Last Chance Gulch: The Strike That Built a Capital

The four men called themselves the Four Georgians, though only one of them had actually come from Georgia. D. J. Miller, Reginald Stanley, John Cowan, and a fourth partner were prospectors who had failed at nearly every digging in the Montana Territory. By the summer of eighteen sixty-four they were down to their last supplies and their last hope.

On July fourteenth, eighteen sixty-four, they panned a gulch in the foothills of the Big Belt Mountains. The color was unmistakable. In the dirt along that nameless creek they found placer gold, enough to make a man's hands shake. They named the spot Last Chance Gulch, because that is exactly what it was.

The news moved faster than the men could contain it. Within weeks, miners poured in from the exhausted camps at Bannack and Virginia City. By the following spring, nearly three thousand people had crowded into a rough-hewn town of tents and log cabins. They called it Helena, after Helena Township in St. Croix County, Wisconsin, the homeland of one early settler. Others preferred Squashtown or Pumpkinville. Helena won.

That first summer's take exceeded three and a half million dollars. Over the following three decades, miners pulled somewhere between thirty and forty million dollars in gold out of the gulch and the surrounding drainages. Helena's main street, the one that bends and curves through downtown today, follows the original path of the gulch itself. The miners built on top of the diggings and the street simply followed the creek's old meanders.

By the eighteen eighties, Helena had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States. The gold brought the money, but the money built something else: a city determined to look like it had always been there, dressed in sandstone and ambition, at the foot of the Continental Divide.