Trapper City was the first chapter in the story of the Bryant Mining District, and it was over in five years. The camp that grew up along Trapper Creek in 1873 was raw and immediate, the kind of place that appeared wherever a significant ore discovery drew men faster than any town could be planned. It had hotels and saloons, a butcher shop and a livery stable, a Catholic church lot donated by a merchant, and a post office established in June 1874 with Daniel Parker as its first postmaster. At its peak it held nearly two hundred people. By 1878 the last resident had packed up and moved to the newer camp of Lion City, and Trapper City was dead. What it left behind was the foundation for everything that followed in the district, the claims that became the Hecla Consolidated Mining Company, the road that connected the mountain to the outside world, and the memory of a place that had been lively enough to produce a fight every day and a newspaper dispatch worth reprinting.

History

The discovery that created Trapper City came in 1873, when James Bryant and a group of associates identified the Trapper Lode silver outcropping on the slopes above what would become Trapper Creek. The creek had previously been known as Willow Creek, and the camp that formed around the discovery was first called Burnt Pine City, a name taken from a wildfire that had scorched a wide swath of forest extending three miles south of the lode. The name was later changed to Trapper City, honoring the trappers who had reportedly passed through the area in 1872 and whose wanderings had pointed the way toward the mineral ground.

The camp organized itself quickly. Town lots sold for between fifty and four hundred dollars, and by the spring of 1875 the snow on the level was seven feet deep and the sleighing was reported as excellent. The Madisonian newspaper, in its August 7, 1875 issue, provided a detailed picture of the settlement: "There are three stores in Trapper City, kept by L. S. Taylor, Tom Lowe and the Bissinette Bros. They are all doing a good trade, and are well filled with stocks of miners' supplies and goods of every description. Four saloons in the town give the boys 'a chance' to quench their thirst to an unlimited extent. They do it daily. A fight each day is nothing unusual, and often two or three makes things lively." The same account noted that Thomas Lowe had donated a town lot valued at three hundred dollars for the construction of a Catholic church, and that the hotel accommodations were provided by the Trapper City Hotel under John Connovan and the LaMarche Hotel under A. LaMarche, both described as well-run establishments.

The social life of Trapper City was not uniformly cheerful. In October 1877, the Madisonian reported a vigilante incident involving a woman identified only as "Rafella, the Spanish woman," who had allegedly insulted a local resident. Four masked men abducted her at eleven o'clock at night, gagged her, led her to a tree outside town, put a rope around her neck, and drew her up two or three times before escorting her several miles down the creek and ordering her not to return. When she appeared before the magistrate at Glendale the next morning, the rope marks on her neck were visible. Four young men from Trapper were arrested but released for lack of corroborating evidence. The case was expected to go before the grand jury. It was the kind of incident that distinguished a frontier camp from a settled town, and Trapper City had not yet become the latter.

By 1877, the attention of the district had shifted decisively to Lion Mountain, where the Cleve and Avon lodes were proving richer than the Trapper Lode below. The Hecla Consolidated Mining Company, organized in January of that year, acquired the key claims and began moving its operations uphill. The men followed the work. Andrew "Mose" Morrison, described in district histories as the last man to leave Trapper City, packed his belongings and moved to the new camp of Lion City. "Trapper City was dead," one account recorded, "and all that was left were empty cabins and buried hopes."

The road that Joseph Vipond and others had worked to build connecting the district to the outside world, and the infrastructure of the post office and supply network that Trapper City had established, carried forward into the successor camps. The Hecla Consolidated Mining Company's subsequent development of the district, the tramway, the concentrator, the company town of Hecla, built on the foundation that Trapper City's five years of activity had laid.

What Remains Today

The site of Trapper City is largely cleared ground along Trapper Creek, with depressions, scattered debris, and the outlines of the creek-side lots where the main street once ran. The bridged crossing of the creek that formed the town's central axis is gone, and the cabins that lined both banks have long since collapsed or been removed. The landscape shows the marks of the early placer workings that preceded the lode mining, and the general topography of the gulch is unchanged from the period when the camp was active.

The site is most meaningful when visited in the context of the full district. Driving Trapper Creek Road from the highway toward Hecla passes through the approximate location of Trapper City before climbing toward Lion City and the upper workings. The progression of the three camps along the road tells the story of the district's decade-long migration uphill in pursuit of the ore.

Visiting

Trapper City is reached via Interstate 15 Exit 93 near Melrose, then along Trapper Creek Road into the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. The site of the original camp is in the lower portion of the road, closer to the highway than the upper sites of Lion City and Hecla, and is accessible to vehicles that cannot manage the rougher upper road. The road is typically closed by snow from November through April. No facilities exist at the site. The Dillon Ranger District of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest can provide current road condition information. The charcoal kilns on Canyon Creek, a related site from the district's smelting operations, are a short distance from the main road and are among the most visually striking remnants of the Bryant Mining District.