Concerned folks in southwest Montana joined together to preserve what was left. Soon, Bannack was abandoned, and the first territorial capital of Montana gained ghost town status.īut this was not a place that would crumble and sink into the dust. No longer were there stores to buy groceries in, doctors to visit, a school to attend or post office to pick up mail. By the late 1940s, most residents were gone. Remnants of the mines and parts of the mills that crushed the ore out of the rock and earth still stand as silent reminders of Bannack’s last fling at gold mining. Some rich deposits might still exist, out of reach, owing to the expense of recovering them.Īlthough hard-rock mining continued to take place downstream from the town site, once the dredges ceased, the population dwindled again. In some places bedrock was too deep even for the dredges to get to. It didn’t take long for the dredges to remove most of the remaining deep placer gold from the Grasshopper Creek area. Ponds created by this method of mining are still visible on Bannack’s south side. As it bites its way along, the barge floats on a small lake of its own making. The gravel is then flushed through sluices to recover the gold, and the leftover gravel is dumped. Another followed in the fall of the same year, and two more machines arrived in 1896.” Eventually, five dredges labored in Bannack.Ī gold dredge sits on a barge and uses a long chain of steel buckets mounted on a conveyor belt to scoop the gravel bed of the stream down to bedrock. A mere sluicebox and shovel wouldn’t do.Īccording to Dave Alt: “During the spring of 1895, the first gold dredge in the United States, an electrically driven model, started work at Bannack. But miners working manually couldn’t reach the deposits on the bedrock, which were anywhere from 10 to 50 feet beneath the surface.

Gold mining continued for several more years. Prospectors could access more rich earth by sluicing the hillside and upper gulches. Now, ditches were built to extend the workings beyond the streambed. Because water was needed to flush out the placer deposits, the first miners in the gulch ignored gravel that was too far from the creek. Wagons of a by-gone era stand silent in Bannack (Photo by Rick and Susie Graetz)īannack placer mining picked up again in the spring of 1866.

Parts to a gold dredge