South of Butte on Montana’s Interstate 15, through the town of Melrose (population 90), across its railroad tracks and new bridge with the Big Hole River and its brook and rainbow and cutthroat trout slipping beneath, past the fishing access signs and farms, and up nearly fourteen miles through dusty networks of gravel roads stunned silent and surrounded by a beautiful immensity of wide open space, more than 130 years of our history is still written and recorded across the land.

Creatively. Compellingly. In a way that’s at once simple and stunning to read.

In this place, on the grounds of the old ghost-town of Glendale, that which is old recedes into a world where time moves in a more mindful motion. Here there is time to watch the sky, the movement and formation of clouds, and the way that light changes as it makes its long transition from morning into night.

And there’s also enough time to remember much of what once was: an old smelter town, thriving in its way with its churches and saloons; the ancient, underground mines, with their ancient, fitting names—Atlantus, Mark Anthony, Cleopatra, Ariadne; and the people, their living and their ways: the Canadians and French who came to cut wood, and the Italians who labored to burn this wood in the bellies of these kilns in order to produce charcoal; the sometimes 100,000 bushels created each day and then sold, 11 cents each, to the furnaces down the road, where tons and tons of ore would then be heated, smelted, ravished in flames, purified and refined; and the “one million ounces of silver and thousands of tons of lead and copper”₁ produced each year until, finally, in the summer of 1879, this fire took over everything and at last forced the whole place to give in.

Still, the mountains and their mines can only give so much. A town, an industry, a person’s time on this earth, is, at best, indefinite. Everything changes, or at least moves on to some other thing. This I understand. But, with so much ending and subsequent procession in this world, it seems only right that the ghosts of certain fallen bodies be given permission to linger and remain. It seems only right that in a world of so much progress and transition, that we reserve space for certain anachronisms, that we take the time to acknowledge them, study them, and listen to what they have to say—and in so doing, see where it is that we stand in this world, where it is that we’ve been, and also where it is that we might be going.

The poet Richard Hugo was mostly right when he said that “nothing dies as slowly as a scene.”₂ But there are times when this can be a good thing. With the all-consuming fire, Glendale’s days in essence came to their end. Production ceased and its people moved on and away to other settlements. Like the bar burned to the ground in Hugo’s “Death of the Kapowsin Tavern,” or the faded, dilapidated farm in his “Montana Ranch Abandoned,” once the fire tore through Glendale’s smelters, so much movement, so much living, so much action, simply left and went away.

But so much also remained. And fortunately for us, so much of the “scene” that was and is Glendale can still be seen today: the small cemeteries, a few old buildings, many old foundations, the faded red brick smelter stack, and this strange tribe of charcoal kilns with their insides charred black from fires that burned over 130 years in the past—all these hints and traces of some other time, all these reminders that place our own time, our own living, our own simultaneous significance and insignificance, back in rightful, fitting perspective.

Lucky for us that the ghost-town of Glendale is not dead. Lucky for us that even though so “little remains to represent this colorful era in Montana’s mining history”₃ that these kilns have found a way to still stand, that, in their silent way, they have demanded to maintain their place in this land. Lucky for us that so much of their significant history still remains, written visually and beyond the confines of sterile books.

And lucky for us that we still have places and legacies like this that remind us to slow down, that remind us what is important and reveal to us the truth about time, that help us perhaps to see our own selves, reflected in the scattered remnants and testaments of the past—those places where our own fates are so eloquently etched.