FEBRUARY 2024 Ghost Towns and History of Montana Newsletter From The Roundup Record, June 23, 1911 CONFEDERATE GULCH HAD THE RICHEST PLACER MINES ON EARTH; DIAMOND CITY, ONCE RIVAL OF HELENA, IS NOW BUT A MEMORY Accessed via: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Some 35 miles northeast of Helena is an abandoned, worked out placer gulch, in which four or five ruined log cabins stand, victims of the slow decay of time. Years ago they surrendered to the fierce assaults of winter blasts, and with sagging ridge poles and crumbling walls, they represent in sorry fashion the only monument that remains of what was once one of the most flourishing and hopeful of Montana's boom gold camps. The list of Montana post offices today does not contain the name of Diamond City, but that was the proud appellation of the hustling, prosperous mining center that half a century ago was as well known as Helena, Virginia City or Bannack, and was considered a much better camp than Butte. Neither would a list of Montana mining districts in 1920 contain the name of Confederate Gulch, yet for the area mined that almost forgotten gulch was the richest gold-producing district ever found in the Treasure state. No Montana mining city ever rose to prominence with a greater rush than did Diamond City or sank into oblivion so quickly. One day in the 60's a heavily laden freight outfit pulled away from its streets with two and onequarter tons of gold dust, valued at $900,000, the clean-up of one short season's work of three or four men on a rich bar. And yet a decade later the course of the camp had been run, and what had been the mining capital of eastern Montana and the county seat of Meagher county was settling down to slow but sure decay. Forty years ago, in 1880, its former population of several thousands had dwindled to 64 men, women and children, and in 1883 Judge Cornelius Hedges, who visited the old place that summer, wrote: "Diamond City is desolate, deserted and dreary to behold in the shreds of its departed glory, yet those who knew it in the days of its pride,
P a g e 2 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r wealth and activity cannot fail to recall pleasant associations. Its very site will go down the flume, which is already within the borders of the town and gleaning a rich harvest—probably the last. There are only four families left of all the many hundreds that have dwelt there since the glorious days of '66. If the goose that laid the nestful of golden eggs can only be found in the shape of a prolific mother vein of gold-bearing quartz, the days of Diamond City's departed glory may return; otherwise it will disappear utterly with another season.” A street scene in Diamond City in the ‘70s, after the glory of the camp had departed and it was rapidly falling into decay. But, unfortunately, the rich strike of gold quartz was never made, and today old Diamond is only a memory in the minds of grizzled old-timers, who like to indulge in day-dreams of their lusty young manhood, when life lay before them and they came to the enchanted mountains of Montana to do a man's work in a new country. Back in the later 80's Charles M. Russell, the cowboy artist, passed through Diamond City — then deserted excepting for two or three gray-haired prospectors—and paused there for half an hour to rebuild in his mind’s eye the old camp as it had been and to populate once more the deserted streets with picturesque mountain men, miners, stage drivers, gamblers and all other types of the western frontier hosts that have passed on forever. Russell said Diamond City was one of the most perfect types of the old mining camp- even in its semi-decay- that he had ever seen. Struck in 1864 Confederate Gulch was discovered in 1864, and during the fall of that year and the spring of 1865 prospectors thronged there and the vicinity was extensively mined by men who had come up from the Idaho and California placer fields. The richness of the pay dirt in Confederate Gulch was the sensation of the Montana gold camps. As high as $180 in gold to a pan was obtained. Montana Bar, situated above Confederate Gulch, and consisting of a foothill of two acres, was richer than the main gulch. When the first cleanup was made on that bar the flumes were found to be clogged with gold by the hundredweight. When bedrock on this famous bar was reached the enormous yield of $180 to the pan in Confederate was forgotten in astonishment at the wonderful yield of $1,000 to the pan. Confederate Gulch was not so large as Alder, Last Chance or Oro Fino gulches, but it was the richest in proportion of all Montana gulches that yielded gold. The best informed miners of that day declared that, in proportion to the area of the surface worked, Confederate Gulch and Montana bar produced more gold than any other spot in the world. Diamond a Mining Center Diamond City in the 60's was not only the trading center of Confederate Gulch, but also for some 14
