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Louis Barrette rode through snow and ice towards Frenchtown in the winter of 1868; though he yearned for a hot fire and warm bed, he noted an interesting canyon that looked ripe for gold. He reached the lodging house of fellow French-Canadian Adolph Louzeau and conferred with Basil Lanthier, another prospector. The next fall, the three partners returned to the gulch and found several hundred dollars’ worth of gold.

They agreed, however, to keep their find a secret, knowing they risked stiff competition if news of a gold discovery spread. Louzeau traveled to Missoula for supplies. Some reports say he drank too much and bragged of the find; others believe the cagey businessman intentionally let the news slip because his lodging house was the only reasonable place to get supplies on the way to Cedar Creek.

The stampede began immediately. Hundreds of men poured into the area from nearby territories despite the fact that it was mid-December. One young man braved “temperatures between 10 and 40 below zero” and snow drifts “from three to 20 feet deep.” He arrived in camp and estimated 3,000 other fortune seekers arrived before him. Prices for food and supplies skyrocketed. Many of the first miners were Irish and French, who squabbled bitterly. By mid-January, “2700 claims of all kinds” had been filed in Cedar Creek.

“New discoveries are being made every day,” one miner wrote to the Helena Herald. “If we had a lunatic asylum it would catch about half of us. Men are everywhere in the mountains, prospecting, in from 10 to 12 feet of snow.”

Residences and businesses sprung up in the gulches. While some men sought their fortunes in gold, others grew wealthy by operating ferries, boarding houses, and supply trains in the rural, isolated claim towns of Cedar Creek, Forest City, and Louisville.

Miners continued to flock to the area for many years, but nothing compared to the first hectic months following December 1869. How much gold came out of the Cedar Creek gulches? Estimates vary from 4 to 10 million dollars’ worth. Gold fever spread from Cedar Creek into gulches across western Montana.

“The trails in the Bitter Roots radiate from the first trail into Cedar,” Arthur Stone remembered years later. “There are hundreds of them; they are blazed with blasted hopes and they are measured by bitter disappointments; but there were millions in dust taken out of these gulches, just the same.” Mining continued in sporadic bursts over the next century. Some area residents continue to prospect the area, ever hopeful that the gulches still have gold left to yield.

Credits and Sources:

“A Cedar Creek Story.” Mineral County Pioneer, January 25, 1917.

Davis-Quitt, Deb. Gumboot Gamblers: Tales of the Cedar Creek Gold Rush.Seeley Lake, MT: Deb Davis-Quitt, 1987.

Stone, Arthur L. Following Old Trails. Missoula, MT: Morton John Elrod, 1913.

Historic photographs of “Placer Mining in Cedar Creek,” “Forest City,” and “Family Traveling on Hand Cart in Cedar Creek” courtesy of Mineral County Historical Museum, Superior, MT.

Contemporary photographs of Cedar Creek courtesy of Historical Research Associates, Inc.