Road Trip Yellowstone

by Dina Mishev

  Q: Do audiences seem to have a favorite?

  BILL KOCH: It is the melodrama that usually gets them in the door. It’s the vaudeville that sends them out with their butt cheeks flapping.

  Q: Where do you get the actors?

  BK: They come from everywhere! It’s funny what a small theater world the western US is. Past actors send friends to us and people randomly call us asking how they can audition to be a Virginia City Player. I’ve had people come work for me from Bakersfield, California, New York, Houston, Alabama, and Los Angeles. The difficult part is that they all live in cabins here. You have to find people who are willing to live in a cabin in a camping situation.

  Q: What’s the community [in Virginia City] like when all the summer tourists leave?

  BK: There’s a community Christmas potluck and everybody sits around the Elks Club and eats dinner. Every year, I emcee the cakewalk that raises money for the fire department. There is something so peaceful about living here. Once you’re considered a local, and that takes some time, the community will do anything for you.

  The Virginia City Players is the oldest continuously operating summer stock theater company west of the Mississippi. Founded in 1948, it performs melodrama and vaudeville 6 days a week (dark Monday) in the Virginia City Opera House. 338 W. Wallace St., (800) 829-2969, www.virginiacityplayers.com

  The Gypsy Fortune Teller inside Virginia City’s Gypsy Arcade might be the only one of its kind left in the world. What makes the gypsy so unique is that she speaks your fortune from a hidden record player. Zoltar, a similar machine made famous in the movie Big, dispenses cards and doesn’t talk. The gypsy was made sometime around 1906. In 2006, illusionist David Copperfield, a collector of such machines, reportedly offered $2 million to the State of Montana for it. But it wasn’t for sale. The state got the gypsy when it bought all of Charles and Sue Bovey’s collections for $6.5 million in 1998.

  The bulk of Charles’s collection came from New York though. In 1958, Charles met the owner of the B.A.B. Organ Company, which had recently gone out of business. Charles bought the company’s entire inventory, from the tools and equipment that would keep the machines operating to the 89-key, house-sized Gavioli. The Gavioli was built in Paris in 1895, and, aside from its size, it is also remarkable for its hand-carved art nouveau exterior. There were about a dozen other music machines.

  With such a large-scale collection, Charles needed someplace to store and display them. Luckily, the man collected old buildings at about the same rate he collected automated music machines. He owned a fair number of buildings in Virginia City and Nevada City. His music machine collection had fit into the Bale of Hay Saloon until all of the B.A.B. pieces came along. Charles thought a building that was once the recreation hall for Yellowstone’s Canyon Lodge would be perfect for the enlarged collection. But first the building, originally built in 1910, had to be moved to Nevada City and then restored. This building was moved in 1959, and the Nevada City Music Hall opened the following year. (406) 843-5247, www.virginiacitymt.com

  Open Air Museum/History

  Bill Fairweather went looking for a spot to picket his group’s horses for the night. What he found instead was one of the richest gold deposits in North America. He made his discovery late in the afternoon on May 26, 1863; within a week, word had gotten out and hundreds of men had descended on Alder Gulch to pan for gold alongside Bill and the other five men in his discovery party.

  Today this area has been partly preserved and partly re-created. There are about 200 historic buildings that re-create a first-generation mining town. And they’re open for business: spend the night at the Nevada City Hotel; grab a Montana microbrew at the Bale of Hay Saloon; cut into a steak in the former Wells Fargo building; or browse local art in several historic buildings.

  Less than a month after Fairweather’s find, nine mining camps stretched down a 14-mile section of Alder Gulch. The whole area was called Fourteen Mile City. Verona was the nicest of these camps and at the midway point of the 14 miles. A group presented the newly elected judge of the Fairweather Mining District a charter proposing this be a new town named “Varina.” Varina was the wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. The judge was a staunch Unionist though and opposed the name. On the charter, he crossed out “Varina” and wrote in “Virginia” instead. Virginia City was born.

