Butte was driven to life by the rich mineral resources that lay underground. Gold and silver mining brought the city's population of forty men and five women in 1866 to 14,000 by 1885. However,…

Born in Germany and raised on a farm in Indiana, Bartholomew Gehring left home in 1862 at the start of the Civil War. By 1865, he had arrived in the Helena area, where he began raising cattle to…

This historically Catholic neighborhood appropriately takes its name from St. Mary’s parish, which included the Irish communities of Dublin Gulch (since leveled) and Corktown. Known as the “miner’s…

Fraternal societies flourished in Montana and throughout the United States in the mid to late nineteenth century, an era sometimes called the “Golden Age of Fraternalism.” By 1897, approximately six…