Pioneer City, Montana

Pioneer Ghost Town( photo taken by Grizzly, M. T. ) 1

NAME: Pioneer
COUNTY: Powell
ROADS: 2WD
GRID: 4
CLIMATE: Cold winter with snow and cool summer.
BEST TIME TO VISIT: Anytime.
COMMENTS: Not too far from Helena - UPDATE: Pioneer, located in Montana, no longer exists. I was told that a rancher who owns the property it stood on bulldozed it all to the ground to make room for his cattle to graze. This news was confirmed by several of the locals. Sad new!
REMAINS: A few ruins.2

The Pioneer Mining District was organized in 1866. Water was brought to the site by various ditches, all, eventually, controlled by cattle baron Conrad Kohrs. Kohrs used his control of the water to buy up claims in the area, and, eventually, control mining in Pioneer. The post office in Pioneer was opened in 1870. At the height of the mining activity, the town had a population of 500 people; four brewries; six saloons; two hotels and four general stores. When the claims started to play out in the 1880's, Chinese immigrants came in and worked the tailings. A mining engineer from Butte, Montana, Pat Wells, recognized the potential for dredging operations in Pioneer in 1929. Wells bought out all of Kohrs' holdings and commenced dredging in the area.2

There was little activity on Gold Creek until 1866, when the Pioneer mining district was organized. The placers of Pioneer Creek and its tributaries, French and Squaw gulches, soon overshadowed the initial placers on Gold Creek. Under laws of the new district, bar claims of 200 feet running back to the summit of the hill could be made. In 1867, the Pioneer Company began using hydraulics on the bars. Although no rush ensued, mining activity picked up and the population of the Pioneer district rose to a high of 1000. Most of the population was concentrated in the new camp of Yam Hill near Batterton Bar.3

Lack of water was more of a problem than the apparent lack of gold. In 1868 or 1869 Conrad Kohrs and others, formed the Rock Creek Ditch Company, to build a 16 mile canal to deliver water from Rock Creek to the Pioneer, Willow Creek, and Pikes Peak districts. The system initially delivered water to the Gold Hill terraces; the first terrace to be worked was the slope descending down to Pikes Peak Creek. These terraces contained rich gold deposits. Several hundred men worked the placers and a reported $140,000 was recovered in a single season from a pit on Batterton Bar. By 1870, it was estimated that $20,000,000 in placer gold had been taken from the gulches (Pardee 1951; Wolle 1963).3

The Pioneer district never rivaled the other major strikes of Montana, but just the same the district flourished all through the 1870s. New placer deposits were discovered and developed at French Gulch, Squaw Gulch, Woods Flat and Wilson's Bar. By 1874 the richer parts of the terraces had been worked, but new deposits were discovered at Pioneer Bar and Ballard Hill. As these placers grew, the town of Yam Hill became deserted and a new town of Pioneer City began to grow. It has been estimated that over a million dollars of gold dust (at $20.67 per ounce) was removed from the Pioneer Bar in the late 1870s and early 1880s (Pardee 1951; Wolle 1963).3

References

1. Grizzly, M. T. Pioneer Ghost Town. Retrieved July 3, 2009 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtgrizzly/3004497236/

2. Ghost Towns. Retrieved June 13, 2009 from http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/mt/pioneer.html

3. Montana.gov. Abandoned Mine Program, aka Gold Creek. Retrieved June 13, 2009 from http://www.deq.state.mt.us/AbandonedMines/linkdocs/techdocs/163tech.asp