Preserved in Pieces: Gunslinger Gulch, Historic Salvage, and the Making of Heritage in Post-Industrial Anaconda

The Landscape Gunslinger Gulch Inhabits

On the northwest edge of Anaconda, where Cable Road climbs into the foothills of the Anaconda Range and the Continental Divide rises a few miles to the south, a cluster of nineteenth-century structures sits on fifty-two acres of high-valley land at roughly 5,300 feet above sea level. The property known as Gunslinger Gulch consists of nineteen historic buildings relocated from various sites across southwest Montana, arranged on the parcel to suggest a coherent frontier townscape. There is a church, a saloon, a boarding house, a jailhouse, a round cord cabin, and several subsidiary structures. None of them originated on this land. All of them are real.

That distinction matters. Gunslinger Gulch is not a ghost town in the conventional sense — not a place where a community rose, flourished, and died in place, leaving its architecture as testimony. It is something rarer and, in the context of Montana’s preservation history, more instructive: a deliberately assembled collection of rescued frontier structures, gathered by a private owner in the 1990s from across the region before they could collapse or be demolished, and installed on a working property in the Deer Lodge Valley. Understanding what Gunslinger Gulch is requires understanding the landscape it inhabits — the history of Anaconda itself, the fragility of nineteenth-century vernacular architecture across southwest Montana, and the choices communities make when the industrial economy that built them has gone silent.

The City That Copper Built

Anaconda did not grow gradually. It arrived all at once, conjured from grassland by a single act of industrial will. Marcus Daly, Irish immigrant and one of the three so-called Copper Kings of Butte, chose a site on Warm Springs Creek in the Deer Lodge Valley in 1883 to build a smelter capable of processing the immense copper ore deposits he controlled in the hills above Butte. He filed a town plat that June — originally under the name Copperopolis, a name already in use by a Meagher County mining camp — and soon settled on Anaconda, after his Butte mine (Discover Anaconda, “Art and History,” https://www.discoveranaconda.com/artandhistory, accessed 21 June 2026). K. Ross Toole, in his writing on the copper country, captured the abruptness of it: there was nothing, and then all at once there was the world’s largest smelter and around it a raw new city (University of Montana, “Anaconda: A Montana Gem,” https://www.umt.edu/this-is-montana/columns/stories/anaconda-montana-gem.php, accessed 21 June 2026).

By the fall of 1884, when the furnaces of the Upper Works fired for the first time, Anaconda already had eighty buildings, including seven hotels and boarding houses and twelve saloons. Its payroll at the end of 1885 stood at 1,700 workers (Discover Anaconda, “Art and History”). The Anaconda Copper Mining Company came to dominate not just local employment but the water supply, the electric system, the street railway, the major bank, and the press. Laborers arrived from Ireland, Finland, Croatia, and Lebanon, as well as from the American South and Midwest, each community laying claim to its neighborhood, its parish, its union hall. By the early twentieth century the smelter complex at Anaconda — the Washoe Reduction Works — was the largest nonferrous mineral processing plant in the world, its 585-foot masonry smokestack, completed in 1919, the tallest such structure on earth (Montana History Portal, “Anaconda,” https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/127427, accessed 21 June 2026).

For nearly a century, the rhythm of Anaconda was the rhythm of the smelter. When smoke rose from the stack, wages came in. When it did not, they did not. In 1980, Atlantic Richfield Company, then owner of the Washoe Works, closed the smelter permanently, ending almost a century of continuous mineral processing (Montana FWP, “Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park,” https://fwp.mt.gov/anaconda-smoke-stack, accessed 21 June 2026). Three years later the Environmental Protection Agency designated the surrounding area a Superfund site, acknowledging contamination that had been building for decades in soils, waters, and the lungs of the surrounding communities. The population of Anaconda-Deer Lodge County, which had been approximately 12,500 in 1970, began a steady decline. The company town without a company faced the same question that had confronted dozens of other post-industrial communities across the American West: what comes next?

The Problem of Vernacular Architecture

The closure of the Anaconda smelter in 1980 and the broader contraction of Montana’s extractive economy across the latter twentieth century left thousands of historic structures across southwest Montana in a condition of rapid deterioration. Log cabins and frame saloons, boarding houses and one-room churches, jailhouses and general stores — the vernacular architecture of the mining frontier — had been built quickly, often of green timber, with minimal foundations, designed to serve immediate needs rather than to last. When the communities that built and used them emptied out, the maintenance stopped, and the structures began their return to the landscape. Roofs leaked, then collapsed; walls bowed; floors rotted through. Fire, weather, and neglect accomplished in decades what time alone would have taken centuries.

The Montana State Historic Preservation Office, established under the National Historic Preservation Act, worked through the 1980s and 1990s to document and protect as many of these structures as possible, but the sheer scale of abandonment outpaced institutional resources. The 2023-2027 Montana Historic Preservation Plan acknowledged the persistent tension between the ambitions of preservation and the economic realities of maintaining structures in remote locations (Montana SHPO, “Past, Present, and Future: The Montana Historic Preservation Plan, 2023-2027,” https://mhs.mt.gov/Shpo/docs/MontanaStatePlan_2023_2027.pdf, accessed 21 June 2026). What the state could not save, private individuals sometimes did — though in forms that preservationists have long debated.

