Neihart’s Silver Lining

Neihart is a wonderfully quirky little community in the heart of the rugged Little Belt Mountains. In the 1890s, Neihart’s population of four thousand rivaled that of Great Falls. Today, the twenty-five full time residents take pride in the town’s colorful past. Its roots date to 1881 when James Neihart and company discovered rich silver veins. There was gold in the district, too. Richard Oatey and his partners sold their silver mine at nearby Barker and headed to Neihart to celebrate. As they hiked back to Barker, hung over and sick, Oatey inadvertently knocked off a piece of outcropping and stuck it in his pocket. Several days later he took it out and studied it. Gold ran through it. The assayer valued it high in both gold and silver content. Oatey and his partners searched the hills and coulees for years, but they could never find the mysterious outcropping.

Scattered buildings recall Neihart's roots.

 By 1885, Neihart bustled. Even though the area was one of the richest in Montana, lack of transportation hindered further development until the arrival of a spur of the Montana Central Railroad in 1891. After the silver market crashed in 1893, Neihart’s mines operated sporadically. They never regained their 1890s momentum, but the Broadwater and Chamberlain mines continued to produce. In the 1920s, Neihart’s silver production was second only to that of Silver Bow County. The late 1930s to 1945 saw the last burst of activity when silver prices briefly increased. In 1945, Neihart residents took their last round trip to Great Falls. Upon their return that afternoon, the train ran no more and workers pulled up the tracks.

Mines and mills dot the hillside around Neihart.

Remnants of mines and mills dot the hillsides. Declared a Superfund site in 2001, the $11.8 million project will include removal of lead-contaminated soil.  Although the mining waste poses no immediate risk, the project will protect residents from long-term exposure. Neihart’s Main Street showcases the community’s individuality. A sign posted just outside town reinforces its resdients’ love for their unique community.  “Our small town is like Heaven to us,” it reads, “please don’t drive like Hell through it.”

The town has a wonderfully quirky personality.

Pioneer Artifacts

Helena’s Pioneer Cabin, the oldest documented dwelling in the capital city, was built in 1864 during the height of the gold rush to Last Chance Gulch. In the late 1930s, women in the community saved it from demolition and created Montana’s first house museum. The Pioneer Cabin opened to the public in 1939. Helena’s pioneer families generously donated heirlooms of the 1860s and 1870s, used by their ancestors at Last Chance, to furnish the museum. Among the interesting items in the cabin is a pie safe dated to 1864. Its punched tin panels let the air circulate but kept insects out, allowing safe storage of baked goods. The rustic cabinet was discovered on the property in an outbuilding.

Pie safes with punched tin panels were essential in well-equipped frontier kitchens. 

Another item of interest is a Civil War era “hat bathtub” that came West by covered wagon. It has a place for the bather to sit, a place to put the soap so it doesn’t fall into the water, and just enough room for one’s legs. It was difficult to heat quantities of water on a small cookstove for a bath, and so bathing was not a frequent occurrence. The tradition held that the oldest person in the family got the first shot at the hot water. In mining families, by the time the youngest child got to the water after all that dirt came off the adults, it was dark and murky. The expression, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” comes from the fact that the youngest child could get lost in the dirty water.

Hat bathtubs—resembling an inverted hat—were popular during the Civil War.

During the Victorian era, it was common to clip a lock of hair from a person who passed away. Jewelry made of human hair was lovingly worn by grieving family members. But sometimes families saved these cherished locks to weave them into beautiful forms which were framed, cherished, and passed down. Some of these incredible works of art came west. The Pioneer Cabin displays two beautiful—although a little creepy—“mourning wreaths.”

The human hair in this mourning wreath was likely from more than one individual and was an artistic tribute to deceased family members.

