Read from the Introduction of Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Kushner Resnick:

"Bearcreek, Montana, used to be wild. In the 1920s, when it was still new, there were eleven saloons. Eleven saloons and not one church. It was a town of brothels and fistfights and rollicking parties to celebrate brides brought over from the old country. The miners worked and drank and worked some more, surviving on the miles of coal spread under the mountains. Some called it a coal camp, but it was different from the others. Montana Coal and Iron, the firm that owned the area’s largest mine, didn’t rule the community—there was no company store that the miners were forced to patronize, no company-owned houses they had to live in. The residents of Bearcreek were free to shop and sleep where they wanted. There were two hotels, rows of profitable businesses, a hospital, and a bank. People said it was a little slice of utopia, this village that sprouted up in the middle of vast natural beauty.

Bearcreek is wild today, too, but in a different way. Now, the sagebrush grows tall on hillsides once congested with streets and houses, the places where the miners held those parties and the shopkeepers laid out their shoes and skillets. Horses wander through hollowed out mine buildings that have disintegrated in the decades since the tragedy that cut off the town’s blood supply. During its glory days, almost two thousand people lived in Bearcreek. On Election Day in 2005, thirty-three voters reelected the mayor, a man named Pits who also happens to own the only saloon still in business. One saloon, with pig races that give tourists and travel writers a reason to come to town, but still, after all these years, no church. No hotels or hospital or bank, either, and the closest store is a little quilt shop. It’s technically located in Washoe, a twenty-one-resident village up the road from Bearcreek that was established enough, until the 1950s, to have its own grammar school and post office. But now Washoe blurs into Bearcreek and its tenuous hold on an identity. The cemetery on the hill is arguably Bearcreek’s most populated spot.

The people who remain and those who speak fondly of the Bearcreek they once knew refuse to call it a ghost town. But almost all of them will admit this: Bearcreek was killed, as surely as if it had been flattened by an earthquake or burned by a wildfire. Cause of death: the worst coal mine disaster in Montana’s history. The 1943 disaster killed 75 men, leaving 58 widows and 125 fatherless children. Since that day, there have only been three underground coal mine disasters in the United States that have killed more men. But none of those destroyed a community. By the time the disaster struck, Bearcreek had segued from Wild West rowdy to Norman Rockwell wholesome. Fewer people lived there, but it had become the quintessential all-American hometown. After the disaster, it was broken and nearly empty. Utopia? Never again."