The Vipond brothers came to the Pioneer Mountains in the years just after the Civil War, when the gold rushes of the early 1860s had already moved on to richer ground and the men who remained in Montana were looking for the next discovery. John Vipond found it in April 1868, when he identified the Mewonitoc Lode at an elevation of roughly eight thousand feet in the northern Pioneer Mountains. His brother William staked the Gray Jockey Mine the following year. A third brother, Joseph, arrived in 1872 and organized the construction of a road connecting the camp to the town of Dewey below, which made it possible to move ore out of the mountains for the first time. The camp that grew up around the Vipond brothers' claims took their name, and for a generation it was a working mining community with mills, boarding houses, and the seasonal rhythms of high-altitude extraction. Today it is a quiet place in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, with old mining sites and a single standing cabin marking where the work once happened.

History

The northern Pioneer Mountains had attracted trappers and explorers before the Viponds arrived, but the mineral potential of the range had not been systematically tested. John Vipond's discovery of the Mewonitoc Lode in 1868 was followed quickly by additional finds. The Lone Pine Mine, the Queen of the Hills, the Faithful, and a number of other claims were staked in the years after the initial discovery, and the area developed the character of a small but persistent mining district. The elevation and the rugged terrain slowed development, pack trains were the only means of supply until Joseph Vipond's road was completed in 1872, but the ore was real enough to justify the effort.

Three mills were built at nearby Dewey to process the ores coming down from the Vipond Park claims. The district produced chiefly silver, with copper and gold as secondary metals. The scale of operations was never comparable to the great silver camps of the Pioneer Mountains' eastern slope, the Hecla district at Glendale, or the Coolidge camp in the Elkhorn Mountains, but it was steady enough to support a community through the 1870s and into the 1880s.

The district's most significant transaction came in 1900, when the Queen of the Hills Mine was sold for $75,000 to Charles W. Clark and E. L. Whitmore. The new owners hired approximately fifty men, began developing the mine in earnest, and constructed a ten-stamp mill to process the ore on site. The investment was substantial by the standards of a secondary district, and it reflected genuine optimism about what the Queen of the Hills could produce. The mine was sold again two years later, in 1902, but the new owners found that the ore bodies did not extend as deeply or as richly as the initial development had suggested, and production fell short of what the purchase price had implied. The operation wound down without achieving the returns that Clark and Whitmore had anticipated.

Renewed interest in the district came during the 1920s and 1930s, when rising metal prices and improved milling technology prompted a re-examination of old workings across Montana. Several of the Vipond Park mines saw activity during this period, but the results were modest and the revivals short-lived. The district never recovered the level of activity it had seen during the 1870s and 1880s, and by the middle of the twentieth century it had settled into the quiet that characterizes it today.

The Vipond Mining District, as catalogued in the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology records, encompassed the Blue Bell, Gray Jockey, Mewonitoc, Old Faithful, and Queen of the Hills as its primary workings. The district was discovered in 1868 by John, Joseph, and William Vipond, and the three brothers' collective contribution to opening the northern Pioneer Mountains to mining was recognized in the name the camp carried from its earliest days.

The broader context of the district places it within a generation of prospecting that followed the initial Montana gold rushes of 1862 and 1863. The men who came to the Pioneer Mountains in the late 1860s were working in the shadow of the great discoveries at Bannack and Alder Gulch, looking for the silver and gold that the placer camps had not found. The Vipond brothers' persistence at high altitude, building their own road when no one else would, was characteristic of the second wave of Montana mining, less dramatic than the first rush but more methodical, and in some cases more durable.

What Remains Today

The Vipond Park area today is part of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, and the old mining sites are scattered across the high plateau that gives the district its name. One cabin from the mining era is still standing, according to the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology survey, and the remains of mine workings, shaft openings, waste rock dumps, and the foundations of mill structures, are visible at several locations across the plateau. The landscape is open and expansive at eight thousand feet, with views across the Big Hole Valley and toward the main Pioneer Mountain crest.

The town of Dewey, where the mills were located and where the road from Vipond Park terminated, is itself a ghost town. The two sites together tell the story of a district where the mining happened at altitude and the processing happened below, connected by the road that Joseph Vipond built in 1872.

Visiting

Vipond Park is located approximately one mile northwest of Dewey in the northern Pioneer Mountains. Access is via Forest Road 187, which runs south from the Wise River area into the mountains. The road is suitable for high-clearance vehicles and is typically open from late spring through early fall. The elevation means that snow can close the road well into May and return in September. No facilities exist at the site. The Dillon Ranger District of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest administers the area and can provide current road condition and access information. The Pioneer Mountains National Scenic Byway passes through the broader area and provides context for the district's geography.