Helena: Last Chance Gulch

The main street running through downtown Helena is still called Last Chance Gulch, and the name is not metaphorical. It is the actual gulch where four exhausted prospectors made their final attempt at striking gold in the summer of eighteen sixty-four before heading home defeated.

The four men, later romanticized as the Four Georgians though only one actually came from Georgia, had been working the Montana goldfields with little success. They decided that a dry, unpromising ravine in what is now central Helena would be their last try before giving up. Incredibly, they struck placer gold. Within months thousands of miners flooded in. The ravine proved to be the second largest placer gold deposit in Montana, producing roughly nineteen million dollars worth of gold in its first four years at a time when that was an extraordinary sum.

On October thirtieth, eighteen sixty-four, the town was formally laid out and named Helena, chosen over the original name of Last Chance, which was judged too rough-sounding to attract respectable settlers. Unlike dozens of Montana mining camps that vanished when the ore ran out, Helena survived by positioning itself at the intersection of transportation routes and as the commercial center for the broader Montana mining industry.

The money accumulated here was staggering. By eighteen eighty-eight, Helena had more millionaires per capita than any city in the United States, possibly in the world, with at least fifty individuals who qualified. Gold had given way to silver and copper, and the mining barons built extraordinary Victorian mansions that still stand in the neighborhood now called the Mansion District. In eighteen seventy-five the territorial capital moved here from Virginia City, and when Montana achieved statehood in eighteen eighty-nine, Helena became the permanent state capital, a status it has never relinquished.