The North Moccasin Mountains are an island range in the truest sense of the term, a compact cluster of hills rising from the open plains of central Montana without connection to any larger mountain system. They are not dramatic country by Montana standards, their summits topping out between 5,400 and 5,800 feet, their slopes grassy and lush rather than craggy and forbidding. But the rock beneath those gentle slopes carried gold, and in 1899 a miner named Harry Kendall was working the surface of those hills when he found enough color to convince him that something worthwhile lay beneath.

Kendall's approach to the problem of extracting that gold was not the traditional one. He was not a placer miner panning creek gravels, nor was he a hardrock man with a stake in a promising vein. He was a man who had learned about cyanide, the chemical process that had recently made it possible to extract gold from low-grade ore that would have been worthless to an earlier generation of miners. The cyanide process worked by dissolving gold out of crushed rock using a sodium cyanide solution, then recovering the dissolved metal through precipitation. It was a technology that required capital and chemical knowledge, but it made profitable what had previously been impossible, and Kendall understood that the low-grade ore bodies of the North Moccasins were exactly the kind of ground where the new process could pay.

He built a small cyanide plant in 1899 and began milling ore from surface workings. The results were promising enough to attract outside capital, and within two years a proper mining company had been organized, an underground mine developed, and a mill constructed on a scale that could process ore in commercial quantities. The town of Kendall grew up around this operation beginning around 1901, and it grew quickly. The mines and the mill employed hundreds of men, and the community that supported them built itself in stone, using rock quarried from a nearby outcrop that gave the buildings a permanence unusual in a mining camp. The population peaked at approximately 1,500 people, a substantial number for a central Montana town of that era.

What distinguished Kendall from most of its contemporaries was not just the cyanide technology but the electrical power that the mining company brought to the district. Electric lights in the mine workings and in the town's buildings were a genuine novelty in Montana in the early 1900s, a sign that the operators were investing in the infrastructure of a modern industrial enterprise rather than the improvised arrangements of a frontier camp. The stone buildings and the electric lights gave Kendall an air of permanence that turned out to be misleading.

The boom lasted approximately a decade. The mines produced well through the first years of the twentieth century, and the town's commercial district reflected the prosperity of the district: a general store, a hotel, a bandstand where the community gathered for dances and celebrations, and the full range of services that a working mining town required. The hard rock drilling contests held during the mine's holiday shutdowns drew the best drillers in the district, men who competed to pound the deepest hole in a granite boulder using a hammer and a hand-held spike. The contest rock, filled with deep perfectly round holes, still stands at the townsite today, a monument to a skill that has no modern equivalent.

The decline came from an unexpected direction. In 1911 a railroad branch line was constructed near Hilger, a small community on U.S. Highway 191 to the east of the North Moccasins. The railroad gave homesteaders and miners a new option: they could move to Hilger, where the railroad provided regular transportation and the possibility of a more connected life, rather than staying in the isolated hills. Some families moved their houses physically, loading them onto wagons and hauling them down to the new railroad town. The mining equipment and extraction techniques of the era were also reaching their limits in the Kendall ore bodies, and the combination of declining ore grades and population loss proved fatal to the town's commercial life.

The mines went quiet, and Kendall entered the long process of abandonment that turned it from a living community into the stone-walled remnant it is today. Three subsequent attempts were made to revive gold production in the North Moccasins, the most recent of them in the mid-1990s when a cyanide heap leach operation processed material from the old mine dumps. That operation used the same basic chemical principle that Harry Kendall had applied nearly a century earlier, though on a much larger scale and with modern environmental controls. Reclamation work from the 1990s operation is still ongoing.

In 1967 the townsite of Kendall was donated to the Boy Scouts of America, who maintain a camp called K-M nearby. The scouts have contributed labor to the preservation of the site and have installed interpretive signs at many of the surviving stone foundations, giving visitors context for what they are seeing. The arrangement has worked well: the site is open to the public for day use, the interpretive infrastructure makes it accessible to visitors without specialized historical knowledge, and the Boy Scout stewardship has prevented the casual vandalism and artifact removal that have damaged many comparable sites.

What Remains Today

Kendall's stone construction has given it a survival rate unusual among Montana ghost towns. The stone foundations of the general store, the hotel, and numerous other buildings are still standing, their walls intact enough to convey the scale and layout of the original structures. The contest rock, filled with the deep holes drilled by competing miners during holiday celebrations, is fenced and interpreted. The bandstand, where the community gathered for dances and public events, still stands in the meadow that was once the town's social center.

The interpretive signs installed by the Boy Scouts provide identification and historical context for the major structures, making it possible to walk the townsite with a reasonable understanding of what each foundation once held. The tall grass is mowed in places to facilitate walking, and the overall condition of the site reflects the care that has been taken with it over the decades since the donation.

Visiting

Kendall is located in the North Moccasin Mountains of Fergus County, approximately twenty miles north of Lewistown. From Lewistown, take U.S. Highway 191 north to the small community of Hilger, then turn west on North Kendall Road. The gravel road is in good condition and accessible to standard passenger vehicles. The townsite is on private property but is open to the public for day use. Visitors are asked not to remove artifacts or materials from the site.

The Lewistown Chamber of Commerce produces a brochure covering the ghost towns and gold mines of the Judith Mountains and North Moccasin Mountains, including Kendall, Maiden, Gilt Edge, and Fort Maginnis, with a map and historical notes. Lewistown, the Fergus County seat, offers a full range of visitor services and is the logical base for exploring the ghost towns of central Montana.