THE GHOSTS OF GRANITE

(Blogger's note: The end of my season is coming up soon. I am sorry I will be unable to post twice a week as I have been. I will continue to post at least once a week. If I lived in Yellowstone all my life I would still be left with places unseen and things undone. I want to spend as much time here experiencing Yellowstone as possible prior to my departure. I have not yet decided whether I should continue my postings. I'm inclined to do so since I have many places yet to see and many changes going on in my life. If you would like me to continue, please drop me a line. I appreciate my readers' attention over the last few months.)

The sun was dappling the ground through the trees. It was a clear day with an impossibly blue sky – one of those ‘Big Sky Montana’ skies. We were at the top of a mountain near Phillipsburg after a fun but interesting 15 minutes on a rutted dirt road. We got out of the truck and started walking toward the only remnants of civilization we saw from the hard-packed ground at the top where we parked my trusty truck YiHa.

 

Suddenly, we heard the squeak of a door and saw something in filmy white from the corner of our eyes. “Did you see that?” asked Dan, my son. “Yes, let’s go take a look.” I felt like Nancy Drew.

 

After a short investigation, we concluded the squeak came from the wind blowing the door of an old wood cabin and the white filmy thing was a very old remnant of a sheer lace curtain blowing in the wind. Or was it?

 

We were visiting the Granite Ghost Town. Granite is one of the largest mining remains in Southern Montana. Near Philipsburg (see my post Mountains, Mining and Microbrews), straight up to the top of Granite Mountain, Montana State Parks has developed a walking trail called the GGW “Granite Ghost Walk”. I’m glad we were there in full daylight. I might have had some heart palpitations if it were dark and not JUST because of the elevation at 7,320 feet.

 

On the way up, we pass the remnants of the old tramway that carried some of Granite’s silver ore down to the stamping mill at Rumsey, 1.5-miles down the mountain. We stopped for pictures and to get a ‘feel’ for what that tram might have been like in its day. (Ok, we’re kind of history nuts. We stop even at those cheesy ‘historic point of interest’ markers on the road. It’s like YiHa just knows where to go.) Some of the original frame still exists and it’s worth the quick stop.

 

Further along, we recognized more recent steel structures, modern storage sheds, and kept climbing. Figuratively, we were looking for the gold – the real deal – a Montana ghost town. And Granite delivered.

 

In its heyday, Granite boasted a citizen count of over 3,000 people. Two of the mine's mills were built very near the top of Granite Mountain and the town spread out to the south and west of these stamp mills. The ‘commercial section’ is relatively intact, having been constructed of rock and steel beams. The beautiful stone walls of the Miner’s Union Hall, the gathering place of the Silver Queen’s miners, still stand tucked into a wooded hillside that creeps ever onward into its interior.  The Granite Mine’s Superintendent’s house is also standing courtesy of Montana State Parks. Up the road (northerly) from the visitor kiosk (which is unfortunately NOT well kept up) and closer to the remnants of the mills, you can take pictures as we did of yourself standing in the steel-framed door of the General Store. Satisfyingly touristy.

 

A few wooden cabins exist, including that of the last remaining resident Mrs. Mae Werning, who remained in Granite as the caretaker until her death in 1969. Her cabin, like the remnants of others we saw, had a large hole in the floor. We couldn’t figure out why that might be – perhaps root cellars? Perhaps primitive secret storage? But if a lot of people had them, they couldn’t be very secret. 

 

With a population of over 3,000 people at its most productive, A LOT of rock foundations of other cabins exist in the forest. The forest seems to want to recover its own, though, and without additional preservation, these will most likely be consumed by vegetation over time. Kind of creepy.

 

The Ghost Walk actually takes off right behind the visitor’s kiosk, something we didn’t figure out until we had already walked over much of the upper mountain to the west and south. The GGW, a pleasant hike of about 2 hours, takes you past the site of the old school house (yes, miners had children and wives) and the old general store. Once you get to the aforementioned general store, you can already see the remnants of the huge stamp mills on the hills. The two mills above Granite town had 70 ‘stamps’, apparatus that ‘stamped’ the ore into dust which was then put through usually a chemical process to separate the gold or silver from the other minerals in the dust.

 

The entire mill section of the ruins sits high above with a panoramic view of Rumsey Mountain and Discovery Ski Resort – and, of course, the entire beautiful Anaconda Mountain Range to the south. And by the time you have hiked to the mills, you are ready to sit and rest a spell under the spell of such beautiful mountain scenery.

 

Montana Miners were relatively well-off by international mining standards. They were generally paid well (the fact one of the most imposing buildings was the ‘union’ building attests to that), quite often had ‘modern’ conveniences like electricity (well, they needed it to run the mills) and sometimes even running water.  The wages and living conditions attracted miners from all over the world. The Granite Mine must have been somewhat cosmopolitan with Welsh and Cornish miners from the British Isles, Chinese mine workers, Irishmen and miners from all over the mining areas of Europe.

 

However, the price of silver took a beating beginning in 1872 when Germany stopped producing silver coinage.  A Depression in Europe caused a further drop in the demand for silver but the US government, in an attempt to prop up the price of silver and stave off the effect of the world-wide depression on mining, enacted the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, requiring the federal government to buy a certain quantity of silver at a certain price that would artificially prop up the silver industry.

 

Three years later, a serious depression in the United States caused President McKinley to seek the repeal of the Act. An interesting note here is the fact that much of the cause of the Depression was due to overbuilding and sketchy financing of the railroads which had occurred in tandem with the expansion of the US mining industry. Several of the Montana mining kings were also heavily invested in building railroads to service the mines.

 

When the Sherman Act was repealed, silver demand went into a tailspin. Miners literally walked off the job and the population of Granite dropped within a few days from nearly 3,200 to 140 (Legends of America). The reign Montana’s Silver Queen was caput.

 

The fallout was enormous for the region. The Philipsburg bank held most of the miner’s money and miners and their families lined up to withdraw all of their savings from the banks. The reserves of the Montana banks, like their counterparts elsewhere, were insufficient to meet the demands of the withdrawals. Panic ensued.

 

The story of Granite is fascinating but it is not the only story of boom and bust in America. America is full of dreams and dreamers. America is the place people come to from all over the world for the promise of a better life. In the case of the Miners of Granite, many were left with no jobs and no hope of jobs. The Chinese miners were left with no money to get home and, due to discrimination institutionalized by a government that would not allow these particular workers to bring their families over here, no families to help them. A story that has been repeated over and over in the history of the waves of immigration in our great country.

 

Walking in their footsteps as we climb out of our own recent economic downturn made me feel kinship with those who left their lunches on the table in order to get in line at the bank. A creepy place? Yes, and a place where the economic history of our world since Industrialization easily leaves us with a sense of loss for the productive miners of Montana’s Silver Queen. It is important we remember the contributions of those who provide the labor that fuels our economy. A visit to Granite is not just a ghost walk; it’s a pilgrimage.