The Ghost Mines of the New World District
Near Cooke City, Montana
The mining history of the Cooke City area is visible not just in the town but in the surrounding hillsides, where the debris of more than a century of prospecting remains scattered across the high country above the valley. Prospect pits, collapsed adits, rusting equipment, and the remains of ore processing facilities dot the drainages of the New World Mining District in the national forest lands northeast of town.
These remnants represent investment that never paid off and ambitions that the geology frustrated repeatedly. The district had real ore, as the Crown Butte drilling program of nineteen eighty-nine confirmed definitively. But extracting it profitably required infrastructure that the district's location made enormously expensive, and most historical mining attempts ended with investors writing off their losses and moving on to other fields.
The most significant of the district's historical operations was the Homestake mine, which excavated deep into the mountain before stopping a few hundred feet short of what turned out, decades later, to be a high-grade ore body. The Crown Butte drillers in nineteen eighty-nine found what the Homestake had missed by only a few hundred feet. The discovery made perfect geological sense and created an immediately difficult political situation.
The nineteen ninety-six federal buyout that ended the modern mining threat was explicitly designed to address not just the proposed new mine but the legacy contamination from the old ones. Twenty-two and a half million dollars of the sixty-five million dollar federal payment was earmarked for exactly that remediation work. The ghost mines are now a federal responsibility, and the cleanup process has been ongoing for decades.
