as dramatic. On March 11, 1824, Alexander Ross of the Hudson Bay Company came upon the tree. He wrote in his journal, “Here is a curiosity called the Ram's Horn—out of a large pine five feet from the root projects a ram's head, the horns of which are transfixed to the middle. The natives cannot tell when this took place but tradition says when the first hunter passed this way, he shot an arrow at a mountain ram and wounded him; the animal turned on his assailant who jumped behind a tree. The animal, missing its aim, pierced the tree with his horns and killed himself. The horns are crooked and very large. The tree appears to have grown round the horns.” No sign of the ram’s head remains today. In 2001 a storm snapped the tree’s trunk, leaving only 20 feet of it standing. Vandals poisoned this remaining portion. But travelers still pay homage to the Medicine Tree with offerings and prayers for good luck.

Photo of the Medicine Tree when it was still alive from Montana Living