  At this time, Virginia City and its neighboring mining camps, including Nevada City, were in Idaho Territory. Within a year, Congress established the Territory of Montana. Nevada City and Virginia City were both in the running, alongside Bannack, to be the territorial capital. Virginia City won and quickly grew to be the largest city in the inland Northwest; the population of Alder Gulch was estimated to be between 8,000 and 10,000, with Virginia City being the hub.

  There were many other Montana firsts for Virginia City. It was the location of the state’s first newspaper (the Montana Post, August 1864); the territory’s first public school opened here in 1866; the first company of the Montana National Guard was organized in 1885; and it was the first town in Montana to have camels (1865, used for freighting). Virginia City was also the first administrative site for Yellowstone National Park when it was founded in 1872.

  And then, by 1875, it was all gone. The population of the gulch was down to less than 800 people. Worst of all? The title of territorial capital was transferred to Helena, which remains the state’s capital today.

  Dredge mining came to the gulch in 1898, and while it resulted in an additional $285 million (in today’s value) of gold being found, it destroyed many of Nevada City’s buildings. Most of the rest were demolished when the highway was built through the center of the town. By the 1950s, Cora and Alfred Finney were Nevada City’s last residents. Nevada City’s remaining original buildings exist because the Finneys saved them.

  By that time though, Charles and Sue Bovey had discovered the area. The couple had a penchant for collecting on a big scale. They began purchasing buildings and property in Virginia City and Nevada City in the late 1940s. They were also buying up old buildings elsewhere in the state. They didn’t bring these to Nevada City yet. In Great Falls, where they lived, the Boveys founded the “Old Town” exhibit at the county fairgrounds. But in 1959, the city needed that space and asked Charles and Sue to find somewhere else for their collection. One by one, the buildings were carefully dismantled and brought to Nevada City to re-create the look of the town as it was during the mining days. The last building was moved to Nevada City in 1978.

  Fourteen of the buildings today in Nevada City are original to Nevada City, including the jail, the Fenner Barn, the Finney homestead, and the Star Bakery. Today’s Nevada City Emporium is an 1880s-era building originally from Dillon, Montana. In the 1860s, the Nevada City Hotel building was a stage station near Twin Bridges.

  Virginia City got telephone service in 1902, but the area didn’t have cell service until 2010.

  Deciding that the buildings were not that interesting when empty, Charles and Sue began collecting artifacts to go in them. Together Virginia City and Nevada City contain over 1 million Old West artifacts, the largest collection outside of the Smithsonian. The state bought the Bovey collection in 1998 and today the Montana Heritage Commission runs it. Virginia City was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. And among all of this is a living community—a small one with about 130 people living in Virginia City year-round—but a living community nonetheless. Virginia City is 14 miles west of Ennis, Montana, on MT 287; Nevada City is another 1.5 miles west, (800) 829-2969, www.virginiacity.com

  Placer Mining

  The massive mining operations around Butte were hardrock mining; miners dug shafts and tunnels into solid rock to find minerals in their ore form. While some gold was found there, it was mostly copper that came from Butte’s mines. In Alder Gulch, placer mining extracted about $2.5 billion worth of gold (in today’s value) between 1863 and 1922. This
was one of the richest gold deposits in North America.

  At the time gold was discovered here, panning was the most common form of placer mining, but there are other methods. Generally, placer mining is any type of mining where raw minerals are deposited in sand or gravel. Other types of placer mining include dredging, sluicing, and using a contraption called a rocker. Dredging started in Alder Gulch in 1898, and, at one time, the gulch was home to the world’s largest dredge. Dredging stopped in 1937.

