Highland City sits in a large mountain valley south of Butte, in the Highland Mountains, and it is one of the more remarkable ghost towns in Montana for a reason that has nothing to do with gold production or dramatic violence. At its peak in the late 1800s, it was a genuine city: two thousand residents, three hundred wooden houses, ten saloons, a hardware store, a blacksmith shop, and the full complement of businesses that a working mining community required. And then it vanished so completely that no maps of the town survived. Three structures remained standing in a valley protected by the United States Forest Service, and for more than a century the layout of the streets, the locations of the businesses, and the social organization of the community were simply unknown. It took an archaeologist with thirty thousand artifacts and a piece of mapping software to bring Highland City back to life, and what she found was a town that defied the conventions of the frontier West in ways that nobody had expected.

History

The Highland Mountains rise south of Butte in Silver Bow County, a range of moderate elevation that contains gold and silver deposits in its upper valleys. The discovery of gold in the Highlands drew prospectors in the 1860s, and Highland City grew up in the largest of the mountain valleys as the district's primary settlement. The camp's location, high in the mountains and accessible only by steep roads, gave it a degree of isolation that shaped its character. It was a self-contained community, dependent on its own resources and its own social organization in ways that the more accessible camps along the valley floors were not.

At its peak, Highland City had a permanent population of two thousand people living in three hundred wooden houses. The town supported ten saloons, a hardware store, a blacksmith shop, and the other businesses that a working mining community required. It was, by the standards of the Montana mining frontier, a substantial place, comparable in size to many of the more famous camps. Yet it left almost no documentary record. No maps of the town were made, or if they were, none survived. The written record of Highland City is sparse, and the physical record appeared to have been erased by time, weather, and the decay of the wooden structures that made up most of the town.

The three structures that survived into the modern era stood in the valley like isolated sentinels, their relationship to each other and to the vanished town around them unclear. The United States Forest Service, which manages the land where Highland City stood, recognized the site's historical significance and included it in the Passport in Time Project, a program that uses volunteers and researchers to investigate and document historic sites on national forest lands.

Dr. Megan Rhodes Victor, working on her doctorate in anthropology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, chose Highland City as the subject of her dissertation research. Over three summers, Victor and teams of students and volunteers dug three hundred test pits on a grid across the area where she suspected the town had stood, based on the positions of the three surviving buildings. Each pit was approximately sixteen inches deep, and every artifact found in each pit was carefully documented: nails, wine bottle fragments, jar shards, horseshoes, and the other debris of nineteenth-century daily life. The result was a dataset of thirty thousand artifacts, each with a precise location.

Victor used mapping software to generate distribution maps from the artifact data, creating topographic representations of artifact density across the site. The maps revealed the town's structure in ways that no written record could have provided. Long empty parallel spaces with no artifacts turned out to be roads. High concentrations of nails indicated the location of the blacksmith shop. Dense clusters of wine bottle fragments marked the saloons. The crisscrossing street pattern of Highland City emerged from the data, and the locations of its businesses and residences became legible for the first time.

The most unexpected finding was about the town's social geography. Victor found numerous jar and bowl shards that were characteristic of Overseas Chinese populations, the kind of ceramics that Chinese miners and workers used throughout the American West. But there was no Chinatown at Highland City. The Chinese residents had not been segregated into a separate quarter of the town, as was the standard practice in virtually every other mining camp of the era. The Chinese artifacts were distributed throughout the town, mixed with the artifacts of the white population, indicating that Chinese residents had lived in houses spread around the community rather than confined to a separate district. It was an unusual degree of integration for the late nineteenth century, and it suggested that Highland City had a social character that set it apart from the broader pattern of the frontier West.

What Remains Today

Three structures from the original town survive in the Highland Mountains valley. The site is managed by the United States Forest Service and is protected from development. The archaeological work conducted by Dr. Victor and the Passport in Time teams has documented the town's layout and artifact distribution, and that research is available through the Forest Service and through academic publications. The valley itself is accessible and retains the character of a high mountain landscape, with the remnants of the mining era visible to those who know where to look.

Visiting

Highland City is located in the Highland Mountains south of Butte in Silver Bow County. Access is via forest roads from Butte or from the Divide area on Interstate 15. The roads are unpaved and require a high-clearance vehicle; conditions vary significantly by season. The site is on national forest land and is open to visitors, though the surviving structures are fragile and should not be disturbed. Butte, approximately twenty miles to the north, is the nearest city with full services and has the World Museum of Mining, which covers the broader history of Silver Bow County's mining era.