Dr. Richard Buswell is well-known in Helena as an allergist, a job he held for decades at St. Peter's Health. Outside of Helena and in the art world, however, he's known as a meticulous black-and-white photographer who has been finding artifacts and unearthly beauty in Montana's ghost towns for 40 years.
On a Saturday in early July, Buswell was kind enough to give a tour of Birdseye Road from Helena all the way to Marysville, the site of one of the most profitable gold mines in Montana.
In his red Jeep Grand Cherokee — "I used to have a Wrangler, but then we had kids," Buswell said with a laugh — the doctor drove on Birdseye Road, slowing down to point out where he used to cowboy for his family over Mullan Pass, driving cattle to summer pasture and back when he was a boy.
"The old Kmart parking lot used to be the staging ground for the Helena to Fort Benton stagecoach. The Scratchgravel Hills were in the way so they had to decide to go to the west or the east, so they did both," Buswell begins.
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"It's Ellen Baumler's opinion as well, so I think I'm in pretty good company."
Buswell seems to know most of the historical figures around Helena, such as Baumler, the recently retired Montana Historical Society historian known for her contributions to Helena's gold rush history.Â
But Buswell is not so much interested in the recreation of history as he is in capturing how time has burned away most of that past, leaving rusted, broken bones of existence in distant places.
Buswell remembers that, up by Birdseye School #2, there used to be a gravesite of a Native American child still decorated with toys. Buswell wasn't able to get over a small brook making its way to Sevenmile Creek, and sounded his surprise that this finger of water was still running so high.
Back on the way up to Marysville, he points out the seven ranches that used to make up the valley running down from the Schatz Ranch near the VA up to and past the Hardie Ranch. "My parents used to go to card nights at Birdseye School," Buswell said. "There wasn't much socializing, so those were important nights."
Before the Hardie Ranch, however, is the Umatilla Mine, a small claim that Buswell remembers was owned and run by "an elderly gentleman by the name of Charleyville."
"He was ancient when I knew him as a boy," Buswell said, "and he was certain, as prospectors are, that there was gold in that mine."
Charleyville's greatest charm was that he played a violin, horrifically. "Squawking" was how Buswell remembered it, but Charleyville would tell everyone who could listen it was a Stradivarius, one of the great instruments made in Italy by the Stradivari family in the 17th and 18th centuries. "He would bring it up and have you look in the soundhole," Buswell said. "And there was the Stradivarius name scratched in there. Whether he scratched it in or the Italians did I don't know, but the pride of that old guy was his Stradivarius."
The first gold strike in the Helena Valley was not Last Chance, but was actually Silver City, an ironic name for a place where the placer gravel mounds make knobby humps like a spine all up and down Silver Creek. "There are cyanide tanks still over there," Buswell said, pointing to rusting cylinders on the north side of the creek, kitty-corner to a fenced oil repository. Cyanide was used in the leaching process to get gold from gravel in placer mining. Further up on Silver Creek are dredging ponds where wooden dredges would sift gravel from the creek bottom searching for the heavy gold.
"Silver Creek was placered three times," Buswell said. "This is where Tommy Cruse started looking for it."
Cruse Street bears the poor, grubstaked Irishman Tommy Cruse's name not because he stayed poor and grubstaked, but because he became fabulously wealthy after striking it big at the Drumlummon Mine above Marysville. "Cruse actually put down seed money for the Helena Cathedral...He died before it was finished," Buswell said.Â
Cruse came up Silver Creek, looking for quartz and pyrite which would tell him gold was close. "Being grubstaked was like tenant farming," Buswell said. "Someone would give you money to live on and you would give them half of what you found. Tenant mining."
So Cruse kept panning up the creek, and then he found "the motherlode."Â
"We don't have an answer to who his grubstaker was," Buswell said. It seems that Cruse might have just kept it all for himself.
As the Drumlummon Mine began an explosion of growth and granite, the Great Northern Railroad and the Northern Pacific Railroad raced to get to Marysville to bring gold and supplies back and forth to the mining camp and the town that sprang up seemingly overnight. Marysville saw itself as another Denver, a dream that seemed attainable in 1900 when the area was, according to the Marysville Pioneer Association, "the richest gold mining area in the world with a production of $60,000,000 one-half of which was taken from the Drumlummon mine."
The mine fully stopped production in the 1980s after a Canadian firm found a rich vein, Charley's Vein, which at 45 ounces of gold per ton was extraordinarily rich, mined it for a while, and then it disappeared along with the miners. Up above inhabited Marysville is a group of buildings that fit the idea of a ghost town; quiet, falling down and gray with age.
"My son took his graduation photos on these stairs," Buswell said with a grin. The stairs are still standing and seem good to climb up, although he cautioned against it. He was standing in a tall, slim house that was owned by a bachelor miner who Buswell said died one winter after wandering out in the cold for no apparent reason. The Big Belts are clear today, and the home offers a wonderful view of them and the mine's first mouth to the south of the highway.
Further above Marysville is the cemetery, where homesteaders, miners and soldiers are buried. Buswell likes cemeteries for their peacefulness and sense of solitude. Looking at the headstones, he can piece together some of their lives, where they might have been from, if he recognized a name from his time spent digging around history books and ghost towns. One headstone slows him up, because it has the same year for both the birth and death.
"It was a child," he said, looking down at it and the sunken earth before the stone.
The wind is blowing and in his cowboy hat, head bowed, it seems like the doctor might float away. But he doesn't. He keeps walking and exits the gate after completing the circle of the fenced-place, perhaps thinking about time or the mine, or maybe something else entirely.