Helena's Exploited Resources

In the summer of 1864, Helena's pristine wilderness teemed with wildlife—pronghorn antelope, grizzly bears, coyotes, wolves, and rattlesnakes. The area was rich in other natural resources as well: water, timber, and especially gold. As the men worked, Indians of various tribes watched in silence as the men began to destroy ancestral hunting grounds. Miners trickled in [Page 302]that summer, and those who decided to stay began to harvest the hillsides, which were overgrown with large trees. Before winter set in, two hundred men swarmed the gulch, building sluice boxes and log shelters along the stream that ran through it and provided miners with the necessary water to placer their claims.

Helena's impressive St. Peter's Hospital, constructed in 1890, reveals a bleak landscape littered with tailing piles.

Used with permission of the Montana Historical Society.

As placer operations along the gulch expanded and men and their animals trampled through the gulch, it was not long before the water source—sufficient for the small party of discoverers—became polluted. By 1865, the water that was so fortuitously located was unfit to drink. Miners relied on teams to bring in a daily supply of potable water. Although once plentiful, there was not enough water to serve so many, and newcomers sometimes left in disgust over its scarcity. Construction of the Yaw Yaw Ditch (also known as the Chessman and Cowan Ditch) remedied the water situation. A wooden flume, built around the base of Mount Helena, harnessed water from a reservoir supplied by Ten Mile Creek. This made sluicing, and further upheaval of the land, much more efficient. In 1869, the Park Ditch Company brought a second water source into Helena from Park Lake twenty miles away. Other water systems followed, and numerous small companies supplied water from various sources.

By the middle of summer in 1865, three thousand people choked Last Chance Gulch. The countryside was barren; stumps remained on the once-forested slopes. The gulch was a jumble of claims where prospect holes and mine shafts made the area treacherous. Tunnels undermined buildings, and stilts held them up. Streets ended abruptly in tailing piles, and prospect holes filled with water put residents and especially children at grave risk. By 1868, sluicing on the gulch had ended and a city covered the old placer diggings.

Some men worked to recover the more easily obtained gold along the gulch near the discovery site; others discovered gold veins south of Last Chance where the main gulch divides into Grizzly and Oro Fino gulches. James Whitlach made the first lode discovery in the fall of 1864. Discovery of the Whitlach-Union Mine inspired others to comb the surrounding hillsides and explore the gulches. Discoveries followed, and small mining camps dotted the area, with Helena at the hub of these smaller operations. The main lode-mining settlement was Unionville, where the Whitlach-Union Mine produced $3.5 million worth of gold between 1864 and 1872. The Spring Hill was discovered in 1870 in Grizzly Gulch. The Spring Hill's major contribution lay in the twenty-three thousand tons of flux it provided between 1885 and 1890 for the territory's first silver-lead smelter at Wickes, eighteen miles south of Helena. Mining at the Whitlach-Union and the Spring Hill mines continued into the mid-20th century.

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