The Camp at Last Chance

After the four discoverers staked their claims at Last Chance, Helena’s early story continues. The Georgians christened the new diggings “Rattlesnake District” for the snakes that were everywhere. A monster rattler with ten buttons on his tail, nailed to a post, warned of the danger. A monstrous grizzly bear that made nightly visits at the gulch’s south end, gorging on the chokecherries along Last Chance Creek, inspired the name Grizzly Gulch.  The howling and barking of wolves and coyotes, discoverer Reginald Stanley recalled, “made the nights hideous.”

Other miners joined the Georgians to pitch tents and mine claims during the summer of 1864.  Some stayed but more moved on, discouraged by the scant supply of water.  In mid-September, the first group of emigrants arrived with the Thomas A. Holmes wagon train from Shakopee, Minnesota. The train included several hundred men and fourteen women. Only half of their names were recorded. Many hailed from Minnesota, but emigrants also came from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and some were European-born immigrants. The incomplete roster includes a number of pioneers who stayed and became citizens of Helena. Among them were longtime Helena attorneys John H. Shober, his partner Thomas J. Lowry, and pioneer rancher Nicholas Hilger. John Somerville, who would soon play a key role in naming Helena, was also part of the group.

The hill in the center of this early Helena panorama, circa 1866, is where the fire tower stands today.
Sketch by A. E. Mathews. Montana Historical Society Research Center.

Most of the emigrants had no experience as miners, and the Montana Post poked fun at them, noting that they used blunt picks and worked “like chickens on a grain pile.” But some had good luck. John Marvin Blake of Wisconsin found one of the largest gold nuggets in the area, worth $2,300. With his fortune Blake studied dentistry in Philadelphia and returned to practice in Helena for fifty years. Others opened businesses and made places for themselves in the new community.

The Real Last Chance Discovery Site

Today—July 14, 2014—marks the 150th anniversary of the discovery at Last Chance Gulch by "the Georgians." Reginald Stanley seems to have been the spokesperson for the group, and reading his account leaves little doubt about the location of the discovery site. However, back in 1920, a committee researched the discovery site and came to the erroneous conclusion that the its location was at Sixth and Fuller, exactly where the Montana Club is today. The Montana Historical Society was in on this “research,” and ignored Stanley’s recollection, the most critical and authentic evidence.  A plaque bolted to the building, placed by the Montana Historical Society in 1924, remains there today, identifying the Montana Club as the discovery site. However, Stanley’s description of the discovery leaves no doubt that the first gold was not found at Sixth and Fuller.

This painting, The Four Georgians, by Shorty Shope, was commissioned in 1952 by the Helena HS class of 1953. It now hangs in the Helena Regional Airport. 

Stanley returned to Helena in 1883 and walked the gulch, noting the discovery site was near where Samuel Hauser’s First National Bank then stood. Hauser located his bank there for a good reason. It was the territory’s first federally chartered bank and thus it was appropriate for him to build it where the fabulous gulch yielded up the first gold. It was a stone building with an elaborate imported lock system and a sod roof. In 1886, that building was torn down. The handsome Securities Bank Building on the north Walking Mall replaced the old bank. Over its entry are the dates 1866 for the founding of the bank and 1886 for the building of the new one. The Colwell Building immediately replaced the old bank at the south end of the gulch. The Colwell Building was originally called “Uncle Sam’s Block” for its association with the discovery site and the first federally chartered bank. Samuel Hauser could have corrected the research committee’s mistake, but he died in 1914. How soon we forget!
In honor of the 150th anniversary, a monument has finally marked the real site of the discovery at Last Chance Gulch.

Friday Photo: Happy 4th!

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, Lot 26 Box 8 Folder 5, Mines and Mining photograph collection

Happy Independence Day! This patriotic boy climbed into a bucket on the Montana Coal and Coke Company’s tram line in Electric, Montana.

