The men who worked Bear Creek in the summer of 1865 were the kind of prospectors who could not leave well enough alone. They had found gold, real gold, in quantities sufficient to sustain a working camp, and yet the creek above them remained unexplored, its gravels untested, its bars unworked. As the season progressed and the lower workings on Bear Creek began to show diminishing returns, the more restless among them pushed upstream, following the drainage into the higher reaches of the Garnet Range. What they found on Elk Creek, the principal tributary above the Bear Creek diggings, was enough to justify a second camp, and that camp took the name of a man whose identity has been only partially preserved in the historical record.

A history of the district published in the Sanders County Independent Ledger in November 1939 offered the most complete account of Reynolds City's origins that survives in print. "A history of that expedition," the article noted, "asserts the creek was named for the laziest man in our party, A. J. Reynolds." Whether Reynolds himself appreciated the honor is not recorded, but the camp that bore his name was anything but lazy in its working years. Reynolds City grew up as a direct extension of the Beartown economy, serving the miners who worked the Elk Creek bars and the lode claims that were eventually developed in the hills above the drainage.

The relationship between Reynolds City and Beartown was close enough that contemporaries described the two camps as essentially identical in character. "Reynolds City was an exact duplicate of Beartown," the 1939 account observed, "with the same happy-go-lucky type of citizens and rustic buildings." The two camps shared a common culture: high prices, high wages, and a social world organized entirely around the work of extracting gold from the Garnet Range. The currency of both camps was gold dust, weighed out on small scales at the store counter and the saloon bar, and the men who carried it in their pokes were the same kind of men, experienced miners who had followed the gold from camp to camp across the territory, spending freely when they had it and moving on when they did not.

The gold of Elk Creek differed from that of Bear Creek in one significant respect. Where Bear Creek produced nuggets, sometimes large ones, including a first-season specimen reported to weigh thirty-two ounces, the Elk Creek gold ran to fine flakes. The two creeks' gold was so similar in color that it was impossible to distinguish one from the other when the dust was mixed, but the form was different: the Bear Creek men found nuggets, the Elk Creek men found flakes. This difference mattered to the miners, because nuggets were easier to weigh and harder to adulterate, while fine flake gold required more careful handling and was more susceptible to the small frauds that plagued every mining camp's informal economy.

The pay streaks on Elk Creek, the 1939 account acknowledged, "on an average did not rate as high as those on Bear Creek," meaning that the per-foot yields at Reynolds City were generally lower than the best ground at Beartown. But the exceptions were striking. Several of the more prosperous bars were decidedly over average, and one claim was reported to have produced twelve thousand dollars per running foot, a figure that would have been remarkable even in the richest camps of the territory. These exceptional bars attracted the capital and labor needed to work them intensively, and for a period in the late 1860s Reynolds City was a genuinely productive camp.

The decline of Reynolds City followed the same trajectory as Beartown and the other Garnet Range camps. The richest placer ground was worked out relatively quickly, and the transition to lode mining required capital that most of the camp's residents did not possess. The Northern Pacific Railroad's arrival in the region in the early 1880s improved access to the Garnet Range and prompted a second wave of interest in the district, but Reynolds City itself did not benefit significantly from this revival. The new investment went primarily to the Garnet district proper, where the discovery of gold-bearing quartz veins justified the construction of stamp mills and the development of systematic underground mining. Reynolds City, whose gold had been in the placer gravels rather than the bedrock, had little to offer the new generation of investors.

By the late 1880s the camp was effectively abandoned. The men who had made their fortunes on Elk Creek had moved on. "Fortunes were quickly made and quickly spent," the 1939 account observed. "A few who were satisfied to hang on to their savings were rewarded by being able to retire, but the majority believed in the old adage that 'tomorrow takes care of itself' and when the two camps ceased to exist, they found themselves ill-prepared to meet the future financially, with pokes and pockets as empty as when they had first arrived."

What Remains Today

Reynolds City has left almost nothing at the surface. The placer workings that defined the camp's economy have been reclaimed by the forest and the creek, and the structures that once housed the camp's population have long since collapsed and rotted into the ground. The single surviving feature of the townsite is the cemetery, a small collection of graves on a hillside above the creek that marks the final resting place of men who died in the camp during its working years. The cemetery has been documented by local historians and photographed by researchers interested in the Garnet Range's mining heritage, and it stands as the most tangible evidence that Reynolds City was once a real place with real people in it.

The Garnet Range Road, a thirteen-mile unpaved loop managed by the Bureau of Land Management, passes through the area and connects Reynolds City, Springtown, Beartown, and the Garnet Ghost Town in a single route. This road provides the most practical access to the Reynolds City area and offers a sense of the landscape that the miners of the 1860s would have known.

Visiting

Reynolds City is accessible via the Garnet Range Road, which leaves Montana Highway 200 east of Missoula and climbs into the Garnet Mountains through a series of switchbacks. The road is unpaved and requires a high-clearance vehicle; it is typically open from late spring through early fall, depending on snowpack. The Bureau of Land Management maintains the Garnet Ghost Town at the end of the road as an interpretive site, and the staff there can provide information about the other sites along the route, including Reynolds City and Beartown.

The cemetery at Reynolds City is the primary destination for visitors interested in the camp specifically. It is a quiet and evocative place, set in the timber above the creek, and the names on the surviving markers, where they are legible, connect the abstract history of the camp to the individual lives that made it real. The Garnet Ghost Town, a few miles farther along the road, offers the most complete surviving example of what a Garnet Range mining camp looked like at its peak, and a visit to both sites in the same day is entirely practical.