Four Georgians Walk into a Gulch
The history of Helena.
Helena’s history started, the story goes, when a party of gold-seekers, exhausted and despondent after weeks of wandering in the wilderness, stopped by a little stream at the edge of a valley and said, “Well, boys, this is our last chance.” Then they hit one of the biggest strikes in Montana history.
Hollywood couldn’t have staged it better. John Cowan (from Georgia), D. J. Miller (Alabama), Reginald “Bob” Stanley (England), and John Crabb (Iowa) had stumbled into history on their last chance. They gained eternal fame (at least in Helena) as the “Four Georgians.” Never mind that only one of the four was from there.
The prospectors wandered about in the rain for two or three days, bickering over which way the Missouri River lay.
Explaining why the Four Georgians were three Georgians short has become something of a local cottage industry. Many believe they received the moniker for using the “Georgian method” of placer mining. Nonetheless, no other town founded by placer-mining-prospectors has a story about Georgians. Rather, the more likely explanation is more mundane: the churn of the early mining camp was concerned with discovering gold, not with recording history. Regardless, what’s not mundane is how the four got to Helena in the first place.
The prospectors’ story—and Helena’s—began somewhere near Missoula in the spring of 1864. The four not-yet Georgians came together by fate or accident on the trail, fewer than three months before their lucky break. Cowan and Miller were with a large party, while Stanley and Crabb were just a couple of prospectors coming up from Virginia City. Everybody was headed north for the diggings in British Columbia. They were all camped on the Clark Fork River when news arrived that the Canadian fields had already played out. Rather than give up, the four joined forces and went exploring in the general direction of the future Helena.
The prospectors followed the Mullan Road east to present-day Elliston. There they turned south, going further up the Little Blackfoot River, digging holes but discovering nothing. So, they pointed their horses into the mountains of the Continental Divide, where they got thoroughly lost, being without a compass or a clue. They wandered about in the rain for two or three days, bickering over which way the Missouri River lay. It took a break in the clouds to reveal a rocky peak from which they could spy a broad valley, a distant river, and some sense of where they were.
Old friends were dropping in after dinner the very first day they worked the sluice boxes.
The four then followed Ten Mile Creek into the Helena Valley, ending up on a well-marked trail long used by the Salish and other tribes. The trail led them past the mouth of a small gulch where they discovered… nothing. Weeks later, after exploring the Rocky Mountain Front almost to present-day Glacier National Park, they returned to that trail and that stream. There they had their Helena Day.
The godforsaken wilderness of western movies it was not. The trail the men had originally followed connected Montana City—another gold camp about two hours away—to the Mullan Road, a major link across the Northern Rockies. Old friends were dropping in after dinner the very first day they worked the sluice boxes. Smoke from farms and ranches along the Prickly Pear Creek was visible from the hills above the foursome’s gulch. They could have gone for morning coffee and still been back for a long day’s work.
It took an urban renewal project in the 1970s to tackle the consequences of the Four Georgians’ city planning.
That’s how Downtown Helena began—as a placer mine in the gravel of a little creek near the Continental Divide. Today, lobbyists have taken the place of prospectors in the search for gold in Helena—though you can’t blame that on the Four Georgians. What you can blame them for is a massive failure in urban design. Their camp sat in the gulch where Last Chance Creek comes out of the mountains. The location made sense for miners—over centuries, gold dropped out as the water slowed at the valley’s edge—but not much sense for a city center. A narrow twisty gulch makes for a narrow twisty downtown. Much later, the head of the city planning board wished someone had said, “Hey fellas, you’ll be a lot better off in the future if you build your city out where the land is flatter.”
It took an urban renewal project in the 1970s to tackle the consequences of the Four Georgians’ city planning. One hundred and twelve years after the four prospectors first panned for gold, the city built a pedestrian mall down their old mining claim. The hope was that it would solve the problems created by geology and discovery and revive the downtown.
The Last Chance Gulch Walking Mall is now one of the very, very few not in a town with a bustling tourist industry or large university. So, next time you wander through Helena—with or without being lost in the rain for three days—remember to thank the guys who put it on the map: Helena’s founding fathers, the Four Georgians.
Even if they mostly weren’t from Georgia.