The Discovery at Last Chance Gulch

With the first greening of spring in 1864, John S. Cowan of Georgia, D. J. Miller of Alabama, John Crabb of Iowa, and Reginald (Bob) Stanley of Nuneaton, England, set out from Alder Gulch to prospect along the Little Blackfoot River. They had no luck and headed over the mountains. After several miserable days of wandering cold and wet in the mist, the sun emerged and they reached the Continental Divide. Pushing down the eastern slope, they camped in a narrow gulch where a stream trickled through gravel. The men passed the evening panning. They did find color, more than they had found elsewhere, but they were anxious to find better diggings and pressed on. Six weeks later, they had found nothing. The discouraged miners began to talk of the little gulch on the east side of the Divide. Nearly out of provisions, the men returned to take one last chance. It was the evening of July 14, 1864. Stanley later wrote:

…while my partners dug some holes near the mouth of the gulch, I took pick, shovel and pan and made my way up stream looking for a bar on which to put down a hole likely to have bedrock. [It was] a fine still evening with the charm of treading the unknown and unexplored.… A tiny stream rippled under gravel banks…. I commenced a hole on the bar and put it down to bedrock, some six or seven feet. Taking a pan of gravel from the bottom, I clambered out and panned it in the little stream close by. Three or four little flat, smooth nuggets was the result; nuggets that made the pan ring when dropped into it….

Miners in gum boots panned streams across Montana looking for gold. Drawing from the Helena Board of Trade, 1887.

Digging pits to bedrock describes the “Georgian method” of placer mining the four miners employed and explains why they were known thereafter as “the Georgians.” According to Stanley, the discovery site was “on bar ground back of the present site of the First National Bank.” In 1886, the Colwell Building replaced the bank. The discovery site is today’s south parking lot. By 1869, successful placer mines at Last Chance and other local gulches collectively yielded nearly $18 million worth of gold or $310 million in modern currency.

Growing up in Butte

Butte, the mining camp that became an industrial hub, was as unique for its children as it was an anomaly. Copper king W. A. Clark’s Columbia Gardens, which boasted one of the nation’s first Ferris wheels and a spectacular roller coaster, was his gift to the community, and children especially loved it. Mining camp ruffians and children of prominent mine officials rubbed elbows on the streetcar that took them all to the gardens each week for Children’s Day. Children by the hundreds enjoyed the entertainment. At the end of the day, they would pick huge bouquets of pansies to take home to their mothers.

Children pick pansies in Columbia Gardens. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.120

But it was not all fun and games. Butte boys who reached puberty and could chew a plug of Peerless tobacco without throwing up were considered man enough to work in the mines. In the 1930s, a sign on the fence around the red light district read “Men under 21 keep out,” acknowledgment that young boys in Butte became men long before they reached legal age. Of all the mining camps, Butte was probably the most dangerous place for youngsters. This made Butte’s children tough and unusually daring. They seemed to thrive in the polluted air and unsanitary conditions frequently noted in reports to the Board of Health.

When Maury Mulcahy was growing up in Butte in the 1930s and 1940s, mine officials came around to his elementary school and showed the kids what a blasting cap was, how to extract the explosive powder, and then warned them not to pick them up. After the lecture, every boy went out in search of caps. They would pour the powder into a bottle with a wick, put it on the train tracks, and try to explode it as a train passed by. Mulcahy knew children who lost limbs to this form of play. The extreme danger made the game that much more fun.

Aldridge

Coal veins discovered in 1892 in Park County fueled the life of Aldridge, a mining town about seven miles northwest of present day Gardiner. Mostly Austrian immigrants, and a fair share of Italians, populated what briefly became one of the greatest coal producers in the country. By 1895, the mine’s main entry had been driven 1,800 feet into the mountain. By 1897, the mines produced between three and five hundred tons of coal daily for transport to the coke ovens eight thousand feet away. When the Miners’ Union organized that year on April 19, Montana Coal and Coke Company officials shut down the mines and coking plant, refusing to employ union men. But the workmen voted to stay with the union, and after several months, the company finally accepted a union contract.

