blackfoot-valley

the vast open ranges mostly east of the Divide. After that followed a high period of agricultural settlement stimulated by the Homestead Act and in- creasing accessability of the region, while in western Montana forestry be- came progressively more important. All of these activities overlapped in time, and all except trapping remain important in today’s Montana economy, with large scale lumbering for shipment elsewhere and coal mining added during the twentieth century. If managed wisely, the range, farmlands, and forests are all renewable resources, but all have been overused at various times and places. In the following sections, we’ll look at each one of these. what was to become Powell County where the Ranch now lies.That find is often credited to the prospector / trader Francois Finlay who in 1850 found traces of the yellow metal on Gold Creek, a southern tributary of the Clark Fork and about halfway between the present day Drum- mond and Deer Lodge. That dis- covery, however, aside from its place in the state’s history came too little. It did stimulate further prospecting in the area which yielded results in both that area and the gulches above Avon and the Nevada Valleys to the north. The oldest ghost town in this area was Blackfoot City whose climax was in the 1860s after the Mullan Road was built, making the area more accesable to fortune-seekers. Its population was 2,000 at the time. Some of Montana’s gold strikes were productive for a time, but none came close to rivaling California or Yukon- Alaska. Blackfoot City is a few ruins today. One town that started as a gold camp and became permanent is Helena, which became Montana’s capital when the territorial government was transferred there from Virginia City in 1875. A later gold camp was Garnet which flourished from 1890 until 1905. Today, Garnet is one of Montana’s best preserved ghost towns with about Mining The highly mineralized region straddling the Continental Divide on ei- ther side - Helena and Nevada Valley in the north to Bannack and Virginia City on the south with Butte in the area between, and Phillipsburg and Garnet in separate minor ranges to the west - was destined to become the heart of Montana’s mining industry. The first gold discovery in Montana took place in 75