The practice of relocating historic structures to consolidated sites has a long and contested history in the American West. It is preservation in the sense that the physical fabric survives; it is not preservation in the sense that the historical context is severed. A jailhouse moved from one county to another no longer speaks directly to the community that built it, the crimes it processed, or the landscape it once anchored. What it retains is its materiality — its hand-hewn logs, its wrought hardware, its proportions — along with whatever documentary record accompanies it. The debate is genuine and without easy resolution. As one Montana preservation scholar noted in 2015, in the case of the Vananda State Bank, moved from a dying homestead community to nearby Forsyth: moving the bank to Forsyth and restoring it there, rather than in Vananda, is not historic preservation in its purest form, but it is preservation nonetheless (Montana’s Historic Landscapes, “Moving and Saving Historic Buildings in the Montana Plains,” https://montanahistoriclandscape.com/2015/01/11/moving-and-saving-historic-buildings-in-the-montana-plains/, accessed 21 June 2026).

The Assembly at Cable Road

It was within this context — of an economically depleted region, a landscape littered with deteriorating frontier structures, and an emerging heritage tourism market — that an unknown private owner in the 1990s began acquiring historic buildings from across southwest Montana and transporting them to the parcel on Cable Road northwest of Anaconda. The details of that original assemblage are sparsely documented. What the available record confirms is that the buildings were gathered over the course of the decade, that some date to as early as 1854, and that they were arranged on the fifty-two-acre property with the intention of creating something recognizable as a frontier townscape — a physical environment that could be occupied, toured, and experienced (NBC Montana, “Anaconda Area Ghost Town Owner Seeking Investment to Remain Open,” https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/anaconda-area-ghost-town-owner-seeking-investment-to-remain-open, accessed 21 June 2026).

The property was subsequently operated as a dude ranch, providing horseback riding and western-themed experiences set against the backdrop of the assembled buildings. It occupied an altitude and topographic position — ringed by mountains reaching as high as 10,400 feet, with Mount Haggin prominent across the valley and the Continental Divide visible to the south — that gave the setting an authenticity of landscape even where the built environment was curated (Locations Hub, “Gunslinger Gulch,” https://rs.locationshub.com/location_detail.aspx?id=028-6, accessed 21 June 2026). Southwest Montana, for all the extraction and disruption visited upon it, retains a physical grandeur that reinforces any evocation of its frontier past.

In 2019, Karen Broussard, relocating from the Seattle area with her three children, purchased Gunslinger Gulch under a five-year contract for deed. She found the property already established as a guest destination and developed it further, adding bed-and-breakfast lodging in the historic structures, themed murder-mystery weekends, music events, and horseback riding packages. The site also attracted film and media productions, serving as a location for the Paramount Network series 1923, the video game Far Cry 5 and its companion short film Inside Eden’s Gate, and the Travel Channel series The Ghost Town Terror, among other projects (Southwest Montana Tourism, “Ghost Town Terror: Gunslinger Gulch,” https://southwestmt.com/blog/ghost-town-terror-gunslinger-gulch/, accessed 21 June 2026).

Financial Precarity and the Heritage Economy

In the spring of 2024, Gunslinger Gulch became the subject of regional news coverage for reasons that illustrated, with uncomfortable precision, the fragility of small-scale heritage tourism enterprises in Montana. Broussard faced a balloon payment of approximately $375,000, due at the expiration of her five-year contract for deed. The COVID-19 pandemic had depressed bookings through 2020 and 2021. The Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023 had slowed the film production work that provided supplemental income. An episode of The Ghost Town Terror, which cast the property in a sensationalized paranormal light, had deterred some family-oriented visitors. The cumulative effect was a funding gap that threatened the property’s survival as a going concern (Montana Right Now, “Anaconda-Based Gunslinger Gulch Lodge Looks for Community Support Facing Closure,” https://www.montanarightnow.com/butte/anaconda-based-gunslinger-gulch-lodge-looks-for-community-support-facing-closure/article_bf6a2194-074b-11ef-be05-33c317eb8ce8.html, accessed 21 June 2026).

Broussard’s public appeal for community support reflected a broader argument: that tourism enterprises, even small and unconventional ones, generate measurable local economic activity through lodging, food service, fuel, and supply purchases. It was an argument that resonated in a community still working through the long aftermath of the smelter’s closure. By June 2024, a resolution had been reached. Several business development organizations had arranged refinancing, and Gunslinger Gulch remained operational, with film projects and murder-mystery events scheduled for the remainder of the season (Montana Right Now, “Funding Keeps Anaconda’s Gunslinger Gulch Open,” https://www.montanarightnow.com/butte/funding-keeps-anacondas-gunslinger-gulch-open/article_662346ee-284b-11ef-b99f-6f090804a766.html, accessed 21 June 2026).

