On April 5, 1866, Samuel T. Hauser received a federal charter for the First National Bank of Helena—Montana Territory’s first national bank. Two years after the Last Chance Gulch strike, the mining camp was already moving from gold dust to paper credit and eastern capital.

Hauser relocated his private banking business into a new building at Last Chance Gulch and Wall Street, on ground that had yielded the discovery that made Helena. The national charter tied a frontier bank to the Civil War–era banking system and signaled that the gulch town meant to last.

Hauser would later become a territorial governor and a railroad and power magnate. The April charter marked an early step in that rise—and in Helena’s transformation from placer camp to capital city.