Elephant Auction House

By editor

Virginia City, Madison County, Montana, Summer 1863

The name required no explanation in 1863. To "see the elephant" was the phrase the gold rush generation used for the whole experience of the West -- the journey, the danger, the disappointment, the occasional windfall. You went to California or Montana or Colorado to see the elephant, and if you came back alive and no richer than you left, you had at least seen it. James Gray and Justus Cooke named their auction house on Wallace Street accordingly. They were selling horses and mules and oxen to men who had come to see the elephant, and they knew their customers.

The building occupied the corner of Wallace and Jackson Streets in Virginia City, which was already the busiest corner in a town that had gone from nothing to ten thousand people in less than three months. Alder Gulch gold had done that. The discovery on May 26, 1863, by a party of six prospectors who had been trying to find their way to the Beaverhead River, produced a stampede that overwhelmed every supply line in the territory. By the time Gray and Cooke opened their auction house that summer, Virginia City was the commercial capital of a gold rush that would eventually yield more than thirty million dollars in placer gold from a fourteen-mile stretch of creek.

Livestock was the oil of that economy. Every mine needed mules to haul ore. Every freight outfit needed oxen to pull wagons. Every man who wanted to leave Virginia City faster than he could walk needed a horse. Gray and Cooke understood this with the clarity of men who had arrived at the right place at the right time with the right inventory, and they built their business accordingly.

The architectural feature that made the Elephant Auction House famous was the porch. A long, sloped roof extended from the building's facade far out into Wallace Street, providing shade for the auctioneer and, above all, creating a covered space where horses could be displayed and buyers could examine them without standing in the dust. At auction time, the effect was spectacular and chaotic in equal measure. Crowds of buyers and spectators packed the street. Horses and wagons blocked the intersection. Men shouted bids over the noise of animals that had not consented to be sold. A photograph taken around 1864 shows Wallace Street during one of these events: the porch roof jutting into the frame from the left, the crowd dense enough that you cannot see the street surface, horses visible above the heads of the men pressing around them.

The city officials of Virginia City, confronted with this scene on a regular basis, eventually concluded that it was incompatible with the orderly conduct of commerce on the town's main street. After several traffic jams and at least one accident that the records do not describe in detail, they outlawed the sale of livestock on Virginia City's streets. The porch came down. The auction moved elsewhere. Gray and Cooke's enterprise on Wallace Street lasted from the summer of 1863 to the fall of 1864 -- barely more than a year, which was about the normal lifespan of a gold rush business that depended on the particular conditions of the rush itself.

After the auction house departed, the building held various stores and offices for the next forty years, which is to say it held the ordinary commerce of a town that was slowly becoming less extraordinary. Virginia City's population peaked somewhere around ten thousand in 1863 and declined steadily thereafter as the placer gold ran out and the miners moved on to the next discovery. By the 1870s, the town was a fraction of its peak size. By the 1880s, it was a county seat that happened to have a lot of empty buildings. By the early 1900s, it was what people were beginning to call a ghost town, though the people still living there objected to the term.

The building was demolished sometime before 1922. The corner where it had stood became one of the many gaps in Virginia City's streetscape, the spaces where the gold rush had built something and time had taken it back.

Charles Bovey changed that. Bovey was a Minneapolis flour merchant who had fallen in love with Virginia City in the 1940s and had begun buying up the town's surviving buildings and, where the buildings were gone, reconstructing them. He rebuilt the Elephant Auction House in 1948, using historical photographs and whatever structural evidence remained, to house antique fire department equipment. The reconstructed building stood on the original footprint, with a facade that approximated what Gray and Cooke had built in 1863, minus the porch that had caused all the trouble.

The fire equipment eventually moved out. A gift shop moved in. The building has housed a gift shop since the late 1990s, which is not what Gray and Cooke would have predicted for it, but is probably what they would have recognized as the natural outcome of a gold rush town that ran out of gold and found a different commodity to sell.

The elephant, in the end, was the town itself.

See also

• Elephant Auction House at Virginia City, Madison County (Montana National Register Sign Program)
• Vigilantes in Montana at Virginia City, Madison County -- the Vigilance Committee that organized in the same months Gray and Cooke were running their auction
• Sanders House at Virginia City, Madison County -- Wilbur Sanders's cottage, the oldest frame building in Montana