Clerk & Recorder

226 1st Street, South

Shelby, MT59474-1920
(406) 434-2232

TOWNS

Bynum

Choteau

Dutton

Fairfield

The West Butte mining district is in the Sweet Grass Hills, which are made up of three buttes that rise straight up from the prairie on their south aspect, with rolling hills extending on the north almost to the Canadian line. The Blackfeet have long considered the Sweet Grass Hills sacred land. The major river in the area is the Marias, which flows through the southern part of Toole County and drains the southern portion of the Sweet Grass Hills. Most of the mining activity in the Hills focused on placer gold found on Middle Butte. Production was highest from around 1888 to 1898.

Each of the three buttes comprising the Sweetgrass Hills is an isolated mountain range composed of a complex of igneous intrusions and the older sedimentary rocks that surround them. The igneous rocks are mostly syenites composed mainly of feldspar and are rich in sodium and potassium. The smaller hills known as Grassy and Haystack buttes are single igneous intrusions. Magnetite-rich iron-ore deposits were formed by contact metamorphism of Mississippian limestone next to intrusions of syenite (Alt and Hyndman 1986).

The earliest recorded discovery of gold in the Sweet Grass Hills occurred in the 1860s, when some Native Americans discovered traces of gold in the gulch that later held the mining camp of Gold Butte. In 1874 Captain Twining, in charge of the international boundary survey, reported finding quartz in the Sweet Grass Hills, and some members of his crew prospected in the area (Burlingame and Toole 1957; Leeson 1885).

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TOOLE COUNTY MONTANA Genealogy Trails website is available for adoption. If you are interested in hosting this county or any others site for us, view our Volunteer Information page and contact Kim. (a desire to transcribe data and basic web page-making skills are required). I will do lookups,  just e-mail me. Send me text or picture data, information on Toole County and I will post it. Your data is owned by you not the web site. SEND DATA to this  e-mail. All work is copyrighted, 2007-08 If you would like to help transcribe, e-mail, I can really use the help.Your text size for this web site should be set at medium. Check back, lots more coming. All text and graphics are covered by current copyright. JoAnn Scott 2007-08

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