Bannack ghost town

Ten thousand people, reachable only by one trail.

Bannack sits on Grasshopper Creek in Beaverhead County, Montana, about 11 miles upstream from where the creek meets the Beaverhead River south of Dillon. It was founded in 1862 and named after the Bannock, and that same year it was the site of Montana's first major gold discovery. In 1864 it briefly served as the capital of Montana Territory, until the capital moved to Virginia City.

At its peak it held around ten thousand people, and it was extremely remote, connected to the rest of the world only by the Montana Trail. The business list tells you what a gold town actually needed: three hotels, three bakeries, three blacksmith shops, two stables, two meat markets, a grocery store, a restaurant, a brewery, a billiard hall and four saloons. All of it was built of logs, though some buildings wore decorative false fronts to look like more.

One founder is worth naming. Dr Erasmus Darwin Leavitt, a physician born in Cornish, New Hampshire, gave up medicine for a while to mine gold, arriving in 1862 and alternating between the two. A history of Montana by Joaquin Miller records that although some success crowned his labours, he soon found he had more reputation as a physician than as a miner, and that there was greater profit in letting somebody else wield his pick and shovel while he attended to his profession. He moved on to Butte.

Mining carried on as the population dwindled. The last residents left in the 1970s.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks now runs it as Bannack State Park and calls it the best preserved of all Montana ghost towns. It is a National Historic Landmark, there are campsites to reserve, and the invitation on offer is a simple one: walk the deserted streets and work out for yourself what the Old West was actually like.