Confederate Gulch is a steeply sided valley on the western slope of the Big Belt Mountains, its small stream running westward into Canyon Ferry Lake near the town of Townsend. The gulch takes its name from the Confederate soldiers who made the first minor gold discovery there in the fall of 1864, men on parole from the Civil War who had come west looking for a new start and found, instead, the beginning of one of the most spectacular placer gold rushes in Montana history. The town of Diamond City grew up to serve the miners who flooded into the gulch after the discovery of the Montana Bar in 1865, and for four years Confederate Gulch was the most productive gold-producing area in the entire Montana Territory. Today the gulch is quiet, the hydraulic mining operations of the 1860s having consumed both the gold and the original townsite, leaving a landscape of spoil banks and disturbed ground that bears witness to the intensity of what happened there.

History

The geology of Confederate Gulch made it what it was. The Big Belt Mountains in this area are composed of Proterozoic sedimentary rocks, shales and limestones, intruded by diorite and quartz diorite dikes and sills. The gold was concentrated in Pleistocene gravel deposits laid down along the creek drainages, and the particular character of the Montana Bar, where gold-bearing gravel had accumulated on a shelf above the gulch floor rather than on bedrock at the bottom, was a product of the specific way the ancient stream had deposited its sediment. The bedrock beneath the Bar was a dense blue-gray limestone with depressions that trapped gold, and when the gravels were washed, the gold in those depressions was so concentrated it could be seen glowing from a distance.

The Confederate soldiers who first prospected the gulch in 1864 found modest placer deposits that encouraged further work but did not trigger a rush. The gulch was on one of the few trails that crossed the Big Belt Mountains from the Missouri Valley to the Smith River Valley, and prospectors passed through regularly in the winter and spring of 1865 without finding anything that warranted staying. The discovery of the Montana Bar by Carl Joseph Friedrichs and his group of German prospectors changed everything. Friedrichs, an experienced Colorado miner, liked the looks of the country and prospected up the stream into an area that became known as Cement Gulch. He did not find the richest ground there, but when he moved back down the main gulch and sank a prospect hole on the shelf above the gulch floor, he found the Bar.

The rush that followed was immediate and overwhelming. By 1866, when gold production was at its peak, approximately 10,000 people, roughly thirty-five percent of the entire population of Montana Territory, were working in Confederate Gulch. The miners built ditches and flumes that extended for miles to bring water to the workings, and when the hand-mining methods of the early years proved insufficient to process the volume of gravel that needed to be moved, they turned to hydraulic mining, using high-pressure water to wash down entire hillsides. The hydraulic operations were effective at extracting gold from low-grade ground, but they were also destructive on a scale that transformed the landscape permanently. The spoil banks from the hydraulic work grew to enormous size, and eventually the operations consumed the original site of Diamond City, forcing the town to relocate.

From 1866 to 1869, Confederate Gulch produced an estimated $19 to $30 million in gold, a figure that made it the most productive mining area in Montana Territory during those years. The gold was exhausted by 1870. The population of Diamond City fell from its peak to 255 people in a single year, and the gulch that had held a third of Montana's population was essentially empty within a decade of the first discovery.

Later mining operations in the gulch included lode mining attempts and, in the twentieth century, dredging operations that reworked the creek gravels for whatever gold the hydraulic miners had missed. Pat Wells, a mining engineer from Butte, recognized the potential for dredging in the 1920s and bought out the major landholdings in the area, commencing dredge operations that continued intermittently through the mid-twentieth century. The dredge tailings added another layer of disturbance to a landscape that had already been thoroughly reworked.

What Remains Today

Confederate Gulch today is one of the most visually striking examples of hydraulic mining's impact on the Montana landscape. The spoil banks from the 1860s operations are still present, massive ridges of gravel and rock that define the gulch floor for miles. The dredge tailings from the twentieth-century operations add a different texture to the disturbance, the characteristic rows of rounded gravel that dredging leaves behind. The original site of Diamond City is unidentifiable; the hydraulic operations consumed it completely, and the relocated town left no standing structures.

The Montana Bar, the site of the discovery that started the rush, is identifiable in the landscape by the shelf above the gulch floor where Friedrichs and his group found their gold. The scale of the disturbance around it gives some sense of how thoroughly the ground was worked in the years that followed.

Visiting

Confederate Gulch is located in the Big Belt Mountains east of Canyon Ferry Lake in Broadwater County. An unimproved road runs up the gulch from the Missouri River valley and crosses the top of the Big Belts on its way to the Smith River valley. The road is passable in dry conditions with a high-clearance vehicle but becomes difficult in wet weather. The site is remote and receives few casual visitors. No facilities exist at the site. The town of Townsend, the Broadwater County seat, is the nearest service center, approximately twenty miles to the west via Canyon Ferry Lake. See also the companion article on Diamond City, the town that served the gulch during its peak years.