Last Chance Gulch: The Richest City in America, Per Capita

Four men stood at the edge of a gulch in July of eighteen sixty-four and made a deal. They had spent months prospecting across what would become Montana Territory, trying every creek and canyon they could find, and finding nothing. They were broke, their supplies were nearly gone, and they had agreed that this would be the last place they would try before they quit and went home. They named it Last Chance Gulch and started digging.

There was gold.

Within months the Helena mining district was producing tens of millions of dollars in placer gold annually. Word spread across the territory and then the continent. By eighteen seventy the population of the gulch town had become a city. By eighteen eighty-eight, Helena was the most millionaire-dense city in the United States. The Montana Historical Society, drawing on census wealth data from that period, cites this as the documented record: more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country, in a mountain gulch in the northern Rockies, twenty-four years after four men decided to try one last hole.

The fifty-odd mansions the mining fortunes built on Helena's west side between eighteen eighty and nineteen ten are still largely standing. You can drive past them. The Cathedral of Saint Helena, completed in nineteen twenty-four and modeled on the Votive Church in Vienna, was funded entirely by donations from the Catholic mining community. It is one of the largest cathedrals between Chicago and the Pacific Coast, built by the people who came to this gulch with nothing and found everything they needed in the ground beneath it.

Last Chance Gulch is a pedestrian mall now. The placer gold ran out, the gulch filled in, and the city built over it. But the cathedral is still there, and it still faces the mountains.