Gold Rush Towns
This town’s gold discovery in 1862 started Montana’s first major gold rush.
What is Bannack?
These citizens’ groups formed to stop crime and enforce justice in mining camps
Who are the Vigilantes?
This simple method used pans and water to separate gold from gravel.
What is placer mining?
This political change in 1864 happened largely because of the gold rush.
What is the creation of the Montana Territory?
The Montana gold rush began during this national conflict.
What is the Civil War?
This boomtown, founded soon after Bannack, became notorious for lawlessness.
What is Virginia City?
This Bannack sheriff was secretly the leader of an outlaw gang.
Who is Henry Plummer?
After placer gold became harder to find, miners began this type of mining to extract gold from solid rock.
What is quartz mining?
The influx of wealth and settlers helped Montana move toward what milestone in 1889?
What is statehood?
Passed during the Civil War, this law gave settlers 160 acres of western land if they agreed to live on and improve it.
What is the Homestead Act?
Gold was discovered here in 1864, leading to the founding of Montana’s capital city.
What is Helena?
This tragic event in 1870 showed how prejudice against Chinese immigrants led to injustice and violence in Montana’s mining towns.
Who was Ah Chow, a Chinese miner wrongfully lynched in Helena?
This mining method used high-pressure water jets to wash away hillsides.
What is hydraulic mining?
During Montana’s gold rush, miners used this toxic substance to bind with gold—but it often polluted rivers and soil.
What is mercury?
The 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act provided federal funding to create this college that originally focused on agriculture and engineering, helping Montana’s education system later on.
What is Montana State University Bozeman.
This site, also known as “Last Chance Gulch,” became Montana’s largest gold strike.
What is Helena?
Appointed by President Lincoln, this man became Montana’s first territorial governor and helped organize the territory’s government after Bannack’s lawless days.
Who is Sidney Edgerton?
In this mining process, giant floating machines dug up river gravel and used water and sluices to separate out gold.
What is dredging?
This immigrant group became the largest in Montana’s gold mining towns, providing labor for mining, gardening, and laundry, but often faced violence and legal discrimination.
Who are Chinese immigrants?
Signed during the Civil War, this act encouraged the building of railroads connecting the East and West, eventually making Montana more accessible to settlers and miners.
What is the Pacific Railway Act?
Chinese immigrants often faced discrimination and violence, but they built strong communities in mining towns and contributed to Montana’s economy. What act in 1882 severely limited their ability to immigrate to the United States?
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
She moved to Montana during the gold rush as a young girl and later wrote a memoir describing frontier life for women and families.
Who is Mary Ronan?
The piles of leftover gravel and waste rock left behind after miners removed the gold were called what?
What are tailings?
One environmental legacy of gold mining?
What are polluted rivers, tailings piles, and deforested hills are all examples of what Montana gold mining left behind.
Signed by President Lincoln in 1864, this act officially created Montana as its own territory, separating it from the Idaho Territory.
What is the Montana Organic Act?