Above: Abandoned Truck at the Bannack Ghost Town
The early days of Western expansion by Americas seem too wild to be real as shown in the movies and TV shows but the reality is, that it was probably often much crazier than depicted on screen.
Sure the journalists of the time juiced up the salacious parts of the stories for their readers safely back on the East Coast but often history records these hair raising tales.
I’ve been up close and personal with some of the wildest, lawless places in the West in the past 18 months or so, visiting places such as the Eldorado Canyon in Nevada where no lawman dare visit and a murder a day was common as miners fought over gold claims.
More recently I visited Bannack State Park a collection of 60 original abandoned buildings in which was once the territorial capital of Montana. Bannack was another lawless mining town until the locals hired a Sheriff but soon found out that this lawman was actually the ringleader of a band of highwaymen who would set upon travelers to Virginia City to cash in their gold dust.
The townsfolks eventually caught on to the source of their misery and ended up hanging the Sheriff and his henchmen.
Pre-statehood Montana was a wild place indeed.