Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • F A L L 2 0 2 1 68 GRANITE WAS FOUNDED IN THE 1870S, situated over a few particularly rich veins of silver ore. It was a big enough town to have neighborhoods roughly divided by country of origin, with a Finnish street, a Cornish street and, of course, an Irish street. It contained a hospital, a bathhouse, a famous- ly excellent dance floor at the Miner's Union Hall, several fraternal orders, eighteen saloons, many of which contained brothels, and, finally, four churches. In an ostentatious display of the area's mineral wealth, the Bimetallic company, then the owners of most of the area's silver mines, sent a gargantuan bar of silver weighing over two tons to the 1893 world's fair. But by the late summer of that same year, Granite would be abandoned, a newly minted ghost town. It would bubble back to life fitfully over the next quarter century before being aban- doned completely in the first half of the twentieth century. It shouldn't come as a surprise that a great many of the ghost towns of the West are the result of closed mines—no other resource was as volatile, as subject to the unpredictable highs and lows of the economy. The demand for gold had established small, rough towns like Virginia City, Nevada City, and other Alder Gulch camps. But then Montana's gold boom had been supplanted by a tenuous silver boom. Some of the gold camps emptied. Others disappeared entirely, as silver mines popped in the Philipsburg area and in Helena. On the horizon was the widespread adoption of electricity, creating a demand for copper that would turn a dirty, unre- markable little gold camp called Butte into a legend. But for every Butte there were ten Granites, or Rumseys, Kirkvilles, Hendersons, Black Pines, Princetons, or Southern Crosses. During the Civil War, the Union had issued "greenbacks," America's first federally issued "fiat currency," or paper money not tied in value to gold or silver. It was a desperate, if necessary, measure, as the Union did not have enough gold bullion to fund its own war effort. The Confederacy did the same, and their respective currencies rose and fell in value as their fortunes did. Previous to the war, money was always backed by gold and silver, mostly at a fixed rate of exchange established by Alexander Hamilton. Though some adjustments to the exchange were made over time, it was largely agreed that 15-16 ounces of silver would be worth once ounce of gold. Following the Civil War, however, the newly reunited states had to decide what form their currency would take. Moreover, most of the country was undergoing deflationary prices, meaning that the American farmers were working harder to pay debts while making less and less money on their produce. This was compounded by the Coinage Act of 1873, known for decades as the "Crime of '73," which eliminated silver and established the gold standard. Soon depositors took their silver notes and went to exchange them for the metal, something which had been promised by the federal government since the time of Alexander Hamil- ton, only to find that they could no longer do so. For the next quarter-century or more, the question of gold and silver would change the face of Montana, and the country. The reestablishment of silver as a form of currency be- came a popular cause, particularly among indebted farmers and, not surprisingly, Western silver mining interests. The farmers reasoned that if the prices of their produce went up, they could more easily pay their debts, while a precipitous fall in the value of silver meant that it was no longer profit- able to mine for the ore at all. In 1890, a prescriptive piece of legislation was passed that would stop short of coining silver but would require the by JOSEPH SHELTON • photos by BRYAN SPELLMAN Granite, Silver, and the Dollar Granite, Silver, and the Dollar

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