Montana’s surprise history

Moving between these states is to experience vast and open, ferociously hot by day and, at higher altitudes, almost Arctic nights.

The arid landscape is relieved by the monumental mountains of the Rockies, some jagged and snowcapped (with names like Sawtooth), others massive craters of ancient glacial melting and volcanic eruptions, of deep gorges, crystal clear, icy cold rivers and lakes made shady by pine trees.

Nestling in a cool Montana valley is Virginia City, territorial capital between 1865-1875 and among the oldest and best conservation sites in the West, and the only gold rush town in Idaho and Montano that is not a ghost town. About 200 people live here year round, keeping it going for the annual host of summer tourists.

For many of us, brought up on Hollywood cinema, the gold rush is something that happened in California, but gold mining spread further east too. It started in Virginia City and along the Ruby Valley in approximately 1863 and between then and 1929, US$100 million worth of gold came from that 14- mile stretch of Montana. At that time gold sold for US$35 an ounce.

In 1860s Montana dozens of pioneering men were turned into millionaires, many more became very rich.

A handful of women also did well alongside the gold mining, but I was surprised to learn that among them was an African-American woman — Sarah Bickford — and equally surprised by the role played by the Chinese in the gold mining enterprise in the USA.

Sarah (née Blair) was born in 1855 in North Carolina. Her parents were born slaves but she went to Virginia City in 1871 during its gold rush and worked as a chambermaid.

In 1872 she married a successful gold miner but he and their three children died, leaving her a widow.

In 1883 she married Stephen Bickford, a white man from Maine.

They had good business heads and upon his death in 1900 Sarah assumed full management of a small farm, Virginia City town lots, various interests in nearby gold mining claims, one share of stock in the Southern Montana Telegraph & Electric Company and two-thirds interest in the Virginia City Water Company.

She then bought one of the oldest and largest buildings in the town from where she ran the water company, having purchased the final third share and continued to grow the business, acquiring natural springs and building a reservoir to supply the region’s increasing population.

Sarah Bickford became the only African American woman in Montana, perhaps in the USA, to own a utility company.

Interestingly, Montana’s anti-miscegenation law forbidding marriage between blacks and whites and whites and Chinese and Japanese was passed in 1909 after Stephen’s death (repealed only in 1953). The 1871 school segregation Act, however, was repealed in 1895 so Sarah and Stephen’s oldest three children would have been subject to it.

Sarah obviously inhabited a difficult world but she triumphed, managing the Virginia City Water Company until her death in 1931.

Today she is heralded in the town.

As for the Chinese, the first abundant source of cheap labour, they provided laundry services throughout the gold rush towns, many appropriating enough gold dust and particles from miners’ dirty pockets to make their own fortunes eventually.

Their entrepreneurial skills also extended to food provision and farming but they suffered great prejudice and demonisation.

Their history of contribution and wealth creation, of massacre and relegation to Chinatowns has been almost completely overshadowed by dramatic Hollywood tales of cowboys and Indians.

Virginia City’s only Chinesetemple eventually made way for a roadway.