Aldrige in 1902. Photo courtesy Montana Guide Service

Aldridge became a strong union town with a union store and a hospital with three staff doctors. The two most important holidays it celebrated were Union Day on April 19 and Labor Day. There were so many in Aldridge who could not speak English that the workmen were glad to have the union as their leader and spokesperson. The fortunes of the union thus became the fortunes of the camp. Progress came to Aldridge, but helped spell its demise. Mules delivering the coal to the coke ovens were replaced by a flumed water system and later by an expensive electric tramway. Shortened shifts, shrinking work weeks, and inevitable strikes beleaguered the town. Finally in 1910, the Montana Coal and Coke Company defaulted on bonds issued to pay for the tramway. Despite its rich veins, the mines closed and residents deserted Aldridge as quickly as they had come.

They Lost a Claim

Hope Mommer tells a story in her biography Look Out West: Here Comes Robert Dempsey about an opportunity Robert Dempsey's little daughters lost. Dempsey was a well-known horse trader with a large extended family. The Dempseys arrived at Bannack at the height of the gold rush. They settled in a log cabin outside the gold camp while the hired hands lived in elkskin lodges, tending the livestock, and watching the miners in their frantic search for gold. The Dempsey daughters, ten-year-old Maggie and eight-year-old Mary, also watched the miners panning in Grasshopper Creek. Maggie studied the procedure. She and her sister found a spot along the creek, and imitated the miners, slushing and swirling water and gravel around in a pan. Their work paid off, and suddenly the girls saw something yellow and gleaming. They had found gold! They ran to the cabin to show their father. He got very excited. Dempsey was an Irishman, and exclaimed in his thick brogue, “On Maggie, me darl’n, to be sure it’s gold! I’ll be gone to file me daughter’s gold claim.”  And Dempsey immediately set off for town to file a claim on his daughters’ behalf.

Bannack in the 1860s. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 940-703

But before Robert Dempsey reached the claim office, he stopped off at one of the numerous watering holes to have a wee nip or two in celebration. So proud was he of Maggie and Mary and their great discovery, the whiskey loosened his tongue. He began to brag about it. Miners kept a watchful eye and an open ear for such casual talk, and were known to take advantage. In this case, some other miner overheard the Irishman telling his friends about Maggie’s gold and the location of the discovery. The miner made a beeline for the claim office, filing on what should have been the little Dempsey girls’ claim. When Dempsey finally arrived at the land office, the claim had already been taken.

Friday Photo: Smith Mine Rescue Worker

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, reference file

A rescue worker comes out of Smith Mine near Bearcreek after a methane gas explosion in the mine killed seventy-four miners on February 27, 1943.

P.S. The rest of the story of the disaster.

Christenot Mill at Union City

Prospectors discovered gold in Alder Gulch, Idaho Territory, on May 26, 1863. Within weeks, the countryside was teeming with thousands of prospectors, but the easily extracted placer gold soon played out. B. F. Christenot, acting independently or perhaps as agent to Philadelphia backers, began acquiring claims in the Summit Mining District in 1864. Christenot later concealed a substantial amount of gold on his person and traveled to Philadelphia where he convinced investors to back construction of a mill. The transition from placer to lode mining was an expensive undertaking that required heavy financial backing. Union City is one of few places where lode mining was attempted in remote Montana. Transporting machinery without the railroad was almost impossible. But at the Christenot Mill, machinery was transported in twenty-six ox-drawn wagons over the Bozeman Trail and up the narrow trail to Union City, an incredible feat. It arrived in October 1866. Thompson and Griffith of Virginia City constructed the mill, which operated by spring 1867. In June, journalist A. K. McClure arrived from the east to assume its management. Most milling of this period was accomplished by stamping, but the Union City operation employed a process using Chilean rollers for crushing the quartz. Although the mill was reported to be the most efficient in the territory, the ore was soon exhausted and the mill closed down in spring 1868. Sixty thousand dollars was said to have been extracted from the company’s nearby Oro Cache lode, but the equipment alone cost $80,000; the operation was a financial disaster. At peak production the Christenot Mill employed up to forty workers, and the site, representing all aspects of gold milling technology from processing to management, fills a significant chapter in the history of mining in Montana. The drive up to the remote site conveys some sense of what must have been a harrowing journey for both oxen and drivers.

