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).

The Sweet Grass Hill placers were discovered in the fall of 1884, near the Canadian border. In the fall of 1884, Marion Carey, Fred Derwent, George Walters, and John Des Champ, went into camp there, wintered in the mountains, and in the spring prospected on the east side of Middle Butte. The next spring Joe Kipp, Charley Thomas, Hi Upham, and about ten others, came into camp, formed a district and located claims.

That spring the Carey party took out 11 1/2 ounces of gold from the gulch, obtaining as much as $1.50 worth of placer gold per pan. They reported that the west side of West Butte was particularly rich (Leeson 1885; Burlingame and Toole 1957).  E-MAIL Jo Ann