Bear Town, as Mary J. Pardee wrote in the most thorough account of its history, was the only one of the great placer camps of Montana whose story had not been definitely recorded. That was in the 1920s, when Pardee undertook her laborious research into original records and her painstaking quest for survivors of the days when the camp was one of Montana's greatest. Her account, published in the Missoulian, remains the essential document of Beartown's history, and it captures a place that crowded the full drama of its existence into fifteen lively years. Immense fortunes were made and lost. The "Fightin' Bar" witnessed daily battles. Five thousand men were camped in Bear Gulch within weeks of the gold discovery in October 1865. And when it was over, all that remained were seven graves on a hillside and the stone cellar of a general store where a kindly Spaniard and a kindly Frenchman had given grubstakes to every man and woman who asked.

History

The gold discovery that created Beartown was made in late October 1865, when Joe and Bob Booth, Charles Hickey, and Jack Reynolds, prospecting out of Elk Creek, found color in Bear Gulch, a narrow drainage in the Garnet Range of Granite County, approximately forty miles east of Missoula. Montana Territory was not yet a year old, and the news of the discovery spread with the speed that characterized every major strike in the territory. Within weeks, five thousand men had camped in the gulch, men of every nationality: Spanish, French, Dutch, Irish, and the full range of the mining West's international workforce.

Bear Gulch was narrow and steep-sided, with a gravel bed and a width that opened in only a couple of places to as much as a few hundred feet. The bowl where Beartown lay was no more than a quarter mile long and 450 feet wide, hemmed in by ragged mountains except for canyon-like openings at either end. Into this small space the life of a boom town seethed for fifteen years.

The town had one street, and along it stood seventeen saloons, several blacksmith shops, restaurants, a hotel, a general store, a brewery, a jail, livery stables, slaughter houses, a drug store, and Gee Lee's Wash house. The buildings were mostly one-story, one-room log structures, roofed with sod or shakes and floored with dirt or rough lumber. Two buildings achieved two-story height: Ball's hotel at the upper end of the street, operated by Mr. and Mrs. Ball as a homelike establishment for miners who came in for supper or found it too late to start back to their diggings, and Pelletier's saloon, a long, high-ceilinged building with a balcony around the central room, a polished bar, a spotless mirror, an ornate billiard table, and gaming tables for faro, roulette, blackjack, and poker. Chicago Joe and her troupe of dance hall girls worked Pelletier's, as did Spanish Jack, who played her hand alone and won.

At the southern end of town, a short, stocky Spaniard named Joaquin Abascal and a Frenchman known as LaForcade ran the largest and most popular general store in camp. An appeal for a grubstake to these two was never denied. With a slap on the shoulder and a hearty drink from the imported liquor kept for private use in their stone cellar, there was hardly a man or woman in Beartown who had not at some time received a full grubstake from them. The path to the cellar was well worn through the rocks, leading straight from the store but weaving on its return, it was said.

The street itself served a triple purpose. It was a street; it housed a placer water ditch into which most of the waters of Bear Creek and Deep Creek were diverted; and when the placering was through for the day and the water had cleared, it provided the town's water supply. Each resident kept large barrels along the edge of the ditch, filling them each evening for the next day's use.

Among the thousands who made Beartown an unforgettable chapter in Montana's history were men who later became prominent in the state's affairs. W.A. Clark, who would become one of the Copper Kings of Butte and one of the wealthiest men in America, was a peddler in Beartown in 1866. The founder of the Warm Springs State Hospital attended to the camp's medical needs. The gold that Bear Gulch produced was estimated as high as thirty million dollars, a figure that places Beartown among the major producers of Montana's placer era.

Beartown's decline was gradual rather than sudden. The placer deposits that had drawn five thousand men to the gulch were worked out over the course of the camp's fifteen active years, and the population contracted as the easy gold was exhausted. The transition from placer mining to lode mining that sustained other Montana camps was accomplished not at Beartown itself but at Garnet, a few miles up the range, where the lode deposits that had fed the placer ground were found and developed in the 1870s and 1880s. Beartown became a memory, and Garnet became the district's new center.

What Remains Today

The stone cellar of Abascal and LaForcade's general store is the only structure from Beartown that survived. Seven graves on the hillside above the old town site mark the resting places of some of the men who died in the camp during its fifteen active years. The gulch itself retains the character of the narrow, steep-sided drainage that Pardee described, and the site is accessible from the Bear Gulch Road that connects the Clark Fork valley at Bearmouth to the Garnet Ghost Town.

Visiting

Beartown is located in Granite County in Bear Gulch, accessible from the Bear Gulch Road that runs from the Bearmouth exit on Interstate 90 to the Garnet Ghost Town. The road is unpaved and requires a high-clearance vehicle; it is open from late spring through early fall. The Garnet Ghost Town, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, is approximately twelve miles up the road from Bearmouth and is one of Montana's best-preserved mining sites. Beartown lies along the route between Bearmouth and Garnet. Drummond, on Interstate 90, is the nearest town with services.