Bannack

By editor

Near Dillon, Beaverhead County, Montana, July 1862

John White and his party came to Grasshopper Creek in the summer of 1862 in the way that most prospectors came to most creeks in the American West: they were looking for something better than where they had just been. They had been working the Salmon River diggings in Idaho, which were crowded and played out in the way that diggings always became crowded and played out once the word got around, and they crossed the Continental Divide into the Beaverhead country looking for a creek that nobody had panned yet.

They found one. On July 28, 1862, White and his men worked the gravel of Grasshopper Creek and found color. The record does not say how much color, or whether they shouted or simply looked at each other with the particular expression of men who have just changed their lives, but it says they found it, and that was enough. Within weeks, the news had traveled back over the divide and down to the Salmon River and out along every trail that connected the mining camps of the Northwest, and men began moving toward Grasshopper Creek with the purposeful urgency of water finding a drain.

By fall of 1862, five hundred people were living on the creek. By spring of 1863, the population had climbed toward three thousand. They called the place Bannack, after the Bannock people who had lived in the Beaverhead country before the miners arrived, though they spelled it differently, which was the kind of small imprecision that a mining camp in a hurry could be forgiven. The town that grew up on the creek had the standard amenities of a gold rush settlement: saloons, a hotel or two, a few stores selling supplies at prices that reflected the difficulty of getting anything to a place six hundred miles from the nearest railroad, and the constant low-level violence that attended any community where a large number of men with money and no particular social obligations were living in close proximity.

The Civil War arrived in Bannack along with the miners, in the sense that the men who came to Grasshopper Creek brought their politics with them. The gulch above the main camp was called Jeff Davis Gulch, and the flat below it was called Yankee Flats, and the two names described the political geography of the place as accurately as any map. Montana Territory was created in 1864, and Sidney Edgerton, the first governor, designated Bannack the temporary capital. The first territorial legislature met in December of that year in a building that Thomas Dimsdale, who was there and wrote about it, described with the kind of restraint that a man employs when he is trying to be polite about a log cabin.

The legislature met. Laws were passed. The machinery of territorial government was assembled and set in motion. And then the gold at Alder Gulch, sixty miles to the east, proved to be richer than the gold at Grasshopper Creek, and the population of Bannack began to drain away toward Virginia City the way water drains toward the lowest point. The capital followed the population, as capitals tend to do, and Bannack was left with its buildings and its memories and the particular dignity of a place that had been important once and knew it.

The vigilantes came in the winter of 1863 and 1864, which was the winter that the citizens of Bannack and Virginia City decided that the sheriff was the problem rather than the solution. Henry Plummer had been elected sheriff of Bannack in May of 1863, which was a considerable achievement for a man who was simultaneously running a road agent operation that had been robbing and killing miners on the trails between the camps. The vigilantes who organized that winter were not interested in legal niceties. They hanged Plummer on January 10, 1864, on the gallows that he himself had ordered built in his capacity as sheriff, which was the kind of irony that even a man who had not read his Twain could appreciate.

Bannack served as the county seat of Beaverhead County until 1881, when Dillon, which had a railroad, took the honor away from Bannack, which did not. The mining continued in various forms, placer and quartz and hydraulic and dredge, through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The last significant mining operation shut down in 1954. The state of Montana acquired most of the town that year, and the buildings that remained, the Masonic Lodge that doubled as a school, the Methodist church, the Hotel Meade that had been the Beaverhead County courthouse, stood in the dry air of the Beaverhead Valley and waited to be recognized for what they were.

The National Park Service recognized them in 1961, when Bannack was designated a National Historic Landmark. The buildings that survived were the buildings that had been built to last, the ones made of logs and stone and brick rather than canvas and rough lumber, and they represented a range of Bannack's history from the primitive 1860s through the more settled 1870s and 1880s and into the early twentieth century. The town that had been Montana's first territorial capital and one of the richest gold camps in the Northwest was now a ghost town, which is what gold camps become when the gold runs out and the railroad goes somewhere else.

Granville Stuart, who was in Montana before Bannack existed and who watched the whole arc of the gold rush from beginning to end, wrote in his memoir that the Grasshopper Creek discovery "set the whole country wild." He was not exaggerating. The discovery of gold on Grasshopper Creek in 1862 was the event that created Montana as a political entity, that brought the population that required a territorial government, that produced the capital that required a legislature, that generated the wealth that attracted the road agents and the vigilantes and the lawyers and the merchants and the ministers and all the other people who follow gold the way gulls follow a fishing boat.

John White found color in the gravel of Grasshopper Creek on July 28, 1862. He was looking for something better than where he had just been. He found it, and then he found that finding it was only the beginning of the story, and that the story, once started, had a momentum of its own that carried it far beyond anything he had intended or imagined.

The buildings at Bannack are still standing. The gallows where Plummer was hanged are gone, but the site is marked. The creek is still there, running through the valley in the way that creeks run regardless of what men do on their banks. The gold is gone. The miners are gone. The legislature is long gone to Helena. What remains is the town itself, preserved in the dry air of the Beaverhead, a record of what happened when three thousand people decided that a particular creek was worth crossing a mountain range to reach.

See also

• Bannack near Dillon, Beaverhead County (Montana Department of Transportation, erected 2009)
• Bannack Historical District near Dillon, Beaverhead County -- the National Historic Landmark covering the ghost town
• Bannack State Park -- the Montana State Park preserving the ghost town buildings