At 8,711 feet in the Pioneer Mountains, the ghost town of Hecla sits where ambition once outran the altitude. The company that built it, the Hecla Consolidated Mining Company, was organized in 1877 by Noah Armstrong and a group of eastern investors who had heard enough about the silver lodes of Lion Mountain to risk serious money on the proposition. What they built over the next two decades was one of the most complete company towns in Montana's mining history: a place with a water works system, fire protection, a church, a school that could seat two hundred pupils, and a mercantile and banking operation that handled the payroll for the entire district. At its peak, the communities of the Bryant Mining District, Trapper City, Lion City, Glendale, and Hecla, together held some two thousand residents, all of them there because of what lay inside the mountain.

History

The district's story begins not with Hecla but with a man named James Bryant, who in 1873 discovered the Trapper Lode silver outcropping on the slopes above what would become Trapper Creek. Bryant and his associates staked their claims and the first camp, originally called Burnt Pine City for a wildfire that had scorched the surrounding forest, took shape along the creek below. Within a year the camp had a post office, a hotel, four saloons, three general stores, a butcher shop, and a livery stable. The Madisonian reported in August 1875 that the town boasted a population of nearly two hundred people and that "a fight each day is nothing unusual, and often two or three makes things lively." By 1878, however, the attention of the district had shifted uphill to Lion Mountain, where new lodes, the Cleve, the Avon, the Cleopatra, were proving richer than anything along the creek. Mose Morrison, described in contemporary accounts as the last man to leave Trapper City, packed his belongings and moved to the new camp of Lion City, and the original settlement fell silent.

Lion City occupied a site closer to the mines but carried a reputation for disorder that troubled the company's eastern shareholders. When Henry Knippenberg took over as general manager of the Hecla Consolidated Mining Company in 1881 and reorganized the operation, one of his first decisions was to relocate the company's workforce about a mile from Lion City's saloons and brothels to a new, planned settlement. The town of Hecla was laid out with the orderliness that Knippenberg's investors required. A four-mile narrow-gauge tramway, completed in 1882, connected the mines on Lion Mountain to the Greenwood Concentrator down the slope, where ore was crushed and concentrated before being hauled by wagon to the smelter at Glendale. The Glendale smelter, originally built in 1875 and rebuilt after a fire in 1879, processed the district's ore into bullion bars weighing ninety pounds each, which were then shipped via the Utah and Northern Railroad to refineries in Omaha.

The principal mines of the district, the Cleopatra, the Trapper, and the Cleve-Avon, produced steadily through the 1880s. By the middle of that decade, Hecla had developed the infrastructure of a permanent settlement. The Hecla Mercantile and Banking Company, established in 1886 as a subsidiary of the mining company with $100,000 in capital stock, operated stores in Hecla, Glendale, and Melrose, handling everything from miners' supplies to payroll advances. The school accommodated children from across the district. Monthly dividends of ten percent were paid to shareholders during the peak years, and by the time the district's total output was tallied in the mid-twentieth century, it had yielded over 656,000 tons of ore valued at more than $19.6 million, including 13.4 million ounces of silver.

The collapse came in 1893, when Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and silver prices fell sharply. The Cleopatra Mine closed in 1895. The Glendale smelter, which had been the processing heart of the entire district, shut down in 1900. Both the Hecla and Glendale post offices closed that year. The Hecla Consolidated Mining Company ceased operations entirely in 1904. A brief revival came between 1913 and 1914, when the Penobscot Mining Company leased the Lion City workings and installed a twenty-stamp mill, but the effort produced little and was abandoned by 1915. Slag processing continued at the Glendale site until 1922, extracting what value remained from the old smelter dumps, and then the district fell permanently quiet.

What Remains Today

Hecla stands as one of the more remote ghost towns in Montana, accessible only by a rough gravel road that most vehicles cannot navigate without four-wheel drive. The site retains a scattering of ruined structures, collapsed log buildings, stone foundations, mine shaft collars, and remnants of the tramway infrastructure, spread across the steep terrain of Lion Mountain. The elevation and the isolation have preserved the ruins from the casual vandalism that has stripped more accessible ghost towns, but they have also subjected the site to the full force of Pioneer Mountain winters, and little stands upright.

The three-canyon cluster of Trapper City, Lion City, and Hecla can be visited as a single excursion. The site of Trapper City, the first of the district's camps, is largely cleared ground along Trapper Creek, with only depressions and scattered debris marking where the hotel and saloons once stood. Lion City retains slightly more visible structure than Trapper City but less than Hecla. The charcoal kilns on Canyon Creek, built to supply fuel for the Glendale smelter, are among the most photogenic remnants of the district and are located closer to the highway.

Visiting

Hecla is located in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, approximately twelve miles from Interstate 15 via Exit 93 near Melrose. The first five miles of Trapper Creek Road pass the site of Glendale; Lion City and Hecla are another seven miles into the mountains on a road that becomes progressively rougher. Four-wheel-drive vehicles are strongly recommended, and high-clearance trucks or ATVs are the practical choice for reaching the upper sites. The road is typically impassable from November through April due to snow. No facilities of any kind exist at the site. Visitors should check current road conditions with the Dillon Ranger District of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest before making the trip.