Hydraulicking

Placer gold is that which is loose in the soil and closest to the surface. Placer mining requires water to wash the dirt, perseverance, and a strong back. Gold is the heaviest material in the soil, and so in the process of washing, the heavy gold is the residue remaining in the pan or the sluice box. The rich goldfields that drew miners to Montana in the mid-1860s only held so much placer gold. Miners wanted to be sure to extract all of it, and so when that closest to the surface was depleted, they resorted to other methods of extraction. Hydraulic mining, or power washing, was one method. The Romans used a similar technique. They filled a reservoir or tank above the area to be flushed and allowed the water to flow down the hillside to expose the veins of gold. The first hydraulic mining in the West was done in California in 1853. Using a hose made of rawhide and a wooden nozzle to channel the water into elevated flumes, gravity created enough water pressure to move large rocks and boulders. Miners employed much the same method at Bannack, Alder Gulch, and Last Chance. They created a reservoir, and then water wheels channeled water under tremendous pressure into huge hoses. These were then directed to the hillsides to power wash the soil down to the bedrock. A series of sluices filtered the dirt. This destructive mining method drastically changed the landscape, reducing once-timbered hills to bare rock.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, Lot 26 B7 F6

Friday Photo: High Ore Mine

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.144

N.A. Forsyth captured this stereoview of workers coming off shift at Butte's High Ore Mine circa 1909. Click the photo for a bigger version.

P.S. The same photographer snapped this humorous photo of "miners."

Mules in the Mines

As electricity came to the mines in Butte in 1915, mules were phased out. Miners were sorry to see them go as they added so much personality to the dangerous work. Some mules loved the miners’ rough caresses and others would bite or kick and wanted no human attention. Hundreds of mules worked in miles of tunnels beneath Butte. Mules went below loaded vertically on the hoist, head down. Once there, they never again saw the light of day until they retired—if they were lucky. Now Kate–she was a kicker. No stall could be built around her that she wouldn’t destroy. She could kick any electric light hung within ten feet of her and when she needed new shoes, the blacksmith would not approach her until she was hog tied and strapped down. Then she would try to kick the shoes off, and sometimes did. Miners called her hind feet “sudden death” and “six months in the hospital,” respectively.

Mule Train on 1100 foot level, Rarus Mine, Butte. N. A. Forsyth, photographer.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.163

Everyone loved Babe, one of the smartest mules to ever work in Butte. Babe loved tobacco. If she saw a miner smoking a pipe during lunch, she would stand close so she could inhale the smoke. Babe was never bridled and took verbal directions. But she complained with looks and groans if asked to pull more than four ore cars in a string.  Sharkey was a thief who knew how to find the men’s lunch buckets. He would often sneak away and work the top off of some poor miner’s dinner pail. Every mule had its own personality and most had at least one miner who missed it when it went to mule heaven at the end of its long road.

The Gold Nugget

In the early summer of 1857, Granville Stuart and his brother James were en route from California to visit their parents in Iowa. Granville became very ill near the future site of Corrine, Utah, delaying their journey for seven weeks. During this delay, an armed confrontation between the Mormon settlers in Utah and the United States government made travel along the emigrant routes impossible. When Granville could travel, Hudson’s Bay employee Jacob Meek advised them to head for the Beaverhead valley where they could safely wait out the Mormon conflict.

Granville Stuart, 1883. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 981-260

It was this circumstance that led to Montana’s first recorded gold discovery. On Christmas Day of 1857, as the Stuarts and others camped in the Beaverhead valley, trader Richard Grant had built a three-room log cabin for his family, and he invited those camped in the area to Christmas dinner. Among the invited guests were the Stuart brothers, Jacob Meek, and Reece Anderson. Grant had hoarded some flour for the feast. The men had not tasted bread in a long time, and so soda bread, chokecherry preserves, dried buffalo meat, boiled smoked buffalo tongue, and coffee made a remarkable feast. Granville’s widow many years later claimed that at this Christmas dinner, Richard Grant gave Granville a gold nugget as a gift, claiming it had been mined at a certain creek in the territory. This supposedly led the Stuarts and Reece Anderson to prospect along Gold Creek the following May 1858. There they made Montana’s first recorded gold discovery. It was later proven, however, that the gold nugget Christmas gift that prompted the Stuart party to prospect had really been mined in California. So that first gold discovery was actually an incredible coincidence.

