![]() ![]() Though you can certainly speed down the interstate to Dillon, I recommend a scenic detour through the Big Hole Valley. In Montana, the drive is often as enjoyable as the destination, and this holds true with a trip to Bannack. What's more, there's a bevy of recreational options nearby in which to sandwich your Old West education. Just a 30-minute drive from Dillon, Bannack is well-preserved and open year-round, with attractions and activities for adults and children alike. One such fountainhead is Bannack State Park, where frontier history, gold-mining glory, and vigilante violence all come together in a 1,529-acre oasis of antiquity. John Vachon, photographer.Sometimes, out there in the big wide open of rural Montana, the past flows steadily into the present, like a spring creek bubbling up out of the earth and into a nearby stream. The Meade Hotel, where Dorothy's ghost has been seen and felt. Visitors report cold spots, and children who know nothing of Dorothy claim to have talked with a girl in a long blue dress. Since then, many others have seen Dorothy upstairs in the hotel. The experience scared her, and she seldom talked about it. Bertie recognized Dorothy’s long blue dress. Some time after the tragedy, Bertie was upstairs in the hotel where she saw the apparition of her friend. Bertie Mathews, whose parents ran the Meade Hotel, took the death of her best friend Dorothy very hard. The site of the accident to this day is known as Dorothy’s Hole. ![]() A passerby saved Fern and her friend, but lovely, vivacious Dorothy drowned. In August of 1916, sixteen-year-old Dorothy Dunn, her cousin Fern, and a friend waded into a dredge pond and stepped off a shelf into deep water. The town’s windswept cemetery where spirits rest, or don’t rest, is evidence of tragedies even more indelible than hangings and shootings. Spirits shroud the ghost town of Bannack, where sluices once ran and whiskey flowed. I'm booked across the state through October to tell the ghost stories I've uncovered in my research on Montana history. ![]()
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