Last Chance Gulch Grows Up!

Unlike most mining towns in Montana, Last Chance Gulch didn't disappear when the gold ran out.  What made the difference? Last Chance Gulch had a good location for agriculture, a good location to other mining towns, and eventually, good locations to major transportation routes.

There are several legends on how Last Chance Gulch became the city of Helena...by the 1870s it was a resort town for cowhands, gamblers, cattle barons and highway men.  In fact, it boasted a red light district that was in business until reform finally shut it down in 1953.

Last Chance Gulch is said to have only had 3 women living in it when it was named, so the fact that it was named for a women seems to have several stories attached.  One has John Sommerville, who lived near the head of Nelson Gulch 6 miles away, chairman of a meeting held by dissatisfied citizens on Oct 30, 1864.  These men wanted to change the town's name, authorize the layout of the streets and elect commissioners.

The first suggestion was "Tomah," a word the committee thought had connections to the local Indian people of the area. Other nominations included Pumpkinville and Squashtown (as the meeting was held the day before Halloween), but Sommerville, who was a lawyer in the business of prosecuting gold crimes in the area, proposed that the name be Helena (and set the pronunciation of it as Hel-EE-na) because of the classic Greek reference, meaning "far from the interior".  It seems Mr Sommerville was quite knowledgeable in Classic Greek and wanted it known.  Obviously classic Greek had little to do with this frontier mining town.

Another legend says that a small town in Minnesota named Helena was the original home of many of these dissatisfied citizens  and they just wanted a taste of home. This immediately caused an uproar from the former Confederates in the room who insisted upon the pronunciation HELena, after a town in Arkansas on the Mississippi River. While the name won, the pronunciation varied until approximately 1882.

The third story is that there was a kind and very popular resident name Mrs. Goldberg, who came from Virginia City and brought most of that town's Jewish population with her to vote  to name the town after her, as her first name was of,  course, was Helena.

Which one of these legends is true? Depends on who you talk to, but the end result was that Last Chance Gulch was officially changed to Helena, Montana  and became the capital of the territory in 1875, and then the state of Montana in 1889.