P.S. Remember Granville's crazy book-buying trip?

Last Chance Stream

Some Helenans dispute the fact that Last Chance Stream, or Creek, once flowed through what is now the downtown. But water was the one essential ingredient needed for placer mining, and we know that the discovery site was where the parking lot for the Colwell Building is today. Water had to be present in that immediate area. Further, the first historic Sanborn Maps of Helena, drawn in 1884, clearly show the water source, although by this time it has been diverted underground into a wooden flume.

Click the map for a bigger version.

The flume runs parallel and roughly between Clore Street (now Park) and Main Street (now Last Chance Gulch). The stream is still there. When it rains, the stream swells. You can see it and hear it flowing beneath the grates in downtown city streets. Richard Buswell has made a study of tracing the stream from its source south of town. One cold day a small group of us followed the stream’s historic path. There are several places where the stream re-emerges above ground. The most dramatic is in Nature Park, east of the Bill Roberts Golf Course. The City of Helena purchased the land in 1974 from the McHugh Land and Livestock Company intending to create “McHugh Park.” Gold dredges once worked the area, leaving behind huge round tailing piles in the destructive search for gold. Porter Brothers Corporation had dredged the location from 1935 until 1943 when gold mining was declared a nonessential industry during World War II. Dredging resumed briefly after the war in 1945. Porter Brothers reportedly took 2.5 million dollars in gold from the area. But the city left the spot undeveloped when the costs to turn the barren landscape into a park proved prohibitive. Vegetation began to regrow. Nature Park is now habitat for deer, fox, birds, and other wildlife.  Last Chance Stream emerges from a large culvert and gurgles merrily along. It runs a lovely crooked course through the park.

Sculpture Gardens

During the nineteenth century, there was a national movement to plan park-like cemeteries with curving driveways and landscaped grounds outside urban areas. The idea took hold in Montana. Our major cities have beautiful park-like cemeteries where turn-of-the-century residents went not only to visit graves but also to picnic and enjoy nature. Missoula’s City Cemetery, Kalispell’s Conrad Cemetery, and Billings's Mountview  are a few examples. Cemeteries were usually located out of town for aesthetic reasons, but planning cemeteries out of town in Butte was a necessity because of health and sanitation. Urban mining everywhere created ground disturbance, and early burials in city churchyards or on private property did not always remain underground. Bodies turned up in odd locations, and exposed burials, especially during epidemics, were a serious health hazard. Keenly aware of this grisly problem, fraternal organizations established Mount Moriah Cemetery in 1877. Rather than curving driveways, it was laid out in simple blocks since there was no landscape to accommodate curving driveways. As much as the community wanted a beautiful cemetery, in nineteenth-century Butte this was impossible. Open hearth smelting polluted the area and prevented anything from growing. The cemetery was bleak and ugly. Butte’s citizens, however, made up for the lack of landscaping by placing fanciful and lovely tombstones on their loved ones’ graves. Butte has the most unique and attractive cemetery art of any in Montana. The desire to create “a spot of beauty” was at first far-fetched. But by 1905, as smelting centralized in Anaconda, trees and shrubs did begin to grow. Today Mount Moriah and Butte’s other sculpture garden cemeteries rival any in Montana.

Mount Moriah has many beautiful sculpture tombstones like this tree stump, which symbolizes a life cut short.
Photo from Buried in Butte by Zena Beth McGlashan

The Lost Mine of the Yellowstone

A golden secret lies in the shadow of Emigrant Peak south of Livingston. Somewhere along the trail to Yellowstone Park, among the gulches where countless winter snows and spring floods have scoured the landscape, lies the fountain of gold, the mother lode, the source of the golden veins that brought miners by the hundreds  to Yellowstone City and Emigrant Gulch.

