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 great fun sliding down the mine dumps on pieces of tin, riding in the empty ore cars as the men pushed them back into the mine to reload, and watching her father scrape the mercury tables at the end of the day. The balls of mercury would catch the gold, and when enough had accumulated, the blacksmith would retort it in a vat, leaving a blob of gold at the bottom. The summer’s highlight was a big dance on the Fourth of July. Adults spread cornmeal on the oak floor in the dance hall, and Elizabeth and the other children skated and slid on it to prepare the floor for dancing. Her family had a 1922 Buick that Elizabeth’s mother learned to drive, an unusual feat at that time of which the family was very proud. The horse-drawn stage to Bearmouth still operated, however, and three times a week it would bring the Farmers a gallon jug of sweet milk. By the time the stage reached Garnet, up the steep, log-lined grade that reminded Elizabeth of corduroy, the jug had been jostled so much that there was always butter at the top.14 Freedom and Adventure Children usually had more freedom in Montana’s mining camps than they might have enjoyed under different circumstances. While myriad duties kept their parents always busy, children made up their own games and devised ways to keep themselves entertained. Mollie Sheehan and her friend, Carrie Crane, enjoyed the unique privilege of cleaning miners’ sluice boxes at the end of the day, until Mollie’s father discovered this activity and forbid it. While miners would have shot any man caught around their sluice boxes, the little girls amused the men and so they allowed them to keep for themselves small amounts of gold that they laboriously dug out of crevices in the sluices. Mollie and Carrie brought their hairbrushes and straws, or “blowers,” brushed out the gold caught in crevices in the wooden troughs, blew it into piles, and scooped it into their buckskin pokes. One day, one of those generous miners, Peter Ronan, poured a bucketful of muddy water down his sluice box, unaware that the girls were down at the bottom. Mollie’s new bonnet was ruined, but that is how she met the miner who later became her husband.15 Young boys in the mining camps could always find work, if their parents would allow it, cleaning up the saloons and hurdy-gurdy houses. They pocketed the loose dust inevitably spilled on the dance floor. Sometimes they found jobs in the liveries and stables, where there was always work to be done, or by holding mules while freighters unloaded. In the mid-1870s, Virginia City was still a rough camp. When Sister Irene McGrath—one of three Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, Kansas, who opened a miners’ hospital at Virginia City—gathered youngsters to teach catechism classes, parents expressed gratitude to her for getting their children off the streets, even if only for an hour or two. Sister Irene herself, a novice, was barely eighteen.16 Boys in Garnet, where Elizabeth Farmer spent her summers in the 1920s, played mean tricks on Frank Davey, whose many properties and businesses included the general store. Mr. Davey guarded his merchan
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