The Bannack Masonic Lodge and schoolhouse, one of the first Masonic temples erected in Montana, was built in the Greek Revival style. The Masons offered the lower floor to the people of Bannack as a schoolhouse, and the citizens gratefully accepted.
MONTANA IS THE NATION’S FOURTH-LARGEST STATE. Fortunately, the best ghost towns are all situated in its southwestern quarter. That’s also the location of some of the state’s most scenic areas. Montana comes from a Latin word meaning “mountainous,” which aptly describes the section you’ll be exploring.
Montana was admitted to the Union in 1889, eight months prior to Idaho and Wyoming. Its state motto is Oro y Plata, Spanish for “Gold and Silver,” although much of the state’s wealth came not from those minerals but from copper. When inventions like the telephone created numerous uses for copper, Montanans found their real bonanza.
Montana’s ghost towns range from the protected (Bannack and Garnet) to the commercial (Virginia City and Nevada City) to the almost deserted (Comet and Elkhorn). Each is a delight to visit and photograph.
Note: At the end of the chapter, you’ll be only a couple of hours’ drive on Interstate 90 from Wallace and Burke, Idaho, which are included in this chapter on Montana as a ghost town bonus.
A dressmaker’s form is the only inhabitant on the second story of Garnet’s J. K. Wells Hotel.
Bannack is one of the Mountain West’s great ghost towns, featuring more than four dozen well-preserved buildings, some of which contain artifacts of antiquity.
The town of Bannock was born not long after a group of Colorado-based prospectors (called Pikes Peakers), led by John White and William Eades, found gold along Grasshopper Creek in July 1862. It was named for the nearby Bannock Indians, but the U.S. Postal Service, when granting a post office the following year, mistook the “o” for an “a,” and “Bannack” it became. The community, which reached a population of four hundred in a matter of weeks, was the first major gold camp in Montana, with an estimated half million dollars of ore shipped by the end of 1862.
Bannack’s prominence was challenged in 1864, when promising gold strikes were found along Last Chance Gulch (later Helena) and Alder Gulch (later Virginia City—see following entry, pages 194–197). Bannack and Virginia City, a mere fifty miles apart as the crow flies, became inextricably linked early in their history by the Vigilance Committee and the Innocents.
When twenty-first-century people think of “vigilante justice,” it usually carries a negative connotation. And “innocents”? Certainly they must be law-abiding people. In Bannack and Virginia City, those notions were reversed completely.
Henry Plummer came to Bannack in its earliest days. Appearing to be a trustworthy and earnest fellow, Plummer was selected by townspeople as sheriff. What they did not know was that Plummer was only three years out California’s San Quentin prison. He organized a group of similar chaps into a clandestine gang of road agents, or highwaymen, named the Innocents, so called because they swore to their guiltlessness of any wrongdoing. This gang of blackguards began a reign of terror in both Bannack and Virginia City, particularly on helpless travelers en route between the two towns. They are believed to have robbed and/or murdered more than a hundred people in eight short months.
In response to this mayhem, a secret band of stalwart citizens, calling themselves the Vigilance Committee, or the Vigilantes, vowed to restore order and justice. They pursued the road agents and, within a little more than a month, caught, “tried,” and hanged twenty-four of them, including, as the result of a condemned man’s testimony, Sheriff Henry Plummer himself. When Sidney Edgerton, appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to be Chief Justice of the Idaho Territory (which then included Idaho and Montana), arrived in Bannack two months after the hanging spree, he concluded that the Vigilantes had done exactly what was necessary at the time. A year later, Bannack citizens, now four thousand strong, chose Edgerton to journey to Washington, D.C., to petition for a division of the Idaho Territory. Not only was he successful, but he became the first governor of the Territory of Montana. Legal authority was firmly in place in Bannack, the territory’s first capital.
The Hotel Meade was erected in Bannack in 1875 as the Beaverhead County Courthouse. It became a hotel in 1890, nine years after the county seat was moved to Dillon, twenty-five miles east of Bannack.
Bannack, however, held that distinction for only seven months, when the first territorial legislature voted in December 1864 to move the capital to Virginia City. Bannack was on a slow path of decline, as other gold strikes eclipsed Montana’s first rush.
