Ghost Towns of Montana: A Classic Tour Through the Treasure State's Historical Sites

by Donald C. Miller, Shari Miller (Foreword)

Wind whistles through an abandoned mine shaft. A loose door knocks in the breeze. Cattle feed past the tilted skeleton of a barn.

Underneath, if you listen hard enough, you can hear the faint sounds of a tin pan piano, the crack of a miner’s hammer against stone, the distant giggle of dance hall girls. Peppered throughout Montana, the remains of a bygone age stand weathering in slowly fading bits and pieces. Read about Castle Town, once home to more than 1,500 miners and families, now a sparse scattering of cabins and frame shacks. Explore Garnet, named after a semiprecious stone, abandoned after more than $10 million in gold was taken from the surrounding mines. And browse the beehive-shaped charcoal kilns of Glendale, southwest of Butte.

First published in 1974, Ghost Towns of Montana is the classic look at the history of the Treasure State. An invaluable resource for ghost town tourists and history buffs alike, it’s also a record of passing time, an ode to those miners, ranchers, and cowboys who founded Montana.

This part guidebook, part history book is an up-to-date collection of photos and true stories about the most famous ghost towns of Montana—packaged with a map and more than 100 historical images.

176 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

While by no means a bad book, this book's shortcomings and little flaws were all the more in evidence because I read this book after reading a fantastic book on ghost towns in the Pacific Northwest.  And compared to that amazing book, this one comes up short in a variety of areas, some of them minor but some of them more significant.  For example, this book features black and white photography rather than color photography, is organized in an alphabetical fashion rather than in a geographical fashion with an eye towards encouraging the visiting of such places.  Indeed, one of the ghost towns is written about anonymously with no information about its location precisely to discourage people from visiting, which is precisely the wrong idea when it comes to books on ghost towns.  Additionally, the book focuses on the history of the towns themselves and on a strident view of politics and economics that I found unwelcoming as well.  Suffice it to say that while most of the book's shortcomings are not big ones, they add up to making this a less pleasant reading experience than it would otherwise be.

This book contains slightly more than 150 pages of alphabetically organized ghost towns in Montana along with essays and often historical photographs about them.  After a foreword and acknowledgments and preface we start with Argenta and its massive silver lode.  Then there is Basin, Bearmouth, a town that barely made it, Beartown, Castle (and its return thanks to some brandy and history), as well as Coloma.  There is a discussion on Comet, Elkhorn (famous for an occasion of the "cross of gold" speech by perennial loser Bryan, Garnet, and Gilt Edge.  There are entries on Glendale, Gold Butte (on an Indian reservation, no less), Gold Creek (perhaps the first of the gold rush towns in Montana), and Granite.  There are entries on Hassel and some of the towns around Helena, Kendall, Landusky, Laurin, various Little Belt camps, Maiden, Mammoth (an overly optimistic name), Marysville, a mystery camp apparently named after a president, New Chicago, and Parrot.  There are ghost towns in the Philipsburg area as well as Pioneer and Polaris, as well as Pony.  There are entries on Radersburg, Rimini, Rochester, and Sunrise.  And finally, there are still miners in the ghost towns around Superior, as well as abandoned areas in Vipond, Virginia City, Bannack, and so on, as well as Yellowstone Country and Zortman, after which some notes close the book.

All in all, this is not a bad book.  If I have yet to go to Montana and do not necessarily want to visit very many of these towns, even if there was anything to see, this book did at least provide some reading enjoyment about the history of Montana.  If there is one consistent theme in the ghost towns of Montana it is the way that many towns were only worth inhabiting so long as there was mineral wealth to be had.  Once that mineral wealth had been tapped out the town was abandoned with no thought to figuring some sort of alternate purpose for existing.  I tend to think that towns are worth keeping around, are worth living in, and worth figuring out ways to make work rather than simply abandoning them every couple of years and then wasting the time and effort to build somewhere new that will simply be abandoned once some lode runs out.  Yet Montana's ways are clearly not my ways when it comes to the celebration of small towns and the establishment of lasting worth in one's communities.  This sort of book made me moan the folly of those responsible for urban planning in Montana, not interested in seeing the cities for myself, but it is at least something.

[Tim Evanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This oversize paperback book isn't quite a coffee-table book, but it easily could be. The prose is simple and straight-forward, but what's most impressive are the numerous photographs -- many of them full-page -- that accompany the text.

Miller's text is excellent, providing just the right mix of anecdote, history, overview, and commentary that is needed to learn why each ghost town was important, why it developed the way it did, and why it died.

The photography in the book can be, at times, amazing. Some of the images, particularly the smaller ones, lack creative spark but are good documentary photographs.

This is a must-read for anyone interested in Montana history or architecture.

[Jeri Norris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had most of the information I was hoping but it did not have any local colt or stories about past residents which was really my need.