On the morning of July 28, 1862, a prospector named John White knelt beside a gravel bar on Grasshopper Creek and found what he had crossed a continent to find. White and his party had come up from the Pike's Peak country of Colorado, where the placers were already thinning, following rumor and instinct into the remote Beaverhead Valley of what was then Idaho Territory. The creek ran cold and clear out of the mountains to the west, cutting through a narrow valley floored with sagebrush and bunchgrass at nearly six thousand feet above sea level. What White found in the gravel that morning was gold, and the news of it spread faster than any rider could carry it.

Within weeks, the creek was lined with men. By the following spring, a town of three thousand souls had materialized on the benchland above the water, a place of log cabins, canvas tents, mud streets, and the constant percussion of picks and sluice boxes. They called it Bannack, after the Bannock people whose territory this had always been. The name was a misspelling that stuck, and the town it named became the first great boomtown of Montana.

The gold of Grasshopper Creek was placer gold, meaning it lay loose in the gravel of the streambed, freed by centuries of erosion from the quartz veins higher up the mountain. A man with a pan and a strong back could work it without machinery, which was why the rush came so fast and so far. Men arrived from the exhausted fields of California and Colorado, from the camps of Idaho, from the farms of the Midwest. They came in wagon trains and on foot, following the Montana Trail north from Fort Hall. By late 1863, the population of Bannack and the surrounding gulches had swelled to perhaps five thousand, and the gold yields of the first two years reached five million dollars.

The town that grew up around that wealth was rough in the way that all frontier boomtowns were rough, but Bannack had a particular darkness at its center. The man elected sheriff of Bannack in 1863 was Henry Plummer, a handsome and persuasive former lawman from California who had already killed at least one man and served time in San Quentin. In Bannack, Plummer presented himself as a reformed character, and the miners, desperate for order, believed him. They should not have. Plummer was, as Thomas Dimsdale later wrote in the first book published in Montana Territory, the leader of the very road agents he was supposed to suppress. "In the case of the Vigilantes of Montana," Dimsdale recorded, "it must be also remembered that the Sheriff himself was the leader of the Road Agents, and his deputies were the prominent members of the band."

Plummer's gang, known as the Innocents, operated along the roads between the mining camps, robbing and murdering travelers with a systematic efficiency that suggested inside knowledge of who was carrying gold and when. More than a hundred men died by their hands in the winter of 1863 and 1864. The response, when it came, was swift and extralegal. A committee of vigilantes formed in Virginia City and Bannack, and in January 1864 they moved against the gang with the same directness the gang had used against its victims. On January 10, 1864, Henry Plummer was taken from his cabin and hanged from the gallows he himself had ordered built as sheriff. His deputies Ned Ray and Buck Stinson died the same night. Over the following weeks, the vigilantes executed twenty-four men in total, and the reign of terror on the Montana roads ended as abruptly as it had begun.

That same year, 1864, Bannack achieved a distinction that had nothing to do with gold or gallows. When Congress carved Montana Territory out of Idaho Territory in May, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Sidney Edgerton as the first territorial governor, and Edgerton, who had been living in Bannack since the previous autumn, designated it the interim territorial capital. The first Montana Territorial Legislature convened in Bannack in December 1864, meeting in Edgerton's own cabin. The honor was brief. Alder Gulch, sixty miles to the east, had produced a richer strike in 1863, and Virginia City had grown larger and better connected. The capital moved there before the year was out, and Bannack was left to manage its own diminishment.

The gold of Grasshopper Creek was never inexhaustible. The shallow placers that had drawn the first rush were worked out within a few years, and the deeper hard-rock deposits required capital and machinery that most individual miners could not supply. Hydraulic mining, which used high-pressure water to wash entire hillsides through sluices, extended the life of the district into the 1870s and 1880s, but the yields were never again what they had been in those first frenzied seasons. Population fell steadily. Businesses closed. Families left for newer strikes in the Judith Basin and the Coeur d'Alene country. By the 1890s, Bannack was a shadow of what it had been, a few dozen people rattling around in buildings that had once housed thousands.

The town did not die all at once. Small-scale mining continued intermittently into the twentieth century, and a handful of residents remained through the 1930s and 1940s. But the arc of Bannack's history was complete long before the last family departed: a gold discovery, a rush, a brief moment of political consequence, a lawless interlude that became legend, and then the long, quiet retreat of the population back to wherever they had come from.

What Remains Today

What makes Bannack unusual among Montana's ghost towns is not its history, which it shares in broad outline with dozens of other camps, but the degree to which that history is still physically present. More than sixty original structures survived into the modern era, a concentration of nineteenth-century frontier architecture unmatched in the state. The reason for this survival is partly the remoteness of the site, which discouraged salvage and development, and partly the dry, cold climate of the Beaverhead Valley, which is hard on people but gentle on wood.

Bannack State Park, established in 1954 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961, preserves the townsite on approximately one thousand acres along Grasshopper Creek. The Hotel Meade, a two-story frame structure that served as the county courthouse before it became a hotel, stands near the center of town, its false front still intact. The Methodist Church, built in 1877, is one of the oldest Protestant churches in Montana still standing in its original location. The Masonic Hall, the jail, the assay office, the schoolhouse, and the ruins of the Skinner Saloon are all present, some stabilized and some left to decay at their own pace.

The state park does not restore its buildings to a finished state. The philosophy is one of arrested decay: structures are stabilized to prevent collapse but not repaired to look new, so that visitors encounter the buildings as they actually are, weathered and leaning and full of the particular silence of places that once held noise. The effect is powerful. Walking the main street of Bannack on a summer morning, with the creek audible below and the mountains visible above, it is not difficult to understand why this place became what it became.

Visiting

Bannack State Park is located approximately twenty-five miles west of Dillon via Montana Highway 278 and a gravel access road. The park is open year-round, though the access road can be difficult in winter. Day-use fees apply. The park hosts Bannack Days each July, a living history event that brings the town briefly back to life with period demonstrations, music, and guided tours.

The site is managed by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Camping is available within the park. No services are available at the townsite itself; visitors should bring water and supplies from Dillon. Cell service is limited.