How a bustling mining settlement in Bighorns became a ghost town

SHERIDAN — In the 1890s, the Bighorns were a vast, rugged territory with few roads beyond wagon pathways. While horses and oxen could make the trek, dense snows during winter made higher peaks simply impassable. Its remoteness deterred settlers and kept towns in lower valleys.

But then someone struck gold.

Judy Slack, a local historian and the vice president of the Big Horn City Historical Society, said building a city on the top of Bald Mountain — a peak more than 9,000 feet in the air — was ridiculous. But the risk became worth the reward in 1890, when three men arrived in Sheridan with small flakes of gold worth $200. They claimed to find this gold at Porcupine Falls, a site just north of Bald Mountain and today close to the Medicine Wheel Passage scenic byway. 

Creating a remote mining settlement became an attractive proposal. “They thought it was going to make them rich,” Slack said. “They wouldn’t have to work. It was the big thing.”

The idea wasn’t completely brainless, Slack said. 

At the time, “gold fever” was spreading across the United States, and men flocked to California, Alaska and the nearby Black Hills to strike it rich. The promise of gold in the Bighorns attracted the Colorado-based Fortunatus Mining and Milling and Company. It helped fund the operation and supply an amalgamator, a machine used to separate gold from dirt and other substances.

Thus, Bald Mountain City was born, and Slack said the town was filled with gold-crazy, single men hoping to come across their fortune. 

By 1892, the town had a post office, a hotel, a livery stable, a general store, a blacksmith shop and two saloons. Past research from local historian Helen Graham estimated 1,000 people called Bald Mountain City Home. It wasn’t the only mining settlement on the Bighorns, but it was the largest, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

The catch? The mountain held no gold at all. It never did. “The Bighorns have never been geologically rich with gold,” Slack said. “There aren’t really true minerals here.”

Slack said there are many possibilities for the original flakes of gold. The men could have found it near Porcupine Falls, like they said. They also could have found the gold somewhere else. It also could have been pyrite — fool’s gold. 

Either way, Slack said their goal was to pull off an elaborate 19th-century scam, one that enveloped not just eager settlers but the entire Fortunatus Company.

“They were trying to make money on the people that thought they could make it big,” Slack said. “They wanted to make money off the gullible guy.”

Slack said a few men bought claims to the land and collected money from the settlers. While the area itself had no gold, the men who purchased the claims and sold the land were the ones who walked away from the venture wealthier.

By 1896, everyone who once called Bald Mountain City home had fled, leaving behind buildings and equipment on the mountain. When historian Elsa Spear Byron investigated the site of the old town in 1926, its buildings were still intact, including the barn, hotel and several homes. Slack said many artifacts were virtually gone by 1948.

“A lot of this was not really protected at all,” Slack said. “People could go up and just take it for firewood. A lot of people weren’t concerned about the historical value of the buildings.”

Today, what’s left of the site includes rotted logs in a clearing. 

Sara Evans Kirol, public affairs specialist with the Bighorn National Forest Service, said visitors can see remains of log cabins and some rock foundations.

“Snow is on the ground most of the year due to high elevation, but the site is typically accessible from late June through September,” Kirol said.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 forbids the disturbance or ruins on archaeological sites on federal lands without the permission of land management agencies. “Simply put, please don’t remove any historic or archeological items,” Kirol said.

Little remains of the original site, but the mining town of Bald Mountain has found its way into tall tales and fables throughout the past century. 

“There are those, however, who still cling to the belief that gold does exist there in paying quantities,” Editor Fred Stell wrote in the Rocky Mountain Bulletin in 1932. “And there are others who think the whole camp a hoax.”

During Stell’s trip to Bald Mountain City with two other men in 1932, he recounted the Bighorn’s mining history — a mystery that lured settlers in by the promise of something more. 

In fact, not far from Bald Mountain lies the “famous Lost Cabin,” where Stell wrote that four men found thousands of dollars in gold. They were attacked, and hid the treasure somewhere in the Bighorn Mountains.

“One of the survivors attempted to lead a party to the scene of the discovery,” Stell wrote, “but failed to ever find it, and to this day its discovery is not established.”