Mining at Bannack was primarily of secondary deposits—the retrieval of gold from streams and riverbanks. This was done first by panning, then by hydraulic mining, and finally by dredging. Each technique is, in a way, a bit more desperate than the method before, since gold seekers are essentially going over the same area, with newer technology, trying to find the precious metal that the previous attempts missed. The easy placering was over in a couple of years. Hydraulicking continued into the turn of the twentieth century, and dredging operations, the first in the United States, lasted from 1895 until about 1905. Smalltime hard-rock operations kept Bannack alive into the 1940s, after which the town was essentially abandoned.
Although some subsequent vandalizing took place in Bannack, concerned Montanans began to work to save the townsite not long after it became a ghost. When the town was finally turned over to the State of Montana in 1954, a principal stipulation was that it was to be preserved as a relic, not turned into a tourist mecca. You will be pleased at what remains.
WALKING AROUND BANNACK
Bannack today has a true feel of entering the past. You will pay a park fee and be given a walking tour brochure, which is free unless you decide to keep it.
When the Nez Perce attack did not materialize (see photo caption, page 192), Preacher William “Brother Van” Van Orsdel used the occasion to encourage the people of Bannack to show gratitude by erecting a church: The result was this Methodist church, built in 1877.
I was talking to a group of tourists in Virginia City who had just been to Bannack and were very disappointed because the buildings were closed up. They preferred Virginia City and its tourist shops and felt Bannack would have been more worthwhile if you could go inside the buildings. Here’s what I didn’t have the heart to tell them: Folks, you can go inside most of the structures; you just have to turn the doorknobs. Park rangers merely ask you to close the doors behind you.
Since you’ll have a walking tour brochure, I’ll mention only a few highlights. One is the unusual 1874 Masonic Lodge. The masons helped the community by donating the ground floor of their lodge to serve as a public school. The Masons had their meetings on the second floor in a lodge that still features Masonic paraphernalia, which you can view through glass partitions.
The winding staircase of Bannack’s county courthouse (later the Hotel Meade) was used in August 1877, when women and children were sent inside “the fortress” because of a feared Nez Perce Indian attack. Children were rumored to have been ready to hide in the courthouse’s large safes. The attack never occurred.
Across the street from the schoolhouse/lodge is the most impressive structure in town, the two-story, brick, 1875 Beaverhead County Courthouse, which served until 1881, when the county seat was moved, after a contentious election, to Dillon, where it still resides.
After almost a decade of standing empty, the courthouse was remodeled into the Hotel Meade by Dr. John Singleton Meade. This upscale hostelry operated off and on during every period of Bannack’s prosperity until the 1940s.
Next door to the courthouse/hotel is Cyrus Skinner’s Saloon, a favorite hangout of Henry Plummer’s road agents. After the highwaymen were dispatched by the Vigilantes, Skinner, too, was hanged for his association with Plummer and his gang. Later, the building became a general mercantile.
Across the street and down a bit from Skinner’s Saloon is Chrisman’s Store, and, behind it, Bannack’s two jails, the first ever constructed in Montana. From the smaller of the jails, one can look through the bars to see, up Hangman’s Gulch north of town, a reconstruction of the gallows that Sheriff Henry Plummer ordered built—the same gallows from which he eventually swayed when discovered to be a leader of the Innocents.
If you walk up to those gallows, you can take a path over to the Pioneer Cemetery, used from 1860 until about 1880. A later cemetery, containing more than sixty graves and many wooden fences, is .4 of a mile beyond the turnoff to Bannack on the east side of the road to Dillon.
On the east side of Bannack are two more buildings of note. The first is the 1877 Methodist church, Bannack’s first house of worship. It was constructed as a result of the determination of William Van Orsdel, known affectionately as Brother Van, who charmed and cajoled Bannack’s citizens into contributing funds to erect his church.
Immediately west of the church stands the 1866 or 1867 Roe/Graves House, the first frame house built in Bannack. It is also the town’s largest house, with a dozen rooms.
WHEN YOU GO
Bannack is 25 miles west of Dillon. Take Interstate 15’s Exit 59, which is 4 miles southwest of Dillon’s Exit 63, and follow Montana Highway 278 west for 17 miles to a junction with Bannack Bench Road, where a sign directs you to Bannack, 3.7 miles south.
Bannack can also be reached from Idaho, by taking Idaho Highway 28 about 20 miles southeast of Salmon at Tendoy. From Tendoy, Agency Creek Road (also known by the cumbersome title of Lewis and Clark National Back Country Byway and Adventure Road) goes into Montana via Lemhi Pass. Bannack is 46 miles northeast of Tendoy.