Winston

By editor

Winston, Broadwater County, Montana, 1892

The town of Winston was named for a railroad station, which was named for a railroad contractor, which is the kind of naming that happens when the railroad arrives and the people who were already there have not yet gotten around to naming things themselves. P. B. Winston was a contractor for the Northern Pacific Railroad, which came through the Upper Missouri Valley in 1883. The station was named for him. Ten years later, the town was named for the station. This is how places get their names in Montana: by accident, by association, and occasionally by someone's deliberate choice.

The valley had been inhabited for at least 10,000 years before Winston arrived. Native tribes -- the Flathead, Shoshone, Crow, and Blackfeet -- traveled through it and used it. The Upper Missouri River was a travel corridor long before it was a mining district. On July 22, 1805, the Corps of Discovery pushed, paddled, and pulled their way up the Missouri through this valley. Sacagawea, their Shoshone interpreter, recognized the white-colored earth along the riverbanks and knew that the Three Forks of the Missouri headwaters was nearby. Lewis noted in his journal: "this piece of information has cheered the sperits of the party." The spelling is his own.

The gold rush that created Winston began in 1864, when four ex-Confederate soldiers discovered gold in a creek bed east of the present town. The creek was later named Confederate Gulch. News of the strike spread quickly, and the surrounding hills filled with prospectors who gave their claims names that tell you something about the spirit of the enterprise: Hog 'Em, Beat 'Em and Cheat 'Em; Sunrise, Sunset, Iron Age City, and Little Bonanza. These are not the names of men who expected to fail. They are the names of men who expected to get rich, and some of them did.

Three major mining locations in the nearby Elkhorn Mountains put Winston on the map: the East Pacific, the Kleinschmidt, and the Iron Age mines. Records indicate that at least three million dollars of gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc came from the Winston Mining District. This was a considerable sum in the 1880s and 1890s, when a working man's wages were a dollar or two a day. The men who found the gold did not all keep it. Some of them lost it to bad luck, bad management, or the fluctuating prices of the metals markets. Some of them lost it to the saloons, of which Winston had seven at its peak.

Winston was platted in 1892 on twenty acres at its current location. At its height, the town had a school, a church, hotels, dance halls, and a newspaper, in addition to the seven saloons. The newspaper was the Winston Miner, which reported on the mines, the markets, and the social life of the community with the thoroughness that small-town newspapers brought to their work in that era. The school educated the children of the miners and the farmers who had come to feed the miners. The church offered the miners and their families a reason to be sober on Sunday mornings.

The Northern Pacific Railroad, which had given the town its name, also gave it its economic lifeline. The railroad connected Winston to Helena to the north and to the markets of the East. Without the railroad, the ore from the Elkhorn Mountains would have been difficult and expensive to ship. With it, the mines could operate at a scale that made them profitable.

The town declined as the mines played out and the prices of silver and copper fell. The Northern Pacific continued to run through the valley, but the traffic it carried was no longer the traffic of a mining boomtown. The farmers who had come to feed the miners stayed and worked the rich soil of the Upper Missouri Valley. The timber industry that had supplied the mine structures continued to operate. The valley is still inhabited, still farmed, still managed. The mining camps in the Elkhorn Mountains are still visible from the back roads, if you know where to look.

See also

• Winston at Winston, Broadwater County
• Confederate Gulch at White Sulphur Springs, Meagher County
• The Discovery at Last Chance Gulch at Helena, Lewis and Clark County