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The ghost town of Silver City, Idaho does all it can to live up to the name, for not only is it virtually deserted most of the year (the official winter population is one), it also has real live ghosts. But more of that later - you have to get there first.
Tucked into a high basin 6,000 feet up in southern Idaho’s remote Owyhee Mountains and only accessible via a rough dirt road through sagebrush desert, and juniper and pine forest, yet only two hours drive from state capital Boise, Silver City will stop you in your tracks as you roll into town. Surely you’ve been here before - at least in the movies. Because this is everyone’s idea of the classic Hollywood cowboy town - clapboard houses line dusty streets, the whitewashed old schoolhouse almost looks ready to launch small girls in pinafores and loud boys in dungarees out of it’s paint-flaked doors, and the Idaho Hotel - well, the only thing missing from this creaking Victorian pile are a few horses tethered outside and a honky-tonk piano churning out the hits of 1884.

A hundred years ago Silver City was home to 2,500 people, the biggest silver producer on the planet and a rip-roaring town mountain where snow fell a good nine months of the year, bears and mountain lions prowled the surrounding forests and hills (and still do) and disagreements, of which there were many, were often settled with a gun. This is how the town acquired its spooks. The story goes that the representatives of two rival mines, J. Marion More and Sam Lockhart, still drift around the corridors of the Idaho Hotel after killing each other in a shoot out on the hotel porch over a disputed claim in 1868. Prior to this, their miners had been involved in a subterranean gunfight after meeting up underground whilst following a silver seam from opposite sides of the same mountain.

If you don’t like the idea of bumping into Messieurs More or Lockhart late at night you’re out of luck since the Idaho is the only place in Silver City where you can get a room, but take the chance anyway. Staying here is like living in a set right out of High Noon - it would be no more surprising to see Gary Cooper or John Wayne swaggering into the musty old bar than a couple of dusty old ghosts flitting through the walls, and there are few hotels in the USA that can rival the Idaho’s genuine Wild West atmosphere.

If you the drive through the shimmering heat of the Snake River Plain to Silver City doesn’t appeal, head for Idaho City instead, less than an hour northeast of Boise through the cooler hills and forests of the Boise Mountains. Admittedly this is a rather vamped up ghost - not really dead so much as hanging on grimly to life like some grisly old relative - and it still has a good clutch of inhabitants. All the same, many of the original log buildings remain from when this was the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco - in 1864, 20,000 people lived where there are now 300. So quiet is it these days that I was able to destroy the silence of the surrounding forests with an impromptu lesson in shooting a handgun - no-one seems to mind the pop of .22 bullets peppering Coke cans, so it seems other than the Coke cans things haven’t changed too much in the 140 years since Idaho City was one of the richest gold towns on Earth.

However, probably the best-preserved ‘real’ ghost town in the region (ie a town where absolutely no one lives any more) is Bannack, Montana, a few hours west of Yellowstone National Park and the funky, outdoorsy city of Bozeman. In 1861 all the excitement that happened on the dry sagebrush hills in this area was the occasional wild fire and lots of winter snowfall; in 1862 gold was discovered; and by 1864 Bannack was the territorial capital and over 10,000 people panned for gold and often fought and died in one of the most violent towns in the west. Ironically, the violence was largely due to the nefarious activities of the town sheriff, Henry Plummer, who with his gang ‘The Innocents’ ambushed over 100 men, mostly gold miners, stole their gold dust and then did away with them. Eventually a band of local vigilantes caught up with Plummer and co., who were hanged on the gallows Plummer himself had built.

The gallows can still be seen, gaunt against the skyline on the slopes of a bare hill outside town (although not the original from which Plummer swung), and within Bannack are over 60 superbly preserved buildings, varying from the miner’s cramped log cabins beside Grasshopper Creek, where they panned for gold, to the Governor’s Mansion, the splendid, spiral-staircased Meade Hotel, and the Masonic Temple, where meetings are still occasionally held.

I visited Bannack in mid-winter, perhaps not the ideal time climatically, but certainly the best season to get a real feel for the hard and isolated world this would have been 140 years ago. With no-one on the snow-drifted streets and the chance to wander around the old buildings alone there’s time to consider what an amazing transformation has taken place in Montana and Idaho in little more than a century. The ghost towns you see today may be just a spectre of their former whup-em-up selves, but the vitality they passed on is alive and kicking in attractive and vibrant cities such as Boise, Bozeman and Missoula, which are great bases from which to explore this idyllic corner of the Rocky Mountains.

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