Helena: Last Chance Gulch and Fifty Millionaires
Near Helena, Montana
On a sweltering July afternoon in eighteen sixty-four, four exhausted prospectors from Georgia reached a gulch in the foothills of the Continental Divide. They had been searching for gold across the Montana Territory for months and finding nothing. Standing at the mouth of this last ravine, they made a pact: this would be their final attempt before they turned for home. They called it Last Chance Gulch.
They found gold. The gulch proved to be one of the richest placer deposits in Montana, eventually yielding gold worth many millions of dollars. Within weeks, thousands of miners flooded in. A town went up almost overnight, and by October of that year its residents voted on a name. Some wanted Pumpkinville. Others pushed for Squashtown. A man from Helena, Minnesota, proposed Helena, and Helena it became, pronounced with the stress on the first syllable by Montanans to this day.
What happened next separated Helena from most gold-rush towns. It did not die when the placers ran out. Sitting astride major freight routes and surrounded by productive farmland, Helena became the commercial hub of the entire territory. By eighteen eighty-eight, the city was home to fifty millionaires, the highest concentration per capita anywhere on earth at that moment. Their fortunes built the Victorian mansions that line the west side of town, many of which still stand.
When Montana achieved statehood in eighteen eighty-nine, the question of where to put the permanent capital triggered one of the most expensive elections in frontier history. Helena faced Anaconda, the copper-smelting city backed by Marcus Daly, one of the most powerful industrialists in the American West. Each side poured money into advertising, rallies, and outright vote-buying. Contemporary accounts described extraordinary sums spent per vote, a staggering amount for the era. In the general election of eighteen ninety-four, Helena won. The four prospectors who named it their last chance had, without knowing it, founded the future capital of Montana.
