Basin Day

Stick ponies, ducks and a cake walk

The 2023 program for Basin Day started at eleven in the morning. Stick pony races, the dunk tank and a cornhole tournament began together, and the cornhole ran until two. A People’s Choice chili cook-off followed at noon. The parade went off at one, with a raffle for the Fire Department. The cake walk was at three, and the duck races, at $5 a duck, were at five. All day there was a garage sale of community donations and a quilt raffle. Karaoke closed the evening.

That edition fell on Saturday, August 12, and the Butte radio station KMBR, which called it “Basin Days,” listed the food. Abigail’s Korean Rice Bowls and Big Sky BBQ were there. Highlander Taste brought schnitzel, pirogie and Polish sausage. The Silver Saddle served Mexican food, the Kiwanis cooked burgers and brats, and the Pepsi Truck had mac and cheese, walking tacos and hot dogs. There were also cotton candy and snowcones. Lance Handyside played from 11 to 3, Vanessa’s & The Basin Band from 3 to 6, and James Karaoke from 7 to 11. Questions went to the Silver Saddle, and the station warned that “everything is subject to change.”

It does change. Jefferson County’s events calendar lists Basin Day for August 15, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Dancing at the Community Hall

The 2019 edition, held Saturday, August 17, was hosted by the Basin Community Hall. Its announcement promised that “vendors will line the streets to show off their specialties!” Children had a free bounce house. The dunking booth cost a dollar for three throws, and the money went to the hall. The duck race that year ran at one o’clock. Half the pot went to the winner and half to the hall.

The chili was cooked inside the Community Hall from one to two and judged at two by the public, who paid a dollar to taste and vote. The cook-off’s share of the proceeds was split between the hall and the Wounded Warrior Project. The cake walk, “featuring local cakes,” came at five, with tickets a dollar each. From seven to eleven came the Basin Dance, free, with music by Clint Rieder and the Longhorn Band.

The canyon and the old highway

Basin lies in a narrow canyon beside Interstate 15, ten miles southeast of the Continental Divide, with Basin Creek running through the center of town. Underneath is the Boulder Batholith, a granitic intrusion formed 76 million years ago that holds many precious minerals. Southwest Montana’s travel office gives the town’s population as 199 in 2020 and its elevation as 5,351 feet. Western Mining History puts it at 5,364. Basin is unincorporated and relies on Jefferson County for law enforcement.

Basin Street once carried old U.S. Highway 91. The historian Carroll Van West drove it often during his field work for the Montana State Historic Preservation Plan in 1984 and 1985. He came through “not because of the Silver Saddle Bar–fine place it is–but because I had no choice if headed south from Helena.” He describes two-story brick commercial buildings from the town’s prominent years and a decaying garage of about 1930 on the outskirts. He also notes the Community Church, a late Victorian building with a tall bell tower and a corner entrance.

The mining shows at the edges of town: abandoned equipment, closed or barricaded portals, and the ruins of a smelter and ore concentrator. A 1960s postcard caption on the Helena History site notes that the smelter stack “still stands.” An advertisement for the Sunshine Health Mine is painted on a Basin building. At the Merry Widow and Earth Angel mines, visitors sit in radon and take radioactive mine water for arthritis and other illnesses. Southwest Montana dates these health mines to the 1960s, and Western Mining History says people have come for over 50 years and calls the practice controversial. Van West writes plainly that “radon exposure is actually dangerous.”

Gold, Heinze and twelve saloons

Gold was reported at the mouth of Cataract Creek, about half a mile downstream, as early as 1862. Within a few years placer miners had worked the full length of Cataract and Basin Creeks. When the settlement at Basin took hold, the buildings at Cataract were moved up to it and the old camp was abandoned. Lode veins were found by the 1870s at the Eva May, Uncle Sam, Grey Eagle, Hattie Ferguson and Comet on Cataract Creek, and at the Bullion, Hope and Katy on Basin Creek. Basin became the supply point for the mines and got a post office in 1880.

In 1888 the Montana Central Railway laid track to connect Basin to the smelter at Wickes. The townsite was platted the next year. The mines produced silver but also gold, lead and zinc, so Basin came through the silver crash of 1893 better than most silver districts. The Basin & Bay State Mining Company reorganized the Katy and Hope in 1894. A new mill at the Katy ran until the mine flooded and the mill burned in 1895, and the Hope’s concentrator caught fire the following year.

In 1905 the Basin Reduction Company, led by the Butte “Copper King” F. Augustus Heinze, took over the Katy and Hope. It spent $500,000 building and equipping a 1,500-ton smelter and concentrator to rework the old tailings. The years 1905 to 1909 were the town’s best, with about 1,500 people. Basin had two railroads, four rooming houses, three hotels, a bath house, a drug store, three grocery stores, a bank, a newspaper and 12 saloons. There were also churches, a dance pavilion, a grandstand and a baseball diamond. The Heinze operation closed in 1909, and by 1911 the mill stood idle.

The last boom came in 1924. The Jib Consolidated Mining Company reopened the Katy, the Hope and the White Elephant and took out $1,700,000 in gold. According to the state’s abandoned-mine report, quoted by Western Mining History, the operation was forced to close by “mismanagement and stock market manipulations.”

Then the interstate was finished and through traffic stopped. In the years that followed, from 1993 to 2011, Basin was home to the Montana Artists Refuge, in two commercial buildings on Main Street. When it closed, board chair Sean Sheehan told the Helena Independent Record: “We’ve had internationally published authors, Guggenheim fellows — all of these people have been extraordinarily kind and open to the community.” Two former members, Bryher Herak and Mary Jane Williams, later renovated an abandoned building as the Basin Art Mine. On July 14, 2024, more than 140 people came for its first evening, “Notes for the Sweet Apocalypse.” The program had poetry, belly dancers from Helena, the drum group Magpie Drum, and a jazz band with Williams on trombone.

A schoolhouse from 1895

The two-story frame Basin School went up in 1895. In the spring of 2022 the custodian, Lettie Smith, cleaned out its attic and found maps dating to 1885, a planetarium, hymnals, bells, a framed constitution and an old Montana flag. She also found class photographs. “Here’s a photo dated back to 1908,” she told The Monitor. “It says here on the back of the photo that ‘third row from the right is Isabell Lowry, and leaning by the post is Ned Lowry.’” Of the building she said, “Some say it’s the oldest running school in the state.”

The school started the 2024–25 year with 11 students. By March, only one had committed for the next year, and head teacher Katie Thomas resigned for a job in Butte. In June 2025 the board voted unanimously to put the school into non-operational status. Clerk Michelle Hughes worked through the state’s procedures, and in April 2026 the Office of Public Instruction approved the reopening.

The board hired Alyssa Smith from Jackson Elementary in Beaverhead County, where she had taught three students at three grade levels at once. “We stole their teacher, and we’re very happy,” said board chair DeDe Rhodes. Residents renovated and furnished a house for her. By the start of September 2026 the school had seven students. Smith had noticed one more thing about her new town: “You guys have an actual post office! That’s different.”