Bannack Historical District

By editor

Near Dillon, Beaverhead County, Montana, July 1862

The thing about Bannack that the historians always get right and the tourists sometimes miss is that the town was never finished. It was not built to last. It was built to produce gold, and when the gold was gone, the buildings that remained were the ones that nobody had gotten around to tearing down for lumber, which in a country where lumber was expensive and scarce was a considerable number of buildings. The Bannack Historical District is not a preserved town. It is a town that was abandoned before anyone could finish dismantling it, and the distinction matters.

John White and his party found gold on Grasshopper Creek on July 28, 1862, and the town that grew up around the diggings went through several distinct phases in the years that followed, each of which left its mark on the landscape. The first phase was primitive, the canvas tents and rough log cabins of men who expected to be somewhere else within the year. The second phase was more permanent, the frame and brick buildings of merchants and professionals who had decided that the camp was going to last long enough to justify a real investment. The third phase was the long decline, the slow departure of population as the gold played out and the railroad went to Dillon instead of Bannack, and the buildings that remained settled into the dry air of the Beaverhead Valley and waited.

What they were waiting for, it turned out, was the National Park Service, which designated Bannack a National Historic Landmark in 1961. By that time, the town had been a ghost for the better part of a century, and the buildings that survived represented the full range of Bannack's history: the primitive log structures of the 1860s, the more ambitious frame and brick buildings of the 1870s and 1880s, and the occasional early twentieth-century structure from the periods when mining was briefly revived.

The Masonic Lodge Hall is the building that most visitors notice first, because it served as the town's school as well as its lodge, and because it was built in 1874 with the kind of care that men put into buildings they intend to use for a long time. The Methodist church followed in 1877, the first Protestant church in Montana, built by a congregation that had decided the Beaverhead Valley was going to be home whether the gold held out or not. The Hotel Meade, which served as the Beaverhead County courthouse from 1875 until the county seat moved to Dillon in 1881, is the largest building in the district and the one that most clearly represents the ambitions of the town's second phase, when Bannack was the county seat and the territorial capital and the men who ran it believed they were building something permanent.

They were not wrong, exactly. They were just wrong about the permanence of the particular thing they were building. The courthouse became a hotel when the county seat moved away. The hotel became a boarding house when the population declined. The boarding house eventually closed, and the building stood empty in the way that buildings stand empty in ghost towns, which is to say quietly and without complaint, the windows intact, the roof holding, the walls doing what walls do.

The hydraulic mining that came later, in the 1890s and after, left its own marks on the landscape around the town. Hydraulic mining uses water under pressure to wash away entire hillsides, separating the gold-bearing gravel from the bedrock by sheer force. It is efficient and destructive in equal measure, and the scars it leaves on the land are not subtle. The dredge mining that followed the hydraulic operations was even more thorough, turning the creek bed itself into a series of gravel piles that are still visible today. The last significant mining operation at Bannack shut down in 1954, and the state acquired most of the town that year.

The residents who remained after the state acquisition did not leave immediately. Some of them stayed into the early 1970s, living in a ghost town that was also a state park, which is a situation that requires a particular kind of temperament. The last residents eventually moved on, and the town became entirely a historical site, managed by the state for the benefit of visitors who come to see what a gold rush town looked like when it was new and what it looks like when it is old.

Thomas Dimsdale, who taught school in Virginia City in 1863 and 1864 and who wrote the first book published in Montana, described the Bannack of those years as a place where "the population was of the most mixed and uncertain character." He meant it as a description of the social situation, but it also describes the architecture. The buildings at Bannack were built by men of mixed and uncertain intentions, some of whom expected to stay and some of whom expected to leave, and the buildings reflect that uncertainty. The ones that were built to stay are still standing. The ones that were built to leave are gone.

The Vigilantes of Montana, Dimsdale's book, was published in 1866 and remains the primary source for the events of the winter of 1863 and 1864, when the citizens of Bannack and Virginia City organized to deal with Henry Plummer and his road agents. Dimsdale was a partisan, and his account should be read with that in mind, but he was also present, and his descriptions of the town and the people in it have the specificity of a man who was there. He describes the gallows on which Plummer was hanged, the crowd that watched, the words that were spoken. He does not describe the gallows as ironic, because irony was not his mode, but the fact is there in his account for anyone who wants to find it: the sheriff was hanged on the gallows he had ordered built in his capacity as sheriff.

The buildings at Bannack are not the buildings that Dimsdale described. Most of those are gone. What remains is the second generation of Bannack's architecture, the buildings of the 1870s and 1880s, when the town was past its first wild youth and settling into the more respectable middle age of a county seat. These are the buildings that the National Park Service recognized in 1961, and they are the buildings that visitors see today when they walk the streets of the ghost town in the dry summer air of the Beaverhead Valley.

The creek is still there. The gold is gone. The buildings remain, multi-period and imperfect and entirely authentic, the record of a town that was built in a hurry and abandoned slowly and preserved by the simple fact that nobody got around to tearing it down.

See also

• Bannack Historical District near Dillon, Beaverhead County (Montana Department of Transportation, erected 2009)
• Bannack near Dillon, Beaverhead County -- the gold rush discovery that started it all
• Bannack State Park -- the Montana State Park preserving the ghost town buildings