Placer and Lode 



newspapers, a laundry, a stage depot, a dance hall, 

 hotels and plenty of vice Gambling flourished. A 

 madame got in trouble when she tried to stock her 

 Quigley brothel with girls from Spokane.'^ A 

 launderer and cook named Wong "Yank" Ying was 

 shot dead outside his tent in a racist vendetta. 



Meanwhile, three miles from Quigley, Bab- 

 cock built himself a mansion. He used 30 men at 

 a time off the mine payroll to haul bricks, install hot 

 and cold njnning \^-ater and wire the house for elec- 

 tricity to come from the mine. 



Then the bubble burst. In September, the 

 flow of eastern funds clogged. First National Bank 

 in Missoula stopped meeting the payroll. Liens were 

 tiled, and later lawsuits. The tent city folded up and 

 hundreds of disappointed workers drifted away. 

 Some say there never was a rich vein up Brewster 

 Creek, that Babcock started it all by salting the 

 mine: loading shotgun shells with gold nuggets and 

 blasting them into the rock wall. Then, the story 

 goes, he tricked a series of investigators by wining 

 and dining them at Babcock Mansion while he swit- 

 ched rock samples on them. Finally, goes this ver- 

 sion of the story, someone skipped the festivities, 

 tested a true sample and blew the whistle. But 

 others deny the swindle, saying the project simply 

 exhausted the resources of investors $50,000 short 

 of starting production.'* 



Whatever the legend, Quigley s only legacy, 

 besides the ruins, is a wagon road carved over the 

 mountain from Rock Creek to Slide Rock. A sign 

 at the cutofL two miles below Rock Creek's Nor- 

 ton Campground, announces the historic site, lur- 

 ing the curious up the old road to the ruins. 



Though Quigley s failure w-as the most spec- 

 tacular mining e\'ent of the past century; gold miners 

 prospected nearly every bend and branch of Rock 

 Creek from Brewster Creek up to Basin Gulch. Few- 

 struck it rich. The first find on Rock Creek, in 1888 

 on the lower VC'elcome Creek tributary, yielded too 

 little to pay.'' A richer placer strike in 1890 on up- 

 per Rock Creek v^•as mined more successfully.'^ And 

 one of the richest goldfields in Montana was 

 disco%'ered three years later at the Basin Creek 

 tributary just as plummeting silver prices were put- 

 ting miners in the area out of work." The miners 

 flocked to Basin Gulch, sluicing thousands of dollars 

 worth of gold nuggets— and leaving the scars of their 

 diggings along almost evers- coulee and brook. Old- 

 timers in Philipsburg say the runoff from these mines 

 made Rock Creek too thick to drink, but not quite 

 thick enough to plow. 



The allure of Rock Creek gold has never fad 

 ed. Some >^0,()0() in placer gold was taken along 

 the Welcome Creek tributary between 1890 and 

 1911, according to a report by the L S. Bureau of 

 Mines.-"' Officially, the Bureau lists only ISOO in 

 gold taken along Welcome Creek since 1911, but the 

 report warns, "the extent of placer workings sug- 

 gests a great deal more placer gold was produced 

 than recorded." 



Subsistence mining was common in western 

 Montana during the 1930s, even without a claim. 

 Kirby Matthew, an archeologist for the Lolo Na- 

 tional Forest, says the Great Depression brought a 

 whole new wave of jobless men to seek their for- 

 tune along Welcome Creek. "I'm sure there was a 

 resurgence of mining up there in the 1930s, " says 

 Matthew. 'You could file a little claim and find 

 enough gold to buy groceries " The Cinnabar Cabin 

 is one of the many relics of that era on Welcome 

 Creek. 



After World War II, gold prices fell and pro- 

 specting slumped, says Don Lawson, the former 

 Bureau of Mines field agent. ^' But in the past 

 decade, new technologies have allowed miners to 

 return to old sites." 



"Legal Action 'Will Be Taken"— Modern Mines 

 and Environmental Standards 



The most notorious project of the 1970s was 

 a cyanide leaching operation at Silver King Mine, 

 a mile and a half up Sluice Creek from Rock Creek 

 (Cyanide is one of the most toxic ingredients used 

 in processing gold.) The operation started in 1976 

 and was well underway before the state Water Quali- 

 ty Bureau got wind of it and closed it down, fin- 

 ding, among other violations, inadequate provisions 

 for storing ore and wastes.^' State inspectors had 

 to ask for an escort from the Granite County sheriff 

 after being turned back in their first attempt to en- 

 force the mine closure. "Similar legal action will be 

 taken against an\- future operation that threatens the 

 environment of Rock Creek," Montana Governor 

 Thomas L. Judge announced. ■=* 



The Calgary-based operator of that mine, A. 

 Dale Fayram, then moved across Rock Creek to a 

 placer mine on Quartz Gulch, where he was again 

 shut down in 1987 after a settling pond burst The 

 contents spilled into a meadow beside a side chan- 

 nel of Rock Creek." In 1990, Fayram was repairing 

 the settling pond and hoping for permission to 

 begin mining again in 1991^" 



