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.)
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