montana

By Wendy Altschuler

Risking life and limb for untold fortune has long been the ethos of miners in the early days of the American West, especially in gold-strike belts like Montana. According to popular shows like Discovery’s Gold Rush and Gold Rush: White Water, the magnetism of shimmering treasure still summons the brave.

With sections protected by the National Park Service, the Bozeman Trail connected the gold rush territory of Montana, specifically in Virginia City at the end of the trail to the Oregon Trail in Wyoming in the mid 1800s. It's named after pioneer and frontiersman John Bozeman, even though Native Americans had been using the route as a nomadic hunting corridor for centuries. With the most direct path to the goldfields, the route skirted the Bighorn Mountains, crisscrossed multiple rivers and traversed grassland and rugged terrain.

For the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies, the Bozeman Trail, known as "the last great overland emigrant trail in the American West," encroached on valued hunting land, which negated the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty. Violent conflict ensued against any settlers or travelers who ventured on the widened wagon path. Multiple forts were erected along the trail by the federal government, including Fort Kearney, where the Bozeman Trail snaked across the Bighorn River. Famously, three bloody attacks occurred: the Fetterman Fight, the Hayfield Fight and the Wagon Box Fight. Afterward, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was signed, forts were abandoned due to a presidential decree and the Bozeman Trail was closed. These conflicts, in tandem with the storied frontier history, have landed multiple segments of the trail on the National Register of Historic Places.

Once a shortcut to the gold rush in Montana, the Bozeman Trail is now a major interstate highway with historic points of interest along the way, including the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, Bridger’s Ferry and Fort Phil Kearny. Bannack, a Montana ghost town managed by Bannack State Park along Grasshopper Creek, became a boomtown when gold was discovered in 1862. Soon after, in 1863, gold was discovered at Alder Gulch in Virginia City, another boomtown that still has people living in it today. Both historic cities, where land was once worth living and dying for, will be interesting for intrepid visitors today.