Day 3 - 6/23

Today we spent an exciting day touring the ghost town in Bannack, Montana. Our family first took a general tour of all the buildings. One of them was the Hotel Meade. It was a fancy hotel with lots of rooms and has been rumored to have ghosts of people who drowned in the nearby creek haunt the place. Another building was the jail. It was just like a stereotypical western jail. It had the bars on the window and a rectangular hole where prisoners got their food from. Another home served as a place where people who were sick could live and not spread the illness to other people in the community. It had a yellow door on it to warn people to stay away.  Many children died there from diptheria and other diseases.  People have said they have heard the sound of crying children there. One of the homes we visited belonged to a guy who was part of a gang that would rob and plunder people on the road side. The sheriff of Bannack, Henry Plummer, led the gang. Plummer and two of his deputies were eventually hanged. We also saw the old church where every week members of the Methodist Church could gather and worship. The wooden seats were plain, but relaxing to sit in. The schoolhouse was also fun to see. The girls took turns playing teacher while the rest of us sat in the old fashioned desks. On the board were written some of the rules the teachers had to follow in 1915. My favorite was that teachers may not loiter in the ice cream parlor. The floor on top of the schoolhouse is a meetinghouse for Free Masons. We got to see their chairs with their symbols engraved and even the Masonic dishware.

After the general tour, we took a tour that showed the mill where gold was extracted. To get up to the mill, we rode in a 1931 Model-T Ford. During the tour, the guide explained a lot about how much chemistry went in to the mining process. It was great to hear him, because since I took a year of chemistry, I could understand most of what he was talking about.  Later in the day we went panning for gold. They had washtubs filled with water, where people could use pans filled with dirt and try to find gold within. I wasn't so lucky, but Dad found a couple specs. Will it make us filthy rich? No, but the experience was fun. There were a lot of garnets in the dirt that we found and collected. The ghost town overall was a very interesting place to explore.