Gold Butte and my fascination with old things.

I have always been intensely fascinated with old and dead things. Not recently dead thing of course. I'm talking dead for decades, centuries, and longer.  From a very young age I wanted to visit ancient ruins, especially the pyramids in Egypt. I can't ever remember not wanting to be an archaeologist. Every time I drive past an old abandoned house, I yearn to go inside to see what is left to tell me the story of who once inhabited the home. Ghost towns enthrall me. I want to know their whole story. Why they came to be and how they then dwindled and eventually died.

There is such a place not to far from where I live. Just across the border into Montana right in the heart of the Sweetgrass Hills. The place is called Gold Butte. As the name suggest, it was once home to a mine in pursuit of gold. The mine, of course has since been boarded up for safety reasons, and there is very little left to indicate  that there had once been a small town complete with a hotel and mercantile. But indeed it once was.

We recently went out to visit Gold Butte again. We wondered around the hills looking for anything to tell us a story. First we visited the old cemetery. For some reason I wasn't yet in picture taking mode, and so I don't have any photo's to share. I read each and every marker, many of them unknown, probably miners come to seek their fortune in gold. Unfortunately that fortune was never found.

Here is the story we discovered on this visit, in picture form.

The inscription reads "Remember me as you pass by, as you are now so once was I, as I am now so soon shall you be, prepare for death and follow me".

An interesting story goes along with this marker. You can find it here http://www.montanaheritageproject.org/edheritage/HE_01win/pages/dafoe.htm

Possibly on old well or cistern.

Taking care of business in an old outhouse.

The roof off of something. 

Possibly the something the roof belonged to.

likely a part of an old refrigerator that I neglected to take a picture of.

Some old mining equipment

The company who made the mining equipment

Oh look, it's a Dodge.

I would love to know more about Gold Butte. I have googled it but I can't come up with very much information about it's actually existence. I did happen upon some fabulous pictures. Here is what Gold Butte looked like at one time.

Armed with these photos, I want to go back and map out what is what and what was where and see what other interesting things I can find. If anyone out there is this wide wide world knows anything more about Gold Butte Montana, I would love to hear about it.