Sand Park Cemetery

By editor

Bonner, Missoula County, Montana, April 2026

The Drummond Call, a weekly newspaper published in the small town of Drummond, Montana, ran the following item in its issue of Friday, October 6, 1905: "Frank Hamilton died last Tuesday and was buried in the Coloma Cemetery on Thursday, under the auspices of the Garnet Miners Union. Deceased was about 35 years of age, but nothing is known of his antecedents, further than that. He was born in Colorado, presumably at Canon City."

That is the most that was ever written about Frank Hamilton. It is not much. He was about thirty-five. He was born in Colorado, presumably. He died on a Tuesday in the Garnet Mountains of western Montana, far from whatever family he may have had in Colorado, and the Garnet Miners Union buried him on Thursday, which was the kind of thing unions did for their members in the years before anyone else was going to do it. The newspaper noted his death in two sentences and moved on to other matters.

The Sand Park Cemetery holds five men like Frank Hamilton, buried between 1898 and 1914. Their names are on simple markers, and their years of death are recorded, and that is nearly everything that is known about them. Most of the hard-rock miners who died in the Garnet Mountains during those years and who had family and means were shipped home to be buried in what the marker calls "consecrated ground" in metropolitan areas like Missoula and Deer Lodge. The men in the Sand Park Cemetery did not have family nearby, or did not have the means, or both. They rest close to the source of their dreams of wealth, as the marker puts it, in the heart of the Garnet Mountains, seven miles south of the highway on a rough road that most people do not take.

The nearby ghost town of Coloma, which existed from 1895 to 1908, was where these men would have bought their supplies. The company store sold flour and bacon and dynamite and boots, and the saloons sold whiskey, and the assay office told you what your ore was worth, and the union hall was where you went when you had a grievance that the mine owner was not going to hear any other way. Coloma is gone now, as completely as Beartown and Reynolds City and Top O'Deep, which are the other camps that the Ghost Town Byway marker, a few miles up the road, mentions as existing only in history and local legend. Coloma lasted thirteen years. The men in the Sand Park Cemetery outlasted it, in the sense that they are still there and the town is not.

The question the marker asks, "Who was Frank Hamilton?", is the kind of question that seems simple until you try to answer it. A man who dies at thirty-five in a mining camp in Montana in 1905, with no known family and no recorded history beyond a birthplace that is itself qualified with the word "presumably," has left very little for posterity to work with. He was a miner. He belonged to the Garnet Miners Union. He was born in Colorado. He died on a Tuesday. The union buried him on Thursday. The Drummond Call gave him two sentences.

What can be inferred is the life that produced those two sentences. He came to the Garnet Mountains because the gold was there, or because someone told him it was, or because he had been following gold from camp to camp since he was old enough to carry a pack and there was no particular reason to stop. The Nancy Hanks mine had yielded three hundred thousand dollars by the time it was worked out. The total from all the Garnet mines was nearly a million dollars. The men who extracted that gold were paid wages, not shares, and the wages reflected the value the mine owners placed on the labor, which was less than the value the miners placed on it. The union existed to argue the difference.

The hard-rock era in the Garnet Mountains ran from roughly 1895 to 1912, when fire burned through the business district of Garnet and most of the remaining residents left. During those seventeen years, the mines employed hundreds of men, and the men lived in conditions that were hard in the ways that mining camp conditions are always hard: the work was dangerous, the housing was rough, the winters were long, and the nearest doctor was a considerable distance away. Accidents, illness, and the absence of adequate medical care meant, as the marker notes, a much shorter lifespan than the men had planned on when they came west looking for fortune.

Frank Hamilton was about thirty-five when he died. If he had been born in 1870, as the arithmetic suggests, he was twenty-five when the Garnet boom began in 1895, and he would have been at the right age to join the rush. He would have been in Garnet or Coloma during the years when the town had four hotels and thirteen saloons and a school with forty-one students and a thousand people crowded into the mountain valley. He would have seen the boom contract, year by year, as the rich veins were exhausted and the population drained away. He died in 1905, when the population was down to about one hundred and fifty, which means he stayed when others left, which is either loyalty or stubbornness or the absence of anywhere better to go.

The Garnet Miners Union buried him on Thursday. The union hall was on the main street of Garnet, between the assay office and one of the saloons, and the men who belonged to it paid dues and attended meetings and buried their dead when there was no one else to do it. That is what the union was for, among other things. Frank Hamilton had paid his dues, and the union kept its end of the bargain.

The cemetery is across the road from the marker. The Bureau of Land Management, which administers the Garnet ghost town, maintains the site. The five simple markers are still there, with the names and the years, and the mountains are still there, and the gold is gone.

See also

• Sand Park Cemetery at Bonner, Missoula County (Bureau of Land Management, erected 2000)
• Ghost Town Byway at Greenough, Missoula County (Montana Department of Transportation) -- 26-mile byway through the Garnet Mountains ghost town country
• Garnet Ghost Town -- Bureau of Land Management historic site, Granite County