Bannack State Park, Montana

Bannack is a ghost town with a colorful history of an abandoned mining town.

The discovery of gold led to the town becoming the first territorial capital of Montana

The weather has been so smoky and hazy that I just had to 'fix' the views with some attempts at photoshop editing.

The hotel building is a favorite for many movies.

In the 1860's this was a very wild place, 

bad whiskey, shootings, and hangings.

“The whiskey was often made with two barrels of water and a few plugs of tobacco with a quantity of camphor and a little strychnine to give it tang to a barrel of pure whiskey, making three barrels of red eye.  When the “forty rod” got near the bottom of the barrel it was so dangerous that a man sometimes dropped dead from the effects of a few glasses, having too much tang never the bottom of the barrel.”

Reminiscences od robert Kirkpatrick, October 1863

I don’t know how many deaths have occurred this winter, but that there have not been twice as many is entirely owing to the fact that drunken men do not shoot well.  There are times when it is really unsafe to go through the Main Street, the bullets whiz around so, and no one thinks of punishing a man for shooting another.” 

Letter by Mrs. Emily Meredith April 30, 1863

There are many buildings that have somewhat repaired to make them safer for visitors to experience a view of the Wild West.

Some of the rooms are in pretty good shape

"Prehistoric Microwave"?

By the time the town became more settled, a Masonic Lodge was built,

in combination with a school.

Some of the early builders of Bannack were fine craftsmen and Masons.  Eventually the masons became a brotherhood of men and only required  the members to have only three beliefs:

1.  Belief in a supreme being

2.  Recognition of the Brotherhood of man.

3.  Belief in the Immortality of soul.

Teachers were basically quarantined between 8PM and 6AM

 

We enjoyed finding a typical Montana saloon to get a good hamburger to end the day.