Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 69 government to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver a month. The demand for silver was back. There were, however, a few problems. For one, the law re- quired that the government pay for the silver with treasury notes that could be exchanged for either silver or gold. The problem was that the monetary value of silver was much higher than the actual value of the metal on the open mar- ket. As a result, shrewd but unsavory interests could make a lot of money buying silver by exchanging it for gold with the treasury at the artificially established rate of 16 to 1, and then sell the gold on the metal exchange, where its value in weight would far exceed the value of the original invest- ment in silver. If this were performed over and over, which it was, it would eventually cause the banks to run out of gold, destabilizing the country's economy. The result, in part, was the Panic of 1893, during which some 15,000 American businesses and 500 banks failed, stock prices fell, and 25 percent of the American railroad business went into receivership. President Grover Cleve- land, faced with rapidly dwindling gold reserves, repealed the Silver Purchase Act of 1893. News travels fast, even in the year 1893: silver had lost nearly all its value. For the residents of Granite, there was no reason to be mining silver, no reason to continue working in the ground, no reason to return to their homes—in fact, there was no longer, as of a minute ago, any reason to live in the town of Granite. The government was no longer buying silver, which meant that there was no longer any real market for the precious metal. The mill engineer for Granite Moun- tain Mining tied open the whistle at the silver mine, allowing its shrill call to spread the message: go home, pack up, and leave. Granite was no longer a town. The effects of the Panic would be felt for decades. But after 1900, when the economic situation began to look better for America, the country settled on a gold standard with com- paratively scant debate. In the decades following WWII, how- ever, the government would return to its Civil War-era notion of fiat currency, paper money backed by the government's assurance and the market's consensus that it has value. For Western silver mining interests, the repeal of the 1893 Silver Purchase Act was the kind of economic calamity that produced so many ghost towns over the state; an unexpect- ed change in the financial winds, and all of a sudden what was once a growing concern becomes a wind-battered ruin flirting with collapse, literal and metaphorical. The next round of Montana ghost towns would be created thirty or so years later, not by mining, but by the boom and subsequent bust of dryland homesteading in eastern Montana. Today, there's not much of Granite left to see. A bank vault, stubbornly still standing despite there no longer be- ing a bank to house it, the skeleton of the old Miner's Union Hall, the Granite Mine superintendent's house, and a hand- ful of shacks. The site is a state park, and can be reached via a narrow, winding road up into the hills. Many go to take photos, and to try to imagine a vanished Montana, but no one lives there. No music is played there. No one drinks at any of the eighteen saloons, of whose former existence almost no physical evidence now exists. Finnish, Cornish and Irish Streets are grown over. On the one hand, the ruins of Granite are a sobering re- minder that we can't predict what will happen to our commu- nities any more than we can predict the market with certain- ty. We can't know, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now, what will be the newly abandoned ghost towns of Montana. On the other hand, maybe the little ghost town is a sym- bol of survival. Granite may be a ghost, but we're still here. And so is Montana. The Making of a Ghost Town The Making of a Ghost Town

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