P a g e 3 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r other gulches in the vicinity that produced gold. Pioneers of the state will recall a number of these gulches with interest. Among these was New York Gulch, whose rich treasures were discovered in 1866 and a town site platted the following summer by men who had high hopes of a city springing up there. Opposite, at the mouth of Trout creek, the town of Brooklyn was platted and the placer mines there mined successfully until 1869. These camps in the midst of the mountains with their high-sounding names, lived their little hour and passed like mist before the sun when the yellow dust was exhausted. For three years the population of the Trout creek gulches were counted by thousands. Ten years later the population of the district numbered 49. White's Gulch, three miles over the mountain from Diamond City, was another famous gold producer that lasted longer than Confederate or any of the other placer gulches in the neighborhood, being mined as late as 1886. It was discovered in May, 1865, by a man of the name of White. Bloody Cave Gulch Fight Cave Gulch was famed for its rich mines and was famous also in the ‘60s as the scene of a bloody vendetta. A party of claim jumpers, which had organized in Idaho and Nevada, decided to come to Montana and operate, stealing claims from their owners and hoping to hold them by strength of numbers. They chose Cave Gulch as the place to start operations because it was inaccessible and had good gold prospects. These claim jumpers were a sinister, desperate band of frontier desperadoes, as may be judged from their plan of action. They established a camp near Cavetown, in the Kingsbury mountain district, and boldly served notice on two miners, who were working on a good-looking bar, to leave their diggings and make themselves scarce by sunset of the following day or take the consequences, which, they declared, would be sudden death. In alarm, these miners consulted with their neighbors who were placer mining, and word was sent out quietly to five other small camps in the neighborhood. That night a score of miners gathered at Cavetown, and before dawn took possession of a cabin near the claims of the two men who had been threatened, they spent the day, playing cards and not showing themselves outside the cabin. At dusk a dozen of the claim jumpers appeared, prepared to take possession of the diggings, which, they believed, had been abandoned in accordance with their orders. No sooner had the leader of the claim jumpers set foot beside the flume than a shot cracked from the cabin Fight in Cave Gulch near Diamond City. Drawn by Charles M. Russell
P a g e 4 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r and the desperado fell dead. The followers of the slain man at once opened up a fusillade of shots at the cabin and the shooting for a few minutes was general. Then a party of miners rushed forth from the cabin and took a stand in the open. Three of the claim jumpers fell, mortally wounded, in a few seconds and the rest broke and ran into the timber. That ended the attempts of the claim jumpers to operate in Montana, at least on any extensive scale. The mines of Cave Gulch were worked in a desultory way as late as the 80's. Diamond a Boom Town For three years, when Diamond City was at its best between 1865 and 1868, it was in every sense one of the best boom camps of the west. Stores, saloons, gambling houses, hurdy gurdy houses and hundreds of log cabins grew like mushrooms up and down the gulch. As adventurers from the east and west poured in, the gold belt widened constantly by new discoveries. Roads were hewn to camps in every direction, and soon rumbling stages began to arrive daily from Last Chance Gulch, where the city of Helena was growing from lusty infancy to a mountain metropolis. Along the trails walked and rode weatherbeaten, booted men with wiry bodies and strong faces, some with pack horses and many carrying their blankets on their backs as they strode along. Soon ox and mule trains began to drag into the gulch, hauling stores of goods for trade with the miners. In any new camp there were at first two sharply defined classes—the old miners and the "pilgrims." It was almost an invariable rule in the camps like Diamond City that the young men were from the east, while the grizzled men were from California, even though they were natives of middle western or eastern states. The "tenderfoot" arriving in a new mining camp without previous experience in the mountains was usually somewhat nervous, uncertain of his rights and suspicious of all of his new neighbors and acquaintances. Not so the veteran miner and mountain man. When Diamond City came into being in 1864 the little host of gold seekers who flocked into the gulch found themselves beyond the reach of the law and without the protection or control of the United States government. The mineral lands had not been declared open to exploration or purchase and there was really no way of acquiring legal title. Actual possession was the only evidence of ownership. The Law of the Miners The situation demanded law as soon as a new district was discovered and that without delay. But the veteran miners and prospectors were not in any degree uncertain about what to do or how to do it, and the promptness with which they acted soon reassured the "tenderfeet." A mass meeting was at once called, which organized the district and adopted rules and regulations for the government and control of all matters pertaining to mining, the use of water for that purpose and the acquiring and disposal of mining claims after determining of what a mining claim should consist.
