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 Highland City, Montana Highland City, in the midst of the towering Highland Mountains, is located 26 miles south of Butte. The town in its prime in the early 60’s, was the largest community of Virginia City, Nevada and rivalled that place as a mining and commercial center. Distributing foodstuffs and other supplies to the lesser mining camps, which included Butte, was no small part of the business that helped maintain the city; but gold, discovered in 1863 was the lodestone that drew people to the almost inaccessible Highland Gulch and paved the way for the city’s growth. Crude in its architecture and as crude in its administration of frontier law, Highland City was a typical camp of the early west. Bustling and booming from the stimulus of gold pouring into the pockets of its people, generosity was a habit and poverty was unknown. Men quarreled and killed each other and were hanged forthwith for doing so. Strong liquor was plentiful but was rarely drunk to excess. Dance halls of the frontier type were there, but with little of the petty knavery that characterized the less prosperous camps. The place is still pointed out where a horse thief, captured some 20 miles west in the Big Hole country, was hanged in 1865. Old timers claim that he was the only man hanged in the city for anything short of murder. But while Highland City did not shine as a center of outlawry and speedy justice as did some of the other early camps, it was not lacking in the qualities that make for an orderly, if somewhat arbitrary, enforcement of common law. A committee of safety, known as a vigilance committee, was regularly elected and narratives of the work and worries of this committee are recounted by the surviving few who were numbered among her residents in Highland’s palmy days. Much gold, of a quality singularly pure, came out of Highland Gulch. Evidences of immense placer workings still remain, Photo by Jolene Ewert-Hintz and in the adjacent gulches, men, whose memories run back to those earlier days, still ply their picks and pans and eke a scanty existence from the reluctant gravel. Occasionally one finds a nugget or a pocket of gold, and hope in an old heart builds a new Highland City on the fast disappearing ruins of the old. The decline of the city was as rapid as its rise. After seven years of affluence the stream of gold came suddenly to an end, an in another year the exodus of people was practically complete. The 600 log structures, many of them two-story dimensions, tumbled rapidly into decay. – This article appeared in The Dillon Examiner, August 26, 1936. Accessed via: http://montananewspapers.org/ Photo by Jolene Ewert-Hintz
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