Courtesy  RootsWeb

David Weaver panned the first gold in Emigrant Gulch—Montana’s fifth great gold discovery—in 1864. He, David Shorthill, Frank Garrett, and others from the States named Emigrant peak, creek, and gulch. These early miners found Jim Bridger’s calling card: twenty elk antlers stuck in a lone pine tree. They assumed that these meant Bridger had been there at some time in the past. Two years later, with a party of other miners, Weaver made an incredibly rich find in the mountains near Emigrant Peak. But the danger of Indian attack made the miners’ work extremely hazardous, and so when the first snow began to fall, the miners were forced to abandon their diggings. Two years later, two of the men returned to find their discovery, but two winters and springs had erased all familiar traces. The miners frantically searched and searched, but the mine was not to be found. Weaver had taken samples of the ore and had them assayed. They proved to be worth $5,000 to the ton, a spectacular amount. Over the years, members of Weaver’s party returned to search the area, but the mine was never found. It is remembered today as the “Lost Mine of the Yellowstone.”

Auditor

Butte’s Berkeley Pit is as poisonous as battery acid. An entire flock of snow geese mistakenly landed on its surface in 1995 and died before they could take flight. But for one lonely matted, mangy canine, the pit’s acrid, crusted shores were home for seventeen lonely years. No one knows where the dog came from. The handful of miners working at Montana Resources, Butte’s only active mining company, named him Auditor because they could never predict when he would show up. He was not a friendly dog, shunning the humans who tried to love him. Miners left him food and water, built a doghouse shanty, and fixed him a bed. He only settled there at night occasionally.

Courtesy Travels with Ace

Auditor’s long, tangled dreadlocks made him look like a moving pile of rags. While the dreadlocks perhaps hinted at his lineage, they likely kept him warm in brutal weather. As he grew old, miners mixed baby aspirin in his food to ease arthritis. One miner once earned enough trust to clip the hair from Auditor’s eyes so that he could see. Miners say that beneath his dreadlocks, he had beautiful eyes. Auditor roamed the wasteland, living where no other living thing could. How the pads of his feet could escape burning from the acid of his habitat defies explanation. In the end, Auditor died peacefully in his shanty in 2003. He was 120 in dog years.

P.S. Remember this heartwarming cattle dog?
P.P.S. Today is Evelyn Cameron's birthday.

Neihart, Montana

Neihart lies at the bottom of a densely timbered canyon along winding Highway 89. The tiny town traces its roots to 1881 when James Neihart and company discovered rich silver veins. By 1882, a crude wagon road connected it with White Sulfur Springs, and miners packed out the silver ore on horseback for processing at the Clendennin smelter twenty miles away. When the smelter shut down in 1883, ox-drawn freight wagons carried Neihart’s ore to Fort Benton where steamboats took it to distant ports. Even though the area was one of Montana’s richest, lack of transportation hindered development. In 1891, a spur of the Montana Central Railroad linked Neihart with the outside world. The new smelter at Great Falls processed Neihart ore, and the town became the undisputed hub of the local mining district.

Postcard courtesy Penny Postcards from Montana

Miners on payday flocked to the great mining camp to sample its saloons, play a game of cards, and visit the ladies in its several parlor houses. The bottom fell out of the silver market in 1893, but Neihart escaped the fate of most silver camps because its mines continued to sporadically operate. Total production of the Neihart mines up to 1900 included 4,008,000 ounces of silver and 10,000,000 pounds of lead. The 1940s saw the last burst of activity when silver prices briefly increased. By 1949, most mines closed permanently.

The remains of mining in Neihart

The mines and mills, whose remnants still dot the hillsides, helped lay the cornerstones of Montana’s economy. Six miles of underground tunnels lie beneath the hills surrounding Neihart. But today, above ground, it is tourism that boosts the local economy.