August 19, 1999

Stagecoach now plies historic Montana gold-rush route

By DARYL GADBOW
Missoulian

GOLD CREEK, Mont. (AP) -- Dave Bluford and his wife, Jan Wohlers, are operating a time machine on their cattle ranch east of Drummond. Its timeless power source is the tandem thrust of Buster and Bob, a pair of one-ton Belgian draft horses.

Fashioned of wood, iron, leather and canvas, this time-unraveling vehicle is an authentic reproduction of an Abbott and Downing Stagecoach, just like the ones that carried passengers past the Wohlers ranch on Old Stage Road, from Helena to Hellgate, more than 100 years ago.

Climb aboard the stage, take a seat on the canvas-covered cushions inside the coach with Wohlers, or ride "shotgun" next to Bluford on the driver's bench some 10 feet above the ground, and prepare for a visit to 19th-century Montana.

The couple offers rides into the past from May through September in their Gold Creek Overland Stage Co. A three-hour trip, costing $40 (children half price), takes up to eight passengers on a scenic route across the Flint Creek Valley to the ghost town of Pioneer, once a rowdy mining boomtown of 2,000 inhabitants. A one-hour tour, costing $10, also is available.

Jouncing along over the sagebrush hills, the colorful history of the Gold Creek area comes alive through the stories told by Bluford and Wohlers, both of whom are dressed as if they just stepped out of an 1880 photograph taken at a rodeo celebration during Pioneer's heyday.

The adventure begins in the couple's "stage station," a restored historic structure that once stood in Pioneer. It was moved once to another location on Gold Creek, where it served as a miner's residence, and then again to the Wohlers ranch.

The station's interior wooden walls are decorated with old photographs and newspaper accounts of the area's rich history. Among the photos is one circa 1860 of an Abbott and Downing stagecoach in Virginia City, Montana Territory.

Montana's first documented gold discovery was made in 1858 on the tiny Gold Creek tributary of Pike's Peak Creek by brothers Granville and James Stewart and their partner Reece Anderson.

From 1860 to 1900, the Gold Creek area produced about $12 million worth of gold. Some of the earliest placer mine "diggings" in Gold Creek can be seen just behind Bluford and Wohlers' home, located not far from where a tent city of miners quickly grew up around the Stewarts' claim.

Bluford said he started thinking about opening a stagecoach tour of historic gold mining areas in the Flint Creek Valley about 10 years ago.

He'd had plenty of experience driving teams of horses on horse-drawn farm machinery in the Midwest before moving to Montana 13 years ago. Later, he married Wohlers, whose late husband's family had homesteaded on their current ranch.

"Because we lived on the old stage line, and the old stagecoaches were so important to this area, I thought it would be a unique idea," Bluford said. "Nobody else was doing it. There are a lot of wagon trains and cattle drives that are designed for tourists. But nobody was doing anything with stagecoaches.

"It sounded like fun to me. And it sounded like a good way to supplement the ranch. That's why I decided to try it. In January I decided this was as good a time as any."

First he needed a stagecoach. A horse-broker friend found one advertised for sale in a magazine. It was perfect: made by a wagon builder in Colorado to the original Abbott and Downing specifications, with some unseen modifications to enhance its strength and durability.

Buster and Bob were purchased in Iowa in April.

Bluford and Wohlers had some brochures made up describing their tours and distributed them in the Deer Lodge-Butte area. They posted an advertisement on the Travel Montana Web page operated by the state Department of Commerce. They also distributed fliers in Missoula and Helena.

When they opened in May, customers started showing up.

As Buster and Bob lean into their harness, and the stagecoach eases away from the station onto Old Stage Road, the history tour begins.

"This leg of the stage line went from Helena to Hellgate," Bluford said. "In 1860, it cost $8 to ride from Helena to Pioneer. They used four to six horses on the longer trips, and switched teams every 12 or 15 miles. Stages ran day and night. And stage drivers would go 50 miles in one day."

It's been interesting, he said, to see the different reactions of his customers to, for most, their first stagecoach experience.

