Bannack, Montana — The Territory’s First Capital

Bannack is a preserved gold-rush ghost town in southwestern Montana, sited on Grasshopper Creek in Beaverhead County. A placer gold strike in July 1862 drew thousands of prospectors within months, making it the first significant mining camp in what would become Montana and, briefly, the capital of the newly created Montana Territory in 1864.

At its peak in the mid-1860s the camp held perhaps 3,000 people, served by saloons, stores, a hotel, and the rough institutions of a frontier boomtown. Bannack is best remembered for its lawlessness: Henry Plummer, elected sheriff in 1863, was accused of secretly leading a gang of “road agents” preying on miners and gold shipments, and was hanged without trial by a vigilance committee on January 10, 1864 — one of the defining episodes of the Montana vigilante movement.

The town’s political prominence was short-lived. The territorial capital moved to nearby Virginia City in 1865 as richer strikes drew population away, and Bannack settled into a long, slow decline as accessible placer gold played out. Periodic revivals — including hard-rock mining and a wave of gold dredging in the early twentieth century — repeatedly extended its life, but never restored its peak.

The last residents drifted away through the first half of the twentieth century, and in 1954 the site was designated Bannack State Park. Today no one lives there permanently; the park preserves more than fifty original structures in a state of arrested decay, neither restored to working condition nor allowed to collapse, making it one of the best-preserved gold-rush towns in the American West.

Calico, California — The Silver Camp That Outlived Its Metal

Calico is a silver-mining ghost town in the Calico Mountains of California’s Mojave Desert, in San Bernardino County near present-day Barstow and Yermo. A major silver strike in 1881 built the camp rapidly, and over roughly the following decade its mines produced an estimated $20 million in silver, supporting a peak population of around 1,200 served by saloons, stores, a school, and its own newspaper.

The town’s fortunes were bound tightly to the price of silver, which the federal government had propped up through silver-purchase legislation. When that support was withdrawn — the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed in 1893 — silver prices collapsed, and Calico’s mines became unprofitable. A secondary boom in borax, specifically the mineral colemanite mined nearby, briefly cushioned the decline, but it too faded.

By the late 1890s the post office and other institutions were closing, and by about 1907 the town was effectively abandoned, its buildings left to the desert. Calico illustrates the classic single-commodity boom-and-bust pattern, compounded by its dependence on a politically determined metal price rather than on enduring industrial demand.

In the 1950s Walter Knott, founder of Knott’s Berry Farm — who had family ties to the original camp — purchased Calico and restored or rebuilt much of it as a tourist attraction. He donated the site to San Bernardino County in 1966, and it operates today as Calico Ghost Town Regional Park, a restored heritage destination with no permanent residents beyond park and concession staff.