What Gunslinger Gulch Tells Us

The property on Cable Road does not fit neatly into the categories by which historians evaluate historic sites. It is not a place of primary historical significance in the way that Bannack or Virginia City are — sites where identifiable events occurred and where the stratigraphy of community life can be read in place. Its buildings carry authentic material history, but that history has been displaced and recombined in ways that complicate interpretation. A visiting scholar would need to approach the site as a secondary source rather than a primary one: the structures are real artifacts, but the landscape they occupy is a composed one, and the story it tells is as much about the 1990s impulse to preserve and the post-smelter search for economic alternatives as it is about the 1880s frontier world it evokes.

That, in itself, is not without historical interest. The decades following Anaconda’s deindustrialization produced a sustained and sometimes anguished reckoning with what the community was and what it might become. Lodge tax revenues tripled between 2020 and 2022 as heritage tourism and outdoor recreation grew; Anaconda’s ranking as a resupply destination for Continental Divide Trail hikers climbed steadily (Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “Tourism or Industry? 45 Years After Smelter Shut Down, Anaconda Angles Toward Self-Reliance,” https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/tourism-or-industry-45-years-after-smelter-shut-down-anaconda-angles-toward-self-reliance/article_81aa8ef5-aaa9-4dfc-8081-2d40012be1a7.html, accessed 21 June 2026). The community did not simply grieve the stack; it built something new around it, and around the broader landscape of which it was a part.

Gunslinger Gulch, with its assembled frontier buildings and its improbable survival through financial crisis, participates in that larger story. It is a place where the material remnants of southwestern Montana’s nineteenth century have been given a second life, however imperfect the conditions of that survival. Whether one judges such salvage assemblages as a diminished form of preservation or as a defensible rescue of otherwise doomed fabric, the structures on Cable Road would, in their absence, simply not exist. They would have collapsed into the ground of whatever remote canyon or homestead quarter they were standing on when the 1990s found them. That the church still holds a roof, that the jailhouse still holds its logs, is something — even if the context has been altered beyond recovery.

Works Cited

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. “Anaconda-Deer Lodge, Montana.” ACHP Preserve America Communities. https://www.achp.gov/preserve-america/community/anaconda-deer-lodge-montana. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “Tourism or Industry? 45 Years After Smelter Shut Down, Anaconda Angles Toward Self-Reliance.” 2 September 2025. https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/tourism-or-industry-45-years-after-smelter-shut-down-anaconda-angles-toward-self-reliance/article_81aa8ef5-aaa9-4dfc-8081-2d40012be1a7.html. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Discover Anaconda. “Art and History.” City of Anaconda-Deer Lodge County Heritage Program. https://www.discoveranaconda.com/artandhistory. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Montana Free Press. “Tourism or Industry? A Southwestern Montana Town Faces an Economic Crossroads.” 29 August 2025. https://montanafreepress.org/2025/08/29/tourism-or-industry-a-southwestern-montana-town-faces-an-economic-crossroads/. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Montana History Portal. “Anaconda.” Montana Historical Society / Montana Memory Project. https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/127427. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Montana’s Historic Landscapes. “Moving and Saving Historic Buildings in the Montana Plains.” 11 January 2015. https://montanahistoriclandscape.com/2015/01/11/moving-and-saving-historic-buildings-in-the-montana-plains/. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Montana Right Now. “Anaconda-Based Gunslinger Gulch Lodge Looks for Community Support Facing Closure.” 1 May 2024. https://www.montanarightnow.com/butte/anaconda-based-gunslinger-gulch-lodge-looks-for-community-support-facing-closure/article_bf6a2194-074b-11ef-be05-33c317eb8ce8.html. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Montana Right Now. “Funding Keeps Anaconda’s Gunslinger Gulch Open.” 12 June 2024. https://www.montanarightnow.com/butte/funding-keeps-anacondas-gunslinger-gulch-open/article_662346ee-284b-11ef-b99f-6f090804a766.html. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Montana State Historic Preservation Office. “Past, Present, and Future: The Montana Historic Preservation Plan, 2023-2027.” Montana Historical Society. https://mhs.mt.gov/Shpo/docs/MontanaStatePlan_2023_2027.pdf. Accessed 21 June 2026.

NBC Montana. “Anaconda Area Ghost Town Owner Seeking Investment to Remain Open.” 1 May 2024. https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/anaconda-area-ghost-town-owner-seeking-investment-to-remain-open. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Southwest Montana Tourism. “Ghost Town Terror: Gunslinger Gulch.” https://southwestmt.com/blog/ghost-town-terror-gunslinger-gulch/. Accessed 21 June 2026.

University of Montana. “Anaconda: A Montana Gem.” This Is Montana. https://www.umt.edu/this-is-montana/columns/stories/anaconda-montana-gem.php. Accessed 21 June 2026.