Lehsou’s Gold

 

Imagine their surprise when, out of the blue, two California women received word that they were heirs to the contents of a little cardboard box found in a bank vault in Missoula, Montana. The story of what was in that box harkens back all the way to the gold rush days of Western Montana.

They had the good fortune of being the sole heirs of John Lehsou, a little known Missoula banker who died in 1921. They claimed their prize in May of 1990, and the contents turned out to be an “estimated” $10,000 worth of gold. The Montana Department of Revenue’s abandoned property bureau had searched for these great granddaughters for four months, after finding the box in a vault at the Western Montana Bank in Missoula.

Their mysterious great grandfather became an officer in Missoula’s Western Montana Bank almost a 90 years before the two received word of their good fortune.  They inherited a small vial of dust, along with 77 nuggets – one weighing 4 ½ ounces.

The price of gold at the time was reported to be $370.00 per ounce. Few people have seen a gold nugget worth $1,000, let alone owned one. No one knows why the little box sat there for so long.

Lehsou was one of Montana’s early placer mining pioneers. After arriving in the United States from Germany in 1865, he worked in Iowa and Nebraska for a year and then went to work freighting with an outfit that arrived in Montana in 1866. Traveling over the infamous Bozeman cutoff, his train lost three men to hostile Sioux, as well as most of their horses. With what remained they went straight to the Bitter Root, delivering mining tools and groceries.

From there Lehsou traveled to Bear Gulch (Bearmouth), forty miles east of Missoula, where he set up a livery – stage line. He then began mining in the area and stayed there until 1892, when he and his wife bought a ranch outside of Missoula, near Grant Creek.

Six miles up Bear Creek the little town of Bear was a very busy place when Mr. Lehsou got there. Quickly after Bear prospectors discovered gold the previous year (1865), Bear Town was one of the prime destinations on the miners’ maps of Montana hot spots. One source estimates the population at 1,500 men by 1866.

 It is now regarded as a very important strike in Montana’s mining history.

A great deal of mining lore centers on the difficulty of getting gold to the surface once it was found. In many cases finding it was the easier part of the proposition.

The placers on Bear Creek were especially known for their depth.  To get down to bedrock in the narrow gully of Bear Gulch the miners sometimes had to dig more than 50 feet straight down before finding what they were looking for. Claims stretched out over a course of close to ten miles, starting at the mouth of Bear Creek where it joined the Hell Gate River. Other than miles of heaped up, washed out rock and gravel, nothing remains to remind us of the activity that occurred there.

Bear Gulch miners were sometimes called ‘Beartown Toughs’, and often became the subject of crude jests in the mining community.

In “Montana – The Gold Frontier,” author Dan Cushman described them thus:

“The men who labored to build this dark and shifting passage fifty feet below the old bed of the stream were said to have assumed one and all a bearlike appearance, with thickened shoulders, spread feet and bowed legs; a habit of holding the head low because of the roof; and squinting because of the drip of muddy water into the eyes; the term Beartown Tough becoming synonymous for all Montana’s massive, truculent, brawling, saloon-wrecking men of sub-human appearance, and Beartown, which grew at the forks of the Deep and the First Chance, a Y in the canyon, was renowned as the toughest camp on the gold frontier.”

Cushman also described the town thus:

“Up Deep Creek, however, was a crescent of flat ground just one quarter of a mile long and one normal city block in width. This was the townsite, quickly divided into streets and typical tiny mining-camp lots. But before any could be sold for cash and deed in hand all were preempted by stores, blacksmith and sawyers shops, log hotels, feed corrals; Chinese wash, medicine and opium houses; barber shops and bath houses, a brewery which came knocked down into staves on the backs of packhorses, and 17 saloons, most of which had games of chance, violin music and the services of harlots. Right down the middle of the town were placer claims, in fact the entire town was claimed as placer ground, but few houses were disturbed because the gold lay fifty feet deep . . . within four years at least eighty percent of the gold was taken out, and during that time Beartown was reached only by pack animals.”

Lehsou was the Postmaster of Beartown for four years. His biography, in “Progressive Men of the State of Montana,” states that he was initially unsuccessful at mining but that he continued to mine until 1892, when he moved to Missoula. It also states that he maintained an interest in placer claims in Bear Gulch.

Recent research suggests that Lehsou profited more from the water that ran through his claims than the gold that he dug out of the ground.

Mention is made of Lehsou in the National Register of Historical Places document for Garnet:

“As the mines began to produce, the main business section of the new town developed along an east/west axis running up First Chance Gulch from the wagon road that passed Mitchell’s mill and continuing west until it split, with one road veering off to the right (north) up what later became known as Dublin Gulch, and the main street continuing up First Chance Gulch to Williams Gulch and the Nancy Hanks Mine.  Both First Chance and Dublin Gulch had seen intensive early placer mining on the John Lehsou and Charles Kroger placer of 1879, and the water rushing down from those workings had created a flattened area where the two converged, allowing for a fairly level construction site for the new business district.”

BLM Archaeologist, Terri Wolfgram, also documented Lehsou’s placer mining activity in Garnet: (from Bozeman Daily Chronicle – April 11, 2005)

 

“The merchants who came to profit off the miners built up Garnet as any other mining town, placing stores in some cases right next to mining claims, Wolfgram said. Garnet’s 1860s boom was short lived as the placer claims died out within a few years. Then two German immigrants, John Lehsou and Charles Kroger, started buying out mining claims in the early 1870s.

 

“As a few hard rock miners stayed and continued mining, Kroger and Lehsou in particular grew rich. But Wolfgram discovered what she believes is why.

She found nearly a dozen old dams and series of ditches leading downhill in the slopes above town. Wolfgram found that almost all of the water rights belonged to Lehsou. ‘If you have all those ditches and dams at the top and everybody beneath you is dependent on that water… no wonder he got rich,’ she said.”

 

Lehsou subsequently pulled up stakes and moved to Missoula in 1892, where he bought a 320 acre ranch near Grant Creek. He was especially interested in raising a variety of fruits and took great pride in his orchards. In “Progressive Men of the State of Montana,” he is described as a principal stock holder in The Western Montana National Bank and as a vice-president in 1900. He married Dora Rusch in Deer Lodge in 1873, and was the father of two sons, Henry W. and Emile C. Lehsou. In 1898 his son, Henry W. Lehsou, was listed as an assayer in Garnet, and by 1901 he was the foreman of a quartz mill at Garnet.

 

Western banks of that day often proudly displayed gold in their windows as a way of promoting the notion that their customers’ investments were secure. The Western Montana National Bank was formed in 1889, when its directors split from the First National Bank of Missoula. Both of these banks came about from Missoula’s first bank, the Missoula National, originally started by Higgins, Worden and Reinhard. The Western Montana National Bank no doubt displayed Mr. Lehsou’s gold at times and rightly so, as the bank survived well into the next century, even if they had to release the little box to his great grandchildren.