P a g e 5 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r The miners' laws of Diamond City and the other Montana camps were based on the eternal principles of equity. One of the most important points to be decided in any new district was the time allowed a miner or a mining company to "lay over" without being jumped. This was a matter regulated by water, snow, frozen ground, etc. No man was required to work his claim if it could not be worked; it was universally understood that a claim could not be jumped while its owner was absent fighting Indians or kept from work by sickness or for want of grub at hand. Claims worth millions were held by no other tenure than a brief code of miners' laws like the following: "We, most of the miners of this district, resolve, first, that this district shall be called Confederate Gulch, and that a claim shall be 100 feet long in the creek, 200 feet long in a gulch and 50 feet front on the bank, and that a man may hold one of each. "Resolved, secondly, that no more Chinamen shall take up claims. "Resolved, thirdly, that a white man must stick up a notice at each end of his claim when he takes it up. "Resolved, fourthly, that a man may lay over his claim a month by posting a notice and paying the receiver one dollar. "Resolved, fifthly, that all disputes about claims shall be settled by a miners' meeting and no lawyers." With the miners’ courts and the citizens’ criminal courts began the judicial history of Montana. With the organization of the territory and the establishment of the capital at Bannack a territorial code of laws was drawn up and these laws were soon in force at Diamond City, which shortly after became the county seat of Meagher county. –From The Circle Banner Newspaper, June 11, 1920, Accessed via: https:// chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Watch next month’s issue for the story of a huge gold dust shipment out of Diamond City… Laura Duchesnay was one of few women who lived at Reeder’s Alley. Her husband, George, owned the Stonehouse, then divided it into four small flats. The Duchesnays lived in one and rented out the others. Laura, well-known as local bird doctor, raised hundreds of canaries in their tiny apartment. Throughout the 1920s she advertised her songbirds as “excellent singers.” They sang so sweetly that some claim their songs now and then still echo through the building. During conversion of the Stonehouse to office space in 2008, workers removed a section of flooring to install computer wiring. They discovered two underground rooms. Legend has it that the Duchesnays sold bootleg whiskey during Prohibition. Buyers lined up and down the alley. They feared the revenue officer would come around with questions, so Laura lined the alley with cages full of songbirds. If anyone asked, customers would say they were just in line to buy canaries. Photo by Jolene Ewert-Hintz
P a g e 6 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r Children in Montana’s Mining Camps–continued by Ellen Baumler The Dangers Butte had a much darker side, however. Children grew up breathing polluted air and playing in filthy alleyways. Boys who had reached puberty and could chew a plug of Peerless Tobacco without throwing up were considered man enough to work in the mines. In the 1930s, a sign on the fence around the red light district read “Men under 21 Keep Out”—an acknowledgment that boys in Butte often became men long before they reached legal age.19 The intrinsic dangers of mining camps put children especially at risk. While Homer Thomas, Mollie Sheehan, James Sanders, and Frances Gilbert had parents who kept close watch on their children, this was not the case for all. Some children, as Thomas Dimsdale noted, ran wild in the early mining camps. Youngsters were sometimes left in desperate need of community charity and social services. On a frigid December day in 1864, three sisters dressed in little more than calico slips begged at the door of James Fergus in Virginia City. Inquiries about their parents revealed that their father was gambling in nearby Nevada City and that their mother could not to be found. Women in town gave the girls food and clothing before reluctantly returning them to their father, as there was no legal alternative. The Montana Post publicly chastised him for neglecting and abusing his children. The eldest girl was twelve-year-old Martha Canary, who grew up to become well known as Calamity Jane.20 During the early decades, various Catholic institutions and boarding schools sometimes took in orphans, but Montana’s first orphanage, St. Ambrose’s, was at Helena. It was established in 1881, when the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth took in three young brothers from Butte. Their mother had died and their father, a miner, could not care for them. The sisters initially named the home after the namesake of Ambrose Sullivan, one of the children, but it soon became St. Joseph’s Orphanage and was quickly filled to well over its capacity.21 Epidemics were commonplace throughout the nineteenth century and knew no social boundaries. Rich or poor, no person was immune and all children were at risk. Typhoid and cholera plagued mining camps because residents quickly polluted their water sources. Children’s diseases, such as measles, whooping cough, and diphtheria, sometimes ravaged the population. Eight-year-old Sallie Davenport traveled by steamboat to Helena with her mother, brother, and sister in the spring of 1865. They came to join their father, William Davenport, who had gone ahead to establish a claim. One younger sibling died before the family boarded the steamboat St. Johns at Liberty Landing, Missouri. There were many families with children on board. Sallie, along with her two siblings and most of the other children, fell victim to the measles, which swept through the passengers housed in close quarters. Sallie recovered, but her younger brother died as the boat docked at Fort Benton. Her older sister Anna made the final leg of the long trip to Helena in a makeshift bed in the back of a freight wagon.22