"I think they're surprised," said Bluford. "It's kind of rough and it's noisy. People are so used to highway travel. They don't realize that that's the way it was, that people crossed the whole nation this way."

Bluford steers the stage off the main road onto a two-rut track that climbs an open ridge covered with bunchgrass and sagebrush. Snow-capped Pikes Peak and other stalwarts of the Flint Range shimmer in the background.

It rained the previous night and the track hasn't completely dried. It's slippery going for Buster and Bob.

"Step up there Buster," commands Bluford. "Pull up. Let's go. Dig. Dig. Hup."

"Let's see how they do on this wet clay," he said. "No problem. These horses can pull a 10,000-pound wagon over any road in these hills. This coach just weighs 2,700 pounds."

Unquestionably, it is sometimes a bumpy ride as the coach covers some remarkably rugged terrain that probably would be considered four-wheel-drive territory. But on flat stretches of the road, Buster and Bob break into a trot, propelling the coach at surprising speed. Then the motion of the coach is not so much a jolting ride as a rhythmic rocking that feels like a ship rising and falling smoothly on the waves.

"Generally, I don't lope 'em," said Bluford, "because it can scare the clientele. But we can probably go 15 miles an hour, depending on the roads."

Bluford points out long trenches bisecting the nearby hills. They are remnants of mining ditches dug by Chinese laborers in the 1870s, he explains. They were owned by several ditch companies that sold water to miners to operate their sluice boxes and water canons used in hydraulic mining.

Traversing the ridge on the way to Pioneer, the stage passes by evidence of one of the several massive gold dredges used to gouge the area's streambeds down to bedrock, strewing mounds of barren rock and rubble in their wake.

The dredge used on the ridge was an English steam-powered design that ripped the earth in 1904 and 1905. Because the dredge required trees for fuel, and the area was lightly forested to begin with, the state Department of Forestry shut down the operation, according to Bluford.

"They were afraid they'd denude the forests," he said.

Now, almost 100 years later, the dredge's path is marked by thickets of scrub fir trees that somehow have taken root in the jumble of rocks.

Dropping down off the ridge into the Gold Creek drainage, the stage rolls past the most striking example of the devastation caused by dredge mining. Here is the unmistakable track of the largest dredge of all, the Mosier, one of the most massive mining machines ever built.

The Mosier was shipped to Gold Creek via railroad in pieces loaded on 46 train cars, said Bluford. It took two years, 1927 and 1928, to put the four-story-tall monster together. The huge dredge floated like a boat on a lake 80 feet deep that it continually dug in front of itself as it devoured the Gold Creek streambed.

Finally, when the gold ran out, the giant machine was abandoned in its last lake. Bluford pulls the stage up to its final resting place, where the Mosier's rusted steel skeleton protrudes from the water like a dinosaur.

A highlight of the stage tour is the visit to Pioneer, which flourished from the 1860s until 1937, an unusually long life span for a Montana boomtown.

"But its heyday was the 1880s and 1890s," Bluford said.

Not only did 2,000 people live in Pioneer during that period, he said, but just up the hill was another encampment, called Yam Hill, that had another 1,000 inhabitants.

All that remains of Pioneer today is a half-dozen or so ramshackle log and board buildings.

Bluford parks the stage and unhitches Buster and Bob for a rest in the shade. The passengers pile out of the coach for a look around Pioneer, stretch their legs, and enjoy a picnic snack prepared by Wohlers and a glass of juice or cup of coffee.

"This is the main street of Pioneer," Bluford announces, pointing to a pair of overgrown ruts running past several of the dilapidated buildings.

A tangle of blooming lilac bushes, and several patches of startlingly white irises mark the location of long-forgotten yards and gardens.

Several of the first Gold Creek Overland Stage customers this year were former residents of Pioneer, Bluford said. They provided much of the history he shares with new customers, including humorous accounts of some of the colorful characters who lived there.

Besides those oral histories, Bluford has pored over old journals from the Powell County Historical Society to provide grist for his tour talks about the area's past.

"I'm still researching," he said.