  Thompson Hickman Museum

  Attached to the Thompson Hickman County Library, the Thompson Hickman Museum is awesome. Included in its collection is a petrified cat last seen alive in 1868 and “found some years later by Mrs. Emslie.” And that’s not even the museum’s star oddity. That honor goes to the mummified club foot of “Club Foot George” Lane. In 1864, Club Foot George was hanged by the Montana Vigilantes, a group of locals who had charged themselves with keeping the peace and sometimes did so overzealously. (During their reign, they hung an estimated forty-four people.) A group of 20th-century locals had heard rumors of Club Foot George’s hanging the century prior and decided to dig up his supposed grave on Virginia City’s Boot Hill to confirm. The proof of Club Foot George the group found was indisputable. Now the object is swaddled in burlap under a protective dome and can be shared with others thanks to its appearance on a postcard the museum sells. 220 Wallace St., (406) 843-5238, www.visitmt.com

  ROAD TRIP 5 GALLATIN CANYON

  You’ll be amazed by the differences between the two routes—US 287 and US 191—that connect West Yellowstone and Bozeman. Know you can’t go wrong with either. Also know that if there’s any way you can make a loop out of driving both, you should. US 191 follows the Gallatin River so closely for most of its length you could make an easy cast from the car. Not into fishing? Depending on the season, there’s alpine and Nordic skiing at Big Sky, whitewater rafting, hiking, and mountain biking along the way, too.

  Gallatin River

  The movie A River Runs Through It won an Academy Award for cinematography. The most beautiful scenes in it were filmed on the Gallatin River, feet from US 191. The story the movie was based on actually has the Maclean brothers fishing on the Blackfoot River by Missoula, but when the movie was made in the early 1990s, that river was too polluted. Aside from having to pose as another river, the Gallatin didn’t have to fake anything else for Hollywood.

  Lewis and Clark named the Gallatin River after US treasury secretary Albert Gallatin. Gallatin was in the position from 1801 to 1814, making him the longest serving treasury secretary in US history. (He served under both Jefferson and Madison.) Gallatin, a native of Switzerland, also served as a representative, senator, and ambassador (first to France and then to Great Britain). After retiring from politics, he helped found the University of the City of New York, which later became New York University. At the time of Gallatin’s death in 1849, he was the last living member of Jefferson’s Cabinet.

  In some stretches of the 120-mile-long river, it’s estimated there are 4,000 mature fish per mile. You’ll also see plenty of kayakers and rafts. This river has some of the state’s best white water and it’s all condensed into one 10-mile(ish) section. If you go rafting through the Mad Mile, a mile-long section of continuous Class III and IV rapids, know that at the turn of the 20th century loggers working in the canyon rode the logs down the river to prevent them from jamming.

  The headwaters of the Gallatin are at Gallatin Lake, at 9,500 feet in Yellowstone National Park. The Gallatin is one of the three rivers that meet at Three Forks, Montana, to form the Missouri River (the other two are the Madison and the Jefferson). Montana Whitewater: 63960 Gallatin Rd., (800) 799-4465, www.montanawhitewater.com

  320 Ranch

  There are dozens of guest ranches in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. But only one can claim ties to one of the most interesting women in Montana’s history: the 320 Guest Ranch.

  Dr. Caroline McGill, Montana’s first female pathologist, the state’s first doctor (she practiced in Butte from 1916 to 1956), and one of the founders of Bozeman’s Museum of the Rockies (read more about the museum on page 229) bought the 320 in 1936. She had first seen it from the back of a bobsled in 1911, shortly after she arrived in Montana from Missouri to take the job of pathologist at Butte’s Murray Hospital. McGill loved the wilderness and once wrote, “To get out into God’s mountains, whether to ride, walk, or just sit, will cure more ills than all the medicine or medical knowledge in existence.” An avid hunter, rider, and angler, Dr. McGill was a charter member of the Montana Wilderness Association.

  Caroline bought the 320 from Sam Wilson, who homesteaded the property in 1898. The Wilsons had run the property as a small guest ranch and Dr. McGill continued that tradition. There was room for about twenty guests. In 1938, she elevated it above other guest ranches in the Gallatin Canyon by bringing in a Cadillac engine to use as a power generator. Thanks to that, the 320 had power 10 years before the rest of the canyon.

  Dr. McGill retired to the ranch in 1956 and lived there until her death in 1959. The last cabin she lived in is now used for employee housing. It is called the Christmas Cabin because the ranch crew that built it for her finished it just before Christmas in 1956. “She was getting older at that point and the ranch crew didn’t like that she was walking so far to the dining room,” says the 320’s current general manager, John Richardson. “So they built her this cabin right next to the dining hall.”

