Highland City

Ghosttowns.com

A view from 1939:

This ghost gold camp at the base of RED MOUNTAIN (10,000 alt.) was once larger than Butte, crude in appearance and equally crude in its way of life. For diversion, men quarreled and killed; then others banded together to hunt down and kill the killers.

After seven years the stream of gold came suddenly to an end; in another year the town was almost deserted. Most of the 600 log structures, many of them two stories high, rapidly decayed. Trees took root where hearth fires had burned, and dropped their needles over the debris. Streets were obliterated by the cross trails of later prospectors. A few buildings still stand, the cellars of others are buried in the sagebrush. Though few people stayed here long, the graveyard is the most tangible of the city's remains. Here is buried Shotgun Liz, sharpshooting hurdy-gurdy girl of frontier dance halls.

Much gold came out of Highland Gulch. Evidence of large placer workings remain, and in adjacent gulches men still scrape a scanty existence from reluctant gravel. Occasionally someone finds a pocket or a nugget, and hopes briefly to see a new Highland City on the ruins of the old. In 1916 John Kearn, sole resident at that time, picked up a nugget worth $1,200.

Source: Montana: A State Guide Book; Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Montana; September, 1939.