CHAPTER XXII.

GOLD IN MONTANA.

[Sidenote: FIRST GOLD IN MONTANA.]

If the Civil War operated to drive commerce from the lower Missouri River, other forces were at work at the head waters of that stream to multiply it many fold. At the time when the attention of the nation and of the world was centered on the tempest that had burst over the eastern portion of the Republic, a few hardy miners were prospecting the country around the upper tributaries of the Missouri in their ever-restless search for gold. It is a singular fact that the gold-bearing regions of western Montana, the very first in the mountain country to be extensively frequented by white men, should have been the last to give up the secret of their hidden wealth. For nearly twenty years emigration had been pouring into the West. The Mormons had settled a few hundred miles to the south. Settlement had gained a permanent foothold on the Pacific Coast from Mexico to the British line. The Pike’s Peak gold discoveries were rapidly filling up Colorado. The reflex wave of emigration was rolling back from the Pacific Coast across the Sierras and the Cascades into Nevada, eastern Oregon, and Idaho. But as yet there were no settlers to speak of in the mountains of Montana, and that country was still practically unknown to the general public. It is a remarkable fact that a section of country in that neighborhood, which is now considered the most wonderful in the world, was the very last of all the national domain to be discovered and explored.

[Sidenote: FIRST SALE OF GOLD DUST.]

The wave of gold discovery in the Northwest moved from the west toward the east. In 1860–61 it made known the rich deposits in Idaho on the Salmon and Clearwater rivers. Next came the findings just west of the Continental Divide, and then the rich discoveries on the head waters of the Missouri. The existence of placer deposits within the limits of the present State of Montana had been asserted as early as 1852. A Canadian half-breed of the name of Beneetse is said to have found pay dirt in that year on a small tributary of Deer Lodge River, one of the sources of the Columbia. The stream has since been known as Gold Creek, and the place of discovery is about fifty miles northwest of the modern city of Butte. Four years later, 1856, the discovery was confirmed by a party who were traveling from Great Salt Lake to the Bitter Root Valley. In the same year a man turned up at Fort Benton with what he asserted was golddust. He came from the mountains in the Southwest, most likely from the Deer Lodge Valley. None of the people at the post were gold experts, and they hesitated about receiving the dust; but Culbertson finally took it on his own responsibility, giving for it a thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise. Next year he sent it down the river, and it was found to be pure gold, worth fifteen hundred dollars. This was the first exchange of golddust in Montana.

The next step in the progress of discovery must be credited to James and Granville Stuart, two of Montana’s most distinguished pioneers. They had been spending the winter of 1857–58, with a number of other people, in the valley of the Bighole River, a tributary of the Missouri, and in the spring of 1858 went over to the Deer Lodge Valley to investigate the reported findings on Gold Creek. They remained there for a time and found paying prospects, but were so harassed by the Blackfeet Indians that they were compelled to leave. They moved to a safer locality, but here James Stuart met with an accident which came near proving fatal, and the two brothers left the country and went to Fort Bridger. Although they had made no great discovery, their report was considered as confirming those already made of the existence of gold in the Deer Lodge Valley.

Before these prospects were any further developed attention was wholly diverted to the important discoveries in Idaho already referred to. A great stampede to the Salmon and Clearwater rivers began. Emigrants poured in both by way of Salt Lake and the Missouri River, and an even larger inflow came from the Pacific Coast. But before the rush from the East had gathered full force discoveries in Montana arrested its course and held it permanently in a new and greater Eldorado.

[Sidenote: BEGINNING OF MINING IN MONTANA.]

In the winter of 1861–62 a considerable floating population, among them the Stuart brothers, remained in the Deer Lodge Valley. The Stuarts commenced sluicing in a systematic way on Gold Creek, and their work was the beginning of the gold-mining industry in Montana. Although nothing particularly remarkable was found, it was enough to attract attention, and reports soon got abroad that the findings were very rich. The greater part of the emigration from the East in the year 1862 was bound for the Idaho mines, but did not get beyond the Deer Lodge Valley, or other points in western Montana. Among these parties was one from Colorado, including J. M. Bozeman, for whom the town of Bozeman, in the beautiful Gallatin Valley, is named. The newcomers made a rich discovery on a branch of Gold Creek, which was named, from the place whence the party came, Pike’s Peak Gulch.

[Sidenote: BANNOCK CITY.]

Another party from Colorado, bound for the Idaho mines, were deflected north by the difficulty of getting through the Lemhi Mountains and by favorable reports from the Deer Lodge Valley. Two of their number discovered gold on Grasshopper Creek, in the southwestern corner of the present State of Montana. They carried the news to the main party, who had gone on to the Deer Lodge, and all returned to investigate the discovery. The report of the two men was found to be true, and prospecting in that part of the country was carried on extensively. This work resulted in the finding of a very rich deposit by a party under one White, for whom the spot was named White’s Bar. Here the town of Bannock sprang up, and before the end of the year boasted a population of five hundred souls. Other rich discoveries were made in that vicinity, while far to the north the deposits on the Big Prickly Pear Creek were found. It was now apparent that the whole country on the head waters of the Missouri abounded in gold, and the work of prospecting assumed enormous proportions.

[Sidenote: NORTHERN OVERLAND EXPEDITION.]

Two other important expeditions came from the East this season, bound for the Idaho mines, but were stopped in their course, like that from Colorado, by the new discoveries in Montana. One of these was the firm of La Barge, Harkness & Co. of St. Louis, and the other was a body of emigrants who accompanied what was known in its day as the Northern Overland Expedition from St. Paul. This expedition was of a semi-official character, under a Federal appropriation of five thousand dollars, and its ostensible object was to open a wagon road from St. Paul to Fort Benton. It was under the command of Captain James L. Fisk, who, a private soldier in the 3d Minnesota Volunteers, was appointed Captain and Quartermaster and placed in charge. About 125 emigrants accompanied the expedition. The journey was made in safety, and was full of interesting happenings. It contributed one of the most important additions ever made to population of the rising State.[47]

The spring of 1863 was marked by one of the most noted gold discoveries ever made. During the previous winter a considerable party, under the leadership of James Stuart, was organized at Bannock City, to explore and prospect the country on the sources of the Yellowstone. A portion of this party, including William Fairweather and Henry Edgar, went by the way of Deer Lodge Valley to secure horses, having fixed on the mouth of the Beaverhead River as the place of joining the main party. Through some unavoidable delay the smaller party did not arrive on time and Stuart went on without them. The Fairweather party discovered Stuart’s trail and made forced marches to overtake him. The route lay up the Gallatin Valley and across the divide to the Yellowstone, and thence down the valley of that stream. Soon after reaching the Yellowstone the smaller party were plundered by a band of Crows of everything except their guns and mining tools. The Indians had the generosity to give them in exchange for their mounts old broken-down horses of their own.

[Sidenote: ALDER GULCH.]

The party gave up their pursuit of Stuart and started back for Bannock City. On the 26th of May they stopped for noon on Alder Creek, a little branch of one of the main tributaries of Jefferson Fork of the Missouri. Here, as a result of a chance examination of a bar by two men, Fairweather and Edgar, the famous Alder Gulch discovery was made, and the richest placer deposit in the history of gold mining came to the knowledge of the world. The news of this wonderful discovery drew to the spot a large part of the population of the Territory, and the town of Virginia City sprang up as if in a night. For several years it was the principal town in the Territory and became its first capital. In less than two years it had grown to a city of ten thousand souls.

[Sidenote: LAST CHANCE GULCH.]

The next important discovery was made in the fall of 1864, in what was named at the time Last Chance Gulch. The deposits were very rich, and the history of Alder Gulch was re-enacted here. The town which arose on the spot was named Helena, and soon outgrew its sister to the south. It became, and for many years remained, the principal town of the Territory. In 1874 it