  McGill’s original cabin, the one she used from the 1930s until the Christmas Cabin was built, is still on the property and you can rent it for the night. “We’ve got some great old photos of Dr. McGill as well,” John says. “There’s one of her leading a trail ride out of the barn. She was a truly amazing woman. Even by today’s standards, she’d be considered a pioneer.”

  After Dr. McGill’s death, the Goodrich family, the 320’s longtime caretakers, bought the ranch and managed it until 1987. Then the ranch’s current owner, Dave Brask, bought it. “It’s pretty special we’ve only had five owners since 1898,” John says. The 320 is also pretty special for how it operates today. “We’re the only true a la carte guest ranch that I know of,” John says. Most guest ranches are all-inclusive and have a minimum stay of 3, 4, or 7 nights. At the 320, you can stay for just a night. Or you can just come to the ranch for dinner, a trail ride, or to look at the historic photos of Dr. McGill. The original Wilson homestead cabin is now part of the 320 Steakhouse. 205 Buffalo Horn Creek Rd., (406) 995-4283, www.320ranch.com

  LOCAL LOWDOWN BRITT IDE, Former Interim CEO of the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce

  Britt Ide grew up as an Air Force brat, but “Montana was always my anchor,” she says. “Montana is my happy place.” Britt is a fifth generation Montanan. “My grandfather was the first mayor of Clyde Park. My mom graduated from Bozeman High.” Britt’s daughter was baptized as a baby at Soldiers Chapel, where Britt’s mom and aunt both played the organ during summer Sunday services when they were in high school. Britt and her husband, Alex, lived in Montana in 1995 and 1996 and “have been trying to get back since then.”

  After living in Boise for the last 15 years, the Ides finally came home in 2015. Alex is the principal of Big Sky’s Ophir School and Lone Peak High School. Britt has her own consulting firm, Ide Energy and Strategy, which does energy policy and sustainability, and she was the interim CEO of the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce. Their house is walking distance to Big Sky’s movie theater. “We hear the creek from our house, and one summer a moose nursed her baby in our backyard,” Britt says. 55 Lone Mountain Trail, Big Sky, (800) 943-4111, www.bigskychamber.com

  Q: What’s your ideal Big Sky summer day?

  BRITT IDE: You wake up and it’s that wonderful cool mountain morning. Then you go for a long hike and it warms up, but it’s not too hot and you see wildlife. Then you have a great dinner out on the patio and walk to a concert or show. We try not to take summer vacation because it is so gorgeous here.

  Q: Can you recommend an
y specific hikes?

  BI: Go up to Ousel Falls.

  Q: What about the perfect winter day?

  BI: Sun and fresh powder, so I’ll be skiing on the mountain, or snowshoeing. If it’s not fresh powder, I might go skate skiing, [or] take the dog outside.

  Q: Do you have a favorite season?

  BI: I love snow and winter, and fall is gorgeous, and summer is amazing. I just have problems with May. It’s gray and rainy.

  Q: Do you have a favorite restaurant in Big Sky?

  BI: As the chamber CEO, I’m not allowed to have a favorite. All of our restaurants are so good—definitely much more than you’d expect for a rural town.

  Q: What makes Big Sky special?

  BI: It’s this neat small town but not at all typical. There is world-class art and people coming in from around the world. My kids have had classmates from Russia and Austria. But with all of this worldliness, Big Sky is very much authentically western and Montana. It is still small enough to be real. There’s a culture of helping and welcoming that I haven’t found in other places. I’m sure I don’t know everyone, but I feel connected, especially with my chamber position.

  Q: Big Sky Resort is one of the biggest and best ski areas on the continent. Are there lots of ski bums around?

  BI: We have a reverse bell curve with our population. There are lots of young adults working as lifties or in service and also a high percentage of retirees. There’s a low percentage of parents raising families. But a lot of the families that are here started out in Big Sky as ski bums and made their lives here.