"[5] Featured in the Star Trek Television series Strange New Worlds Episode 1 of Season 1 as the home of Captain Christopher Pike.

The tremendous amounts of coal extracted from the Bearcreek mines all traveled over this 21 mile long spur.

The MW&S was built by speculators hoping it could be immediately sold to the NP who used the high grade coal from the Bearcreek mines in their engines.

However, since the MW&S's single outlet to the wider world was all through the NP terminus at Bridger, the Northern Pacific did not buy this short line but sought to control it through business interactions.

The MW&S existed as a vacillating and weak but critical link to the continued prosperity of the community of Bearcreek.

American and foreign-born workers moved there, drawn by the expanding coal mining activity and the promise of steady work.

At its peak, Bearcreek and the surrounding communities of Washoe, New Caledonia, Chickentown, Scotch Coulee, International, and Stringtown, had a population of about 3,000 people, most of whom worked in the coal mines.

[citation needed] From 1906 onward, Bearcreek attracted a large contingent of Serbian/Slavic immigrants from Serbia and Montenegro.

With its diverse ethnic composition, Bearcreek traditionally celebrated Christmas twice, on December 25 and January 6, the Serbian Orthodox Church holiday.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was a marked trend away from coal consumption in the American economy, due to utilization of natural gas or fuel oil for heating and the increasing use of diesel to power locomotives.

After the abrupt closure of the Smith Mine, and as the demand for coal declined so did the financial health of the Montana, Wyoming and Southern, which had always been precarious.

After the closure of the railroad followed by most of the mines the town's population rapidly dwindled, eventually declining to under 100 people.

The rails and ties were removed from the railroad bed and over time the many empty miners houses that once filled the coulees along Bear Creek were sold and moved, or they simply sat vacant and deteriorated until they were torn down.

Today, the many surrounding communities that made up Bearceek are almost completely gone, with only a few houses marking Washoe, currently the largest of them.

[8] In the last decades there is some growth of the tiny remaining community of Bearcreek thanks to its proximity to Red Lodge which has developed an economy to serve tourists who come to ski, or to use summer cabins, or to pass through to Yellowstone Park.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 0.12 square miles (0.31 km2), all land.