The Lost Horse Mine and Johnny Lang

High in the hills of the park stands the best preserved gold mine in the whole region, and it got its name from a missing horse. Around eighteen ninety, a cattleman named Johnny Lang was driving stock through this valley when his horses vanished near the camp of a rough outfit called the McHaney Gang. While looking for them, Lang met a prospector named Dutch Frank Diebold, who had found a rich vein of gold but was too afraid of the McHaneys to work it.

Lang and some partners bought the rights for about a thousand dollars and named it the Lost Horse Mine, filing the claim in eighteen ninety-three. A Montana rancher named Ryan and his brothers bought in and installed a steam powered ten stamp mill that pounded ore around the clock. Between the eighteen nineties and about nineteen thirty-one the mine produced more than ten thousand ounces of gold and thousands of ounces of silver, worth roughly five million dollars in today's money.

But Johnny Lang got caught skimming gold for himself and was forced to sell out. He grew old and poor, and in the winter of nineteen twenty-five he died alone of exposure while trying to walk out for supplies. Bill Keys found his body months later and buried him where he lay.