P a g e 7 The summer of 1865 in the mining camp at Helena was rainy. Mollie Sheehan remembered her family’s cozy cabin during that summer, but the Davenports had the opposite experience. They lived in a cabin with a sod roof. Every time it rained, the sod soaked up water like a sponge and the roof constantly leaked. Sallie recalled that her mother was suffering from a bone felon in her hand. She paced the muddy door at night, unable to sleep, worried about Anna’s health. Anna died in September, leaving Sallie—one of four children just six months before—an only child.23 Two decades later, the great silver camp of Elkhorn, Montana, flourished. Elkhorn’s pathetic legacy, however, reminds us that sometimes the sacrifices parents made in leaving home and family for new opportunities were minor compared to the hazards these decisions imposed on their children. Dr. William Dudley served as camp doctor, but could do nothing when a diphtheria epidemic claimed most of Elkhorn’s children in 1889. The Dudleys left Elkhorn abruptly, leaving their firstborn son, a casualty of the epidemic, buried in the hillside cemetery. Later that year, on September 27, Albin Nelson, ten, and Harry Walton, nine—rare survivors of the recent epidemic— found a quicksilver container full of black powder. Adults filled these containers to detonate for community celebrations like the Fourth of July, and had overlooked this one. The boys managed to explode it, and blew themselves to bits. They share a common grave in the small cemetery.24 Epidemics and explosives were not the only perils; dredging created its own dangers. At Bannack in 1916, three girls were enjoying the warmth of a summer afternoon, splashing and wading in Grasshopper Creek. Laughing and talking, they waded out into a pond created by the dredge boat, not realizing they had gone too far. Suddenly the girls stepped off a ledge into nine feet of water. None could swim. Twelve-year-old Smith Paddock heard the commotion and managed to pull two of the girls out, but the third girl, sixteen-year-old Dorothy Dunn, drowned.25 Of all the mining camps, Butte was probably the most dangerous place for youngsters. This made Butte’s children tough and unusually daring. They seemed to thrive in the polluted air and unsanitary conditions frequently noted in reports to the board of health. While Maury Mulcahy was growing up in Butte in the 1930s and 1940s, mine officials came to his elementary school, showed the kids what a blasting cap was, warned them not to pick up the devices, and showed them the explosive inside. After the lecture, every boy went out in search of caps. They would pour the powder into a bottle with a wick, put it on the train tracks, and try to explode it as a train passed by. Mulcahy knew children who G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r Mining camp children went to school in Garnet, Montana. (947-520, Montana Historical Society Research Center Photograph Archives, Helena.)
P a g e 8 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r lost limbs to this form of play. Danger made the game that much more fun.26 These strong and resilient children of the mining camps grew up to become the backbone of Montana. Mollie Sheehan Ronan vividly recalled from a very early age that Montana’s “dry, light sparkling air” invigorated her “and gave zest to living.”27 While unusual hardships and dangerous conditions sometimes put them at high risk, the freedom these young pioneers enjoyed made them singularly independent individuals. In this way, mining camp children and their descendants helped define the character of today’s Treasure State. NOTES: 19. WPA Writers’ Project, Copper Camp: The Lusty Story of Butte, Montana, The Richest Hill on Earth (1943; reprint, Helena, MT: Riverbend Publishing Co., 2002), 8; Ellen Baumler, “Devil’s Perch: Prostitution from Suite to Cellar in Butte, Montana,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 48 (Aut. 1998): 17. 20. (Virginia City) Montana Post , 31 Dec. 1864; Roberta Deed Sollid, Calamity Jane: A Study in Historical Criticism (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1958), 9-10. 21. Gilmore, We Came North, 60; Ellen Baumler, “Catholic Hill” (at http:// www.metnet.mt.gov/Special/Quarries%20From%20The%20Gulch/HTM/Catholic%20Hill.pdf, accessed May 5, 2011). 22. Sallie Davenport Davidson, reminiscence, 1928, Small Collection 606, Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena. 23. Davidson reminiscence, Small Collection 606; Butts, “The Forgotten Pioneers,” 3. 24. Great Falls Tribune, “Parade,” 9 Oct. 1949; Ellen Baumler, “Historical Reflections,” Montana The Magazine of Western History 50 (Aut. 1982): 75. 25. Dillon (MT) Examiner, 9 Aug. 1916. 26. Maury Mulcahy, personal communication with author, Apr. 2006. 27. Ronan, Girl From the Gulches, 51. Ellen Baumler was an award-winning author and Montana historian. A master at linking history with modern-day supernatural events, Ellen's true stories have delighted audiences across the state. The legacy she left behind will be felt for generations to come and we are in debt to her for sharing her extensive knowledge of Montana history in such an entertaining manner. To view and purchase Ellen’s books, visit: http:// ellenbaumler.blogspot.com/p/my-books.html My/Donor Information: SUBSCRIBE TO THE GHOST TOWNS AND HISTORY OF MONTANA NEWSLETTER! Renewal? Y/N Send a Gift to: NAME____________________________________ NAME___________________________________ ADDRESS__________________________________ ADDRESS_________________________________ CITY______________________________________ CITY_____________________________________ STATE__________________ZIP________________STATE_________________ ZIP________________ Yearly subscriptions are $19.95 (published monthly). Please make checks payable to Ghost Towns & History of MT, LLC and send with this clipping to P.O. Box 126, Warm Springs, MT 59756 Diphtheria took the lives of many children at Elkhorn, Montana, in 1889. (Photograph courtesy of Larry Goldsmith.)
1 Publizr