The camp on Indian Creek in Broadwater County went through two names before it settled on the one it carries today. It was first called St. Louis, a name that appeared on early maps and in the territorial records when gold was discovered along the creek in 1869. By the mid-1870s it had been renamed Hassel, after Joseph E. Hassel, one of the pioneer miners who had worked the ground from the beginning. The renaming was a common courtesy in the mining districts, a way of honoring the men who had done the hard early work before the investors and the stamp mills arrived. Hassel never grew into a large town, but it was a genuine community, with a post office, a main street, a brothel, and the social infrastructure of a working mining camp. The creek it sat on produced approximately five million dollars in gold over the course of its active years, a figure that made it one of the more productive secondary camps in Broadwater County.

History

The gold discovery on Indian Creek came in 1869, in the foothills of the Elkhorn Mountains on the eastern edge of what is now Broadwater County. The creek and its tributaries held placer deposits that attracted prospectors in the years immediately following the great rushes at Alder Gulch and Confederate Gulch, when men who had missed the richest ground were still working through the secondary drainages of central Montana looking for what had been overlooked. Indian Creek was not overlooked for long. By 1875 the camp had been formally organized, with approximately forty miners working the placer ground along the creek and its branches.

The placer phase of the camp's history lasted roughly a decade. By 1880, the easily accessible surface deposits had been worked through, and the operation shifted to stamp mills and hydraulic sluicing, which could process larger volumes of lower-grade material more efficiently than hand methods. This transition was typical of Montana's secondary placer camps, where the initial rush of individual miners gave way to more capital-intensive operations as the richest ground was exhausted. The stamp mills at Hassel were modest by the standards of the larger districts, but they kept the camp productive through the 1880s.

The National Register of Historic Places documentation for the district notes that gold was discovered in and around Indian Creek in 1866, with the St. Louis mining camp forming in the years that followed and being renamed Hassel after the pioneer miner whose name had become attached to the place. The camp's post office, established under the Hassel name, served the miners and the small permanent population that remained after the initial rush had passed. The brothel, the cabins, and the main street that contemporary accounts describe were the social fabric of a camp that was working rather than booming, a place where men came to earn wages rather than to strike it rich overnight.

The total production figure of approximately five million dollars in gold from Indian Creek reflects the sustained but unspectacular character of the Hassel district. It was never a Confederate Gulch or a Diamond City, never a place where a single week's cleanup produced six figures. What it was, instead, was a reliable producer over a long period, the kind of camp that kept men employed and kept the county's tax base intact through the years when the spectacular camps had already played out.

The Elkhorn Mountain foothills that surround the Hassel site are a different landscape from the high-altitude camps of the Pioneer Mountains or the deep gulches of the Big Belts. The country is open enough that the camp was accessible by wagon road throughout the mining season, and the supply problem that plagued the higher-elevation camps was less severe here. The proximity to Townsend and the Missouri River valley meant that goods could reach the camp without the extraordinary logistical effort that characterized operations like Hecla or Lion City. This accessibility was part of what made Hassel a working camp rather than a boom camp; the men who came here were not isolated enough to develop the intense social culture of the high-altitude mines, and the town's character reflected that.

The National Register documentation for the district notes that the St. Louis camp, as Hassel was originally known, was one of several mining operations along the eastern slope of the Elkhorn Mountains that contributed to Broadwater County's early economic development. The county's mining history is less celebrated than that of the major districts to the south and west, but it was real and sustained, and Hassel was a part of it.

The decline of Hassel followed the pattern of most of Montana's secondary placer camps. As the stamp mills processed through the accessible ore and the hydraulic operations exhausted the creek gravels, the economic reason for the camp's existence diminished. The post office closed, the permanent residents moved on, and the buildings were left to the elements. By the early twentieth century, Hassel had become the ghost town it remains today.

What Remains Today

The Hassel site retains the physical evidence of its mining history in the disturbed ground along Indian Creek, the waste rock dumps from the stamp mill operations, and scattered structural remnants from the camp's active years. The setting in the Elkhorn Mountain foothills is attractive, with the creek running through open country that gives the site a different character from the heavily forested high-altitude camps of the Pioneer Mountains. The isolation that defined the camp during its active years is still present; Hassel is not on any major road and receives few casual visitors.

The broader Broadwater County mining district, of which Hassel was a part, included several other camps and workings along the drainages of the Elkhorn Mountains' eastern slope. The county museum in Townsend has materials on the district's history and can provide context for a visit to the Hassel site.

Visiting

Hassel is located in Broadwater County in the Elkhorn Mountain foothills, accessible via secondary roads from the town of Townsend. The site is on or near public land, but access roads are unpaved and may require a high-clearance vehicle. No facilities exist at the site. Townsend, the Broadwater County seat on the Missouri River, is the nearest service center. The Broadwater County Museum in Townsend has exhibits on the county's mining history, including the Indian Creek district.