Two miles southwest of Garnet, on the main divide between Elk Creek and the Bilk Gulch drainage, the mining camp of Coloma occupied a position in the Garnet Range that was close enough to its more famous neighbor to share in the district's history but remote enough to develop a character of its own. The camp's name appears in the historical record spelled variously as Coloma, Colomo, and Colma, a typographical inconsistency that reflects the informal record-keeping of the mining era and the difficulty of standardizing place names in a territory where the post office, the newspaper, and the mining company might all use different spellings for the same location.

The first placer discoveries in the Coloma district came in 1865, when miners working their way through the Garnet Range found color in Bivins Gulch and along Elk Creek. The rush that followed created several small camps in the area, including Coloma, Reynolds, Springtown, and Yreka, each of which occupied a different drainage in the northern Garnet Range. The placer gold was real but not abundant, and the estimates of total free gold production from the district range from $40,000 to $100,000, figures that sustained a population of miners but did not produce the kind of wealth that would have attracted large-scale investment.

The hard-rock era at Coloma began in earnest in the 1880s and 1890s, when miners located the quartz veins along the main divide that had been the source of the placer gold. Several mines were located in 1886 along the divide, and the camp's post office opened in 1895 with Anna Richards as postmaster, a marker of the community's growing permanence. The post office operated until 1908, a thirteen-year run that encompassed the district's most productive period.

The Mammoth Mine was the most developed property in the Coloma district and the one that attracted the most substantial investment. By 1905 the mine had been opened by an incline shaft approximately 350 feet deep, with additional vertical shafts reaching 270 feet and a network of levels totaling about 2,000 feet of underground workings. The property was equipped with a 60-horsepower boiler, a 35-horsepower engine, an Ingersoll air compressor, and a Huntington mill capable of handling fifteen to twenty tons of ore per day. The New York-Montana Gold Mining Company, which owned the Mammoth by 1905, employed thirteen men at the mine and expected to double that number when the mill was fully operational.

The Drummond Call newspaper of September 22, 1905, devoted considerable space to the Mammoth Mine's operations, describing the ore bodies in detail and noting that "there are thousands of tons of ore exposed, much of it of good shipping value, and if the ten stamp mill was in commission, there is enough ore uncovered to keep it running for two years." The optimism expressed in that account was characteristic of the mining press of the period, which tended to describe prospects in their most favorable light, but the Mammoth Mine did produce real ore. An estimated $200,000 was extracted from the Mammoth property over the course of its active life, a respectable figure for a small mountain district.

The Comet Mine, developed by the Quantock Mining and Milling Company in 1905, produced smaller returns of gold from a tunnel bored to crosscut the Mammoth and other veins. The Pearl Mine on the divide between Deep Creek and Bilk Gulch was reported to produce $20,000 in gold and copper. Other properties in the district, including the Clemantha, Cato, Crystal Springs, and Valley claims, were worked sporadically through the first decade of the twentieth century, contributing to a total district production that the various sources estimate at between $40,000 and $250,000 depending on which mines are included in the count.

The Butte-Coloma Gold Mining Company, formed in 1907 with a capitalization of $1,000,000 and the backing of interests associated with W.A. Clark, represented the last major attempt to develop the Coloma district on a large scale. The company's formation coincided with a period of renewed optimism about the district's potential, but the results were disappointing, and the camp entered a long period of sporadic activity and gradual decline.

August Erickson, who worked in the Garnet area from 1930 to 1941, recorded frequent visits to Coloma in his diary, particularly to the Mammoth claims, indicating that small-scale mining continued at the site through the Depression era. The University of Montana's archaeology department conducted an exploratory dig at Coloma in 2010, recovering historical artifacts from the Fessler family claims that had been held by the same family since the mining era. The dig confirmed the site's historical significance and the depth of material culture preserved in the Garnet Range.

What Remains Today

The Coloma site retains evidence of its mining operations, including the remnants of the Mammoth Mine workings and the disturbed terrain of the various prospect pits and shafts that characterized the district. The Coloma cemetery, shown on the 1987 Granite County map, marks the location of the community and provides a tangible connection to the people who lived and worked there.

The site is located within two miles of the Garnet Ghost Town, which is managed by the Bureau of Land Management and is open to visitors. Visitors to Garnet who are interested in the broader history of the Garnet Range will find Coloma a natural extension of that exploration, though the site is less developed and less accessible than the main Garnet townsite.

Visiting

Coloma is located in the Garnet Range approximately two miles southwest of the Garnet Ghost Town, accessible via the same unpaved roads that serve the Garnet site. The road to Garnet is accessible from Highway 200 east of Missoula via Bear Creek Road, or from the Drummond area via Garnet Range Road. A high-clearance vehicle is recommended for both approaches.

The Bureau of Land Management's Missoula Field Office manages the Garnet Ghost Town and can provide information about access to the broader Garnet Range, including the Coloma area. Missoula is the nearest city with visitor services, approximately an hour west via Highway 200 and Interstate 90.