Bear Creek Cemetery reflects Bearcreek’s coal mining heritage, the community’s losses, and its ethnic diversity. A large red granite monument honors the 75 miners who died in the 1943 explosion at the Smith Mine, Montana’s worst coal mining disaster, and 22 of the mine’s victims are buried here in family plots with the death date February 27, 1943 carved onto their grave markers. Of the 473 people buried here, 107 are children, including the first person interred in the cemetery in 1909, six-year-old Helen Markovich; many of the children’s graves are marked by marble tombstones decorated with carved lambs and other tokens of innocence that suggest parents’ grief and the historical toll of poverty, infant mortality, and childhood diseases. In the cemetery’s southeastern corner, headstones with Cyrillic lettering and porcelain photographs reflect the Eastern European roots of many Bearcreek miners and their families. At the community’s height in 1920, a third of its residents were immigrants and another third were the children of immigrants, and surnames on the headstones show Croatian, Montenegrin, Slavic, Italian, Scottish, German, Finnish, French, and English backgrounds. After the Smith Mine disaster, Bearcreek became a near ghost town as many residents left, fleeing bad memories, leaving the cemetery and its sandstone, granite, and marble headstones as testimony to the community and its dead.