Ghost Town Byway

By editor

Greenough, Missoula County, Montana, April 2026

The gold was there before anyone came to take it. Between seventy and seventy-five million years ago, great thrust faults carried the Sapphire Block eastward from the top of the Idaho batholith, and when the granite magma cooled in the fractures of the sedimentary rock, the crystallization process separated quartz and gold into veins. The Garnet Range formed along the northern edge of that block, and the gold sat in the veins for seventy million years, waiting. It did not know it was waiting. It had no opinion about the matter. It was simply there, in the rock, until the rock weathered and the gold flakes eroded into the streams, and the streams ran down to the valleys, and eventually a man with a pan knelt in Bear Creek and held up what he had found.

That was 1865. His name is not recorded with the certainty that the date is, which tells you something about how history works in mining country: the gold is remembered, and the man who found it is approximate.

The placer miners came first, as they always do. Placer mining is the simplest form of the work: you find a stream that carries gold flakes, you divert the water, you sluice the gravel, and you take what comes out. It requires no capital beyond a pan and a strong back, which is why it attracts the kind of men who have nothing but a pan and a strong back. The Bear Creek diggings drew them in 1865, and for several years the work was profitable enough to sustain a camp. By 1870, most of the placer gold was gone, and most of the men went with it, to the next creek, the next range, the next rumor.

The Garnet Mountains went quiet for twenty years. Then, in 1893, Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and the silver mines across the West collapsed overnight, and the men who had been working silver came back to gold. Dr. Armistead Mitchell erected a stamp mill at the head of First Chance Gulch in 1895, and the town that grew up around it was called Mitchell, after him, until 1897, when it was renamed Garnet. Sam Ritchey hit a rich vein in the Nancy Hanks mine just west of town, and the boom began in earnest.

By January 1898, nearly a thousand people were living in Garnet. The town had four stores, four hotels, three livery stables, two barber shops, a union hall, a school with forty-one students, a butcher shop, a candy shop, a doctor's office, an assay office, and thirteen saloons. The saloons outnumbered the hotels by more than three to one, which was a ratio that reflected the priorities of a mining camp with some accuracy. The Nancy Hanks mine alone yielded approximately three hundred thousand dollars in gold. The total extracted from all Garnet mines by 1917 was estimated at nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was a considerable sum and also, in the context of what the work cost in human terms, a modest one.

The men who dug the gold out of the Garnet Mountains were paid in wages that reflected the value the mine owners placed on their labor, which was not the same value the miners placed on it. They worked in shafts and drifts where the air was bad and the rock was unstable and the machinery was indifferent to the distinction between a man's hand and a piece of ore. The Garnet Miners Union met in the union hall on the main street, between the assay office and one of the thirteen saloons, and the men who belonged to it understood that the union was the only institution in town that existed for their benefit rather than for the benefit of the men who owned the mines.

The timber industry was bound to the mining industry by necessity. The mine shafts required beams. The railroad that hauled the ore required ties. The locomotives that pulled the trains required fuel. The loggers who supplied all of this worked with crosscut saws in the timber above the mines, and the crash of falling trees joined the whistle of stamp mills as the characteristic sound of the Garnet Range at the turn of the century. The two industries depended on each other so completely that the decline of one guaranteed the decline of the other, which is the kind of arrangement that looks like prosperity until it doesn't.

The population of Garnet had shrunk to about one hundred and fifty by 1905. The rich veins were exhausted or too expensive to work at the price gold was bringing. In 1912, fire burned through the business district, and most of the remaining residents left. The town that had held a thousand people in 1898 was, by 1913, a collection of empty buildings in a mountain valley, which is what a ghost town is before anyone starts calling it that.

The ghost town era was interrupted once, in 1934, when President Roosevelt raised the price of gold from sixteen dollars to thirty-two dollars an ounce, and the mines became profitable again, and men came back to Garnet to work them. F.A. Davey ran the store through both the original town and the revival, which required a particular kind of patience and a tolerance for uncertainty that most businessmen do not possess. The revival lasted until the Second World War, when the government curtailed the use of dynamite for domestic mining, and Garnet became a ghost town again, and in 1948 the contents of Davey's store were auctioned off and souvenir hunters stripped what remained.

The other towns the marker names, Beartown and Top O'Deep and Reynolds City, exist only in history and local legend, as the marker says. Beartown was an earlier camp in the Bear Creek drainage, from the 1860s and 1870s. Reynolds City and Top O'Deep were short-lived camps that rose and fell in the years when the Garnet Range was being worked over by men who moved on when the gold ran out. They left no buildings. They left names on old maps and in old newspapers, and the names are what remain.

The Bureau of Land Management now administers the Garnet ghost town, and the twenty-six-mile byway that the marker describes runs from the highway over the summit and back down, through country that is rich in natural wealth and in stories of men who came here to find fortune and mostly found hard work and a shorter life than they had planned on. The road is rough in places. The buildings that remain are old and fragile. The gold is gone.

See also

• Ghost Town Byway at Greenough, Missoula County (Montana Department of Transportation, erected 2000)
• Sand Park Cemetery at Bonner, Missoula County (Bureau of Land Management) -- five miners buried 1898-1914 near the Garnet ghost town
• Garnet Ghost Town -- Bureau of Land Management historic site, Granite County