Times were good in Castle, with full employment and a booming economy. But it only took 72 hours to send prosperity down Main Street and into oblivion.

By Tim Cahill

All that was left of the town were its broken and weathered bones: a few ramshackle buildings with Victorian pretensions, all listing dangerously to one side or another, manifestly losing their slow-motion fight with gravity.

There were some stone foundations and several piles of crumbling boards, bleached gray under a merciless blue sky. That and nothing more. Castle, Montana, dead now for over a century, is a fit subject for the most fatuous of meditations. Man is vanity, one might conclude, and yet the earth abides. Or something equally solemn and silly. If the people who populated Castle were alive today, one imagines, they'd be heavily invested in Internet stocks.

I didn't enter any of the buildings: They were prime breeding ground for hantavirus, which is spread by deer mice via dried urine and excrement. A footstep in an abandoned building raises dust, the dust harbors the deadly virus, and unlucky victims die of respiratory complications.

So I passed near the tumbledown buildings and had a sense of unseen eyes, watching, watching. Castle now belonged to the rodents, and the virus. Once there was a grid of streets, but it was gone now, grown over with sage and wildflowers. My dog and I wandered through the ghost town, occasionally scaring up whitetail deer that pogoed off into the trees, their long tails wagging over their backs like flags.

Above the town, set at the summit of the mountains, was the castle that gave the town its name: several crenellated towers of rock that looked a bit like medieval battlements. The old town site was set on a series of rolling hills and mountain meadows, alive with wildflowers. There were purple asters and lacy yarrow, along with wild roses and Indian paintbrush and mountain bluebells. The air sang with the hum of bees, and the wild silvery odor of sage floated on the breeze.

The town had a six-year run of incredible prosperity, and then it died, bang, like that, in a matter of 72 hours. The first 200 people had settled alongside Castle Creek by April of 1887. There was silver in them thar hills, and the Cumberland Mine, along with a dozen others, drew workers from all over America and Europe.

Miners made about $4 a day, which was damn good money back then. A cowboy, by contrast, earned about a dollar a day. In Castle a house with outdoor bathroom facilities and a dry kitchen could be purchased for $100, so that an ordinary working man could buy a modest place for a little less than a month's wages. Try that today. European workers with experience in digging and blasting, notably Cornishmen—called, for some reason, Cousin Jacks—were highly valued. There were Irishmen as well, along with a few Chinese, called Celestials because, at the time, China styled itself the Celestial Kingdom. The Chinese worked the tailings, piles of scrap ore that Europeans and Americans could not process profitably.

PHOTO: Paul Dix