Helena

Four Miners in Last Chance Gulch

Helena’s Main Street runs along the bottom of Last Chance Gulch, and its crooked path weaves between the original mining claims of the 1864 gold camp.^1,2 The city, Montana’s capital, sits against Mount Helena and Mount Ascension and looks out over the Prickly Pear Valley.¹ A marker in town tells how, in 1864, four miners coming back from an unsuccessful prospecting trip decided to take one “last chance” and struck pay dirt a few hundred yards south of where it stands.⁴ The West Main Street district history dates that first strike to June 1864, while the 1939 Federal Writers’ Project guide places the discoveries late in the summer of 1864.^1,5 By January 1865 about 700 people lived in the Helena area, many of them in tents while log cabins went up.⁶

In October 1864 the name Last Chance was judged unsuitable, and the 1939 guide says one John Somerville dominated a meeting and won adoption of Helena, the name of his home town in Minnesota.¹ The miners and bullwhackers disliked his pronunciation and shifted the stress to the first syllable, and their pronunciation became the accepted one.¹ A later National Register nomination says only that a meeting of residents at Colonel Wood’s cabin chose the name in late 1864.⁷

Fire, Lime Kilns, and Reeder’s Alley

Fire was a constant threat, and in 1869 the downtown burned and was replaced over the next few years by brick and granite business houses.² In the wake of fires that swept Helena in the late 1860s and 1870s, many residents looked to safer areas, and an addition rose around Courthouse Square and along North Rodney Street during the 1870s.⁷ A short way up Grizzly Gulch, Joseph O’Neill built lime kilns beginning in the late 1860s, the first in 1868 by one account, and they supplied the mortar and plaster for Helena’s earliest buildings.^5,8 Louis Reeder, a Pennsylvania brick mason who came to Helena in 1867, built some thirty-five housing units in stone and brick for single miners between 1875 and 1884.⁹ The place was already known as Reeder’s Alley when Reeder died after a fall in 1884.⁹

Capital, Railroad, and Silver

The state guide and the Capitol campus marker give 1875 as the year Helena became territorial capital, while the Helena Historic District text says Helena claimed it from declining Virginia City in 1874.^1,2,10 The following year, by that same text, Helena received one of the nation’s five U.S. Assay Offices, a sign that hard-rock gold and silver mining had replaced placer mining.² The city incorporated in 1881, and the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived in 1883.^2,6 Silver and lead from Wickes, Corbin, and Elkhorn fed the boom, and by 1888 Helena held 11,500 people and, the 1939 guide reported, was said to be the richest city per capita in the United States, with some fifty millionaires.^1,7 The newly rich built mansions on the West Side and in Kenwood and Lennox, with turrets, cupolas, and porte-cocheres, iron deer on the lawns, and stone lions at the entrances.¹ At statehood in 1889 the county courthouse became Montana’s first capitol, and voters chose Helena as permanent state capital in 1894.¹⁰ In that fight, the 1939 guide records, Helena was backed by W. A. Clark and Anaconda by Marcus Daly, and Helena won by less than 1,000 votes.¹ In 1893 the federal government devalued silver, the building boom ended, and many who had put their money into elaborate new houses left.^1,7 Officials broke ground in 1899 on a site that east side booster Peter Winne had offered the state $4,000 to choose, and the 1902 Montana State Capitol now stands at the center of a sixty-acre campus.¹⁰

Dams, a Federal Reserve Branch, and the 1935 Earthquakes

Building the Canyon Ferry, Hauser, and Holter dams on the Missouri River between 1900 and 1910 brought a brief return of prosperity, with many Helena people employed on the dams and in the mines.¹ A Helena branch of the Federal Reserve Bank opened in 1921 after lobbying by Norman B. Holter, and its marker says Helena was the smallest town in the country to host such a bank.¹¹ In the fall of 1935 a series of earthquakes caused four deaths and property damage the 1939 guide put at $4,000,000.¹ Some buildings had to be tied together with long rods run from wall to wall.¹ In the South-Central district the earthquake claimed most of Catholic Hill, and wood siding replaced fallen brick veneer while stucco hid the cracks.¹² The earthquakes destroyed the first Federal Reserve building, and Montana architect George Shanley designed its Art Moderne replacement, completed in 1938.¹¹

Kilns, Alleys, and Placer Ground

Many downtown buildings have been lost to fires, earthquakes, and urban renewal, and in the 1970s Urban Renewal took the old red-light district and dozens of homes.^2,12 Twenty-three pensioners lived at Reeder’s Alley in 1961, when its buildings were rescued from demolition, and the Helena Historic District entry calls it the town’s most complete remaining block of the territorial period.⁹ The West Main Street district keeps 19 residences and 4 lime kilns, only two buildings have gone up there since 1895, and some houses are still owned by descendants of early pioneers.^5,8 Much of the city stands on old placer diggings, and traffic on Main Street now wheels over the ground that drew the first miners.⁴