“Montana Ghost Towns and Gold Camps” by Bill Whitfield

By Guest Writer, 8-08-08

Montana Ghost Towns and Gold Camps
by William W. Whitfield
Stoneydale Press, 240 pages, $19.95

Bill Whitfield often thinks about what Montana must have been like for the plucky miners and homesteaders who lived during the flourishing heyday of Montana mining towns. Although these miners would probably have a hard time envisioning the world we know today, thanks to Whitfield’s pictorial guide Montana Ghost Towns and Gold Camps, it’s easier for us to envision theirs. 

Brimming with more than 450 raw and blunt photographic recollections of mostly left behind and disremembered mining structures, relics, and machinery, Whitfield’s book provides us with the nostalgic insight to be able to better see and understand the mining world, and the satisfying luxury of visiting the places where the rough and ready lived, worked, fought, drank and died. These bare photographs evoke emotions —solitariness, desperation—or images of pioneers’ and miners’ struggles to survive uncivil but simpler times.

Although the inhabitants of Montana’s early-day gold and mine camps may only still be around in spirit, Whitfield feels we should still consider ourselves guests when on such long since abandoned grounds—and act accordingly.

“It’s amazing that at one point some of these ghost towns were teeming hilltops of people,” says Whitfield. “Some of them actually met up and touched. Then, you couldn’t tell when you were leaving one town and heading to the other. Now, there are two or three miles of separation, with one building on one side and one on the other— that’s all that’s left of what was once a three mile stretch of mining activity.

“It’s amazing what a century can do as far as depleting a resource and a population.”

Whitfield adheres to the respectful principle which tells us to “Take only photographs, and leave only footprints.” He is heedful of the fragility of crumbling structures and disintegrating memories. Indeed, he wants visitors to such places to remember that people sweated, toiled and sacrificed in the very spots they may be standing. And he hopes if the book accomplishes anything, it’ll encourage people to better respect the less-traveled, now idle settlements and faint footpaths of bygone days as veritable symbols of western development. 

“Whatever has been left behind for us to admire is there because nobody passing that way before has destroyed it,” says Whitfield. “I wish that people had more respect for history. Lives were lived there. To see these places wiped out is sad.”

Montanans, Whitfield believes, share a special affinity with their past.
His sincere photographic essay, containing 71 locations of historical importance, is his way of reminding us to venerate where we came from, and to keep this relationship in mind.

Whitfield used outdated road maps and obsolete Forest Service grids to identify towns that haven’t officially existed for many decades and then find them. 

“I would try finding a town that’s not on modern maps, and I’d try to find out as much as I could about it. I used a lot of early road maps from the 1920s and ‘30s. I compared new maps with the old maps; old mining areas are white on Forest Service maps. From there I was able to pinpoint just when the town stopped getting recognition and was able to know when the town survived until.”

Whitfield’s interest in the subterranean extraction hustles and spirited social bustles of mining towns can be traced back more than 30 years. 

“I moved out west from Michigan in 1975. We stopped at the Black Hills area of South Dakota on the way and found some former mining camps on the map. We camped at these ghost towns. Ever since 1975 I’ve had the bug.”

Whitfield moved to the Bitterroot Valley in 1977. He has spent many weekends since identifying and exploring ghost towns.

“It’s been a 30-year journey,” says Whitfield. “I took the photos from 1985-1995, finally finishing up the book in 1999. During winters I would write the photo captions and historical information.”

Often Whitfield would return to a location to find that the deterioration of certain buildings had advanced beyond belief in only a few short years; some structures had fragmented into unrecognizable oblivion.

“We’d go back to places we had been a year before, and when we’d get there, some of the greatest buildings there were gone.

“I’ll bet that you wouldn’t be able to find dozens of the buildings in this book, or perhaps even entire towns, anymore. They won’t be there anymore, unfortunately.”

There are many different reasons why the remains of some ghost towns are allowed to vanish: the structures are unsafe fire hazards and unproductive tax liabilities; ranchers knock down rickety sites to prevent injuries to their livestock; it’s cheaper to demolish derelict buildings than to fix them. Other explanations exist, too.

“As mining continues,” says Whitfield, “a lot of these old places are sitting on valuable property. That’s because, in the past, one place they didn’t mine was under the towns. But since nobody lives in these towns anymore, it’s being done.

“You get goose bumps when you notice that something is missing and that you were able to be there before it disappeared. You’re glad that you got to see it, but you feel sick, too. I consider the photos in my book a testimonial to the spirit and sense of historical importance most of us embrace as part of our past.”

Many of these neglected buildings lack any type of state or federal protection, and more than likely will soon tumble and blow away in the blustery winds of natural transition, making Whitfield’s bleak, classy photographical documentation even more inestimable. Through these pages, we see verifiable testimony as to the final phases of lonely, untreasured places.

“The outlook isn’t very good,” says Whitfield. “Granite is the most disappointing to watch. I was there in 1977 when it had a full Main Street, along with buildings on both sides of the streets. Five years later, in the mid-1980s, the change was quite drastic. So much was gone.”

Unexpected finds along the way have made Whitfield’s quest more than worthwhile. In the former town of Martina, he stumbled upon sturdy old cabins made of cedar logs and cedar splits; a well-preserved stamp mill, in what was once Ajax, appeared as if it wouldn’t take much effort to restart the stamping process. 

“Finding places accidentally is the greatest feeling,” says Whitfield.

Even though he has recently published a book superlatively capturing the essence of the weathered wood look and rugged terrain feel of the scattered buildings comprising Montana’s once vibrant, long since somnolent, ghost towns, Whitfield isn’t calling off the scouting party just yet.

“I’ve got leads on places I still need to go. I hear that there was a mining town near Bannack that was built on stilts. I need to go and see if there’s anything left.”

Brian D’Ambrosio is a writer living in Missoula and the editor of the Clark Fork Journal. His second book, Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry 1998-2008, was published last month.