Erasmus Darwin Leavitt

Physician & Co-founder of the gold rush town of Bannock which became temporary capital of the Montana Territory and is now an official State Park Ghost Town and considered by many as the most haunted Ghost Town in America.

Dr. Erasmus Darwin Leavitt was a physician born in Cornish, New Hampshire, who gave up medicine for a time to become a gold miner. Dr. Leavitt arrived in (what became) Bannack in 1862, and alternately practiced medicine and mined for gold with pick and shovel. "Though some success crowned his labors," according to a history of Montana by Joaquin Miller, "he soon found that he had more reputation as a physician than as a miner, and that there was greater profit in allowing someone else to wield his pick and shovel while he attended to his profession." Subsequently, Dr. Leavitt moved on to Butte, Montana, where he devoted the rest of his life to his medical practice.

-Joaquin Miller (1894). "Erasmus Darwin Leavitt". History of Montana. USGENWEB Montana Archives. Archived from the original on 2012-02-26. Retrieved 2009-09-01.