Bannack
Bannack is a small ghost town located to the South of Dillon, Montana. John White and a small group of miners known as “Pike's Peakers” found gold on Grasshopper Creek in 1862. The history of Bannack starts after John White found the scad of Gold. The discovery of gold at Grasshopper Creek sparked up one of three major gold rushes in Montana. Bringing a surge of prospectors and traders alike. It became Montana’s first territorial capital and had ten thousand people at one point. In 1863 Bannack Citizens elect Henry Plummer. The people of Bannack did not know that he was an outlaw who fled to Montana. To most he was a kind and fair sheriff. Plummer came to the rockie mountains to flee his prosecution for killing a man in California, and he met a group of stagecoach robbers. Out of the back door of his good sheriff act he was the leader of a group of stagecoach robbers know as “The Innocents”. The mining in Idaho …show more content…
Bannack being so popular at the time became Montana's first territorial capital. The first governor was Sidney Edgerton. (Who was previously a territorial chief justice) spoke to the president about Montana becoming its own territory. By the fall of 1864 nearly ten thousand people had settled in Bannack. That was when Bannacks population peaked. The city had to expand and build so they called bannack and Virginia City the 14 mile city. With the more people that came the gold was harder to find. With Bannacks population in 1866 already starting to dwindle away as miners moved to new claims. Such as the claim in Virginia City called Alder Gulch.Bannack was only the capital of the territory for around a year before It was moved to Virginia City. Those who stayed in bannack were left with little options as the storeowners didn’t have consumers and when they left the remaining consumers had no where to buy supplies. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Bannack officially had no residents and became a ghost