Butte, Helena & the Gold Country
Nimiipuu loss at the Big Hole, the gold strikes at Bannack, Alder Gulch and Last Chance Gulch, the vigilantes, and Butte's flooded Berkeley Pit beneath the Anaconda stack.
In August 1877 about eight hundred Nimiipuu, non-treaty Nez Perce in flight from Idaho, pitched their lodges beside the North Fork of the Big Hole River to rest. Before dawn on August 9 Colonel John Gibbon's infantry and a party of civilian volunteers fired into the sleeping camp. The warriors pinned the soldiers down in the pines while the families escaped south, but between sixty and ninety of their people were dead, most of them women and children. The National Park Service keeps the meadow as a battlefield and as a burial ground.
This was already gold country. John White's party found gold on Grasshopper Creek on July 28, 1862, and Bannack, named for the Bannock people of the region, became the first capital of Montana Territory on May 26, 1864. Alder Gulch, struck in May 1863, proved richer, and Virginia City took the capital in 1865; Last Chance Gulch, worked from July 1864, made Helena, which took it in 1875 and kept it. The camps made their own law. On January 10, 1864, vigilantes hanged Bannack's elected sheriff, Henry Plummer, and two of his deputies without a trial, and by the end of February they had hanged twenty-two men.
Butte made its money underground. On June 8, 1917, a fire in the Granite Mountain and Speculator mines killed 168 men, the deadliest disaster in American hard-rock mining. From 1955 the Anaconda Company took the hill from above instead, demolishing whole neighborhoods for the Berkeley Pit. On April 22, 1982, the pumps were shut off, and the pit has been filling ever since with acidic, metal-laden water; in late 2016 thousands of snow geese landed on it and died. At Anaconda the 585-foot smelter stack still stands, the tallest surviving masonry structure in the world, at the head of a Superfund complex that runs down the Clark Fork.
What to See in Butte, Helena & the Gold Country
9 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Architecture
Stories from Butte, Helena & the Gold Country
Butte, Helena & the Gold Country rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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