The Prickly Pear Diggings

The panel's best line is older than the panel. The Highway Commission board that stood here before it already had Gold Tom's colors making little dent in the national debt, and added that Montana City swaggered into existence. A 1936 history in the Great Falls Tribune gives the prospector a name, Henry Thomas. The Fisk train reached the Prickly Pear valley on September 21, 1862, and the split it caused was lopsided: eighty-two people stopped to prospect, while only three wagons and fourteen men went on with Fisk to Walla Walla.

What the plaque says

The Prickly Pear Diggings The Fisk or Northern Overland Expedition camped at the future site of Montana City just east of I-15 in 1862. The outfit, consisting of 125 emigrants, left Minnesota in June 1862, under the leadership of Capt. James Fisk for the purpose of opening a wagon route across the northern Great Plains to Fort Benton, the eastern terminus of the Mullan Road. After arriving in Montana, expedition members drifted south toward mining camps in Idaho and Grasshopper Creek in Montana. They found "Gold Tom," one of Montana's first prospectors, holed up in a tepee near here scratching gravel for gold along Prickly Pear Creek. The few colors he panned out wouldn't have made much of a dent in the national debt, but about half of the Fisk outfit caught gold fever and wintered here. By 1864, a few hundred men mined along the creek with only marginal success. Montana City faded away as richer gold strikes elsewhere in the territory lured its residents away. By 1870, it was little more than a memory. The Montana Central Railroad reestablished it in 1888 as a station on its line. Today, Montana City is a distinct community that is proud of its heritage.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Montana State Capitol — 5.2 mi
  A copper-domed capitol won in a copper kings' election, with a Russell painting that put the Salish at the center.
• Mann Gulch — 25 mi
  Thirteen markers on a grass slope above the Missouri, where a fire outran a crew of smokejumpers in 1949.

More markers nearby

• Unionville — 6.8 mi
• Benton Avenue Cemetery — 6.9 mi
• Elkhorn Mountain Volcanoes — 9.0 mi
• Freighters — 9.0 mi