Ghosts of Bannack and Big Hole

One month and 4,975 miles ago, we climbed into Little Red and left home. Early this morning, bundled in sweatshirts and jackets, we left Dillon, Montana, and clambered out of the Saturn in Bannack, Montana's first territorial capital, a gold mining boom town from 1862, that has been preserved rather than restored and protected rather than exploited. I had never heard of it, or I just didn't remember my American history very well.

Andy looked at it as potential job retraining, classroom style, when he posed at a desk in the classroom.
Alone for nearly three hours, we walked the deserted hard-packed streets and let ourselves into frame buildings, as stately as the two-story Hotel Meade and as dingy and tumbledown as the bachelor miner's one-room cabin. We could almost hear the shots ring out as claimants vied for fortune or the screams as Vigilantes of 1863 hanged elected sheriff Henry Plummer or the cries of babies quarantined in the Bessette House during the early 1900's outbreak of scarlet fever.

"I'll bet this ghost town is inhabited by ghosts from the past," I told Andy.

Fascinated, we read every entry, a history not covered in many classrooms.

Equally as moving in a very different way, Big Hole National Battlefield, about 70 miles west of Bannack, shows the ruthless treatment by white men of the Nez Perce. Here, in a tragic turning point of what came to be called the Nez Perce War of 1877, about 90 American Indians, mostly women and children, were shot indiscriminately by U.S. Army troops under Col. John Gibbon. After an inadvertent shot by a civilian, Gibbon's men attacked the sleeping tribe before dawn when Katalekin went out to check his horses. The battle that followed prompted Chief Joseph's flight toward Canada with his tribe and his eventual surrender, a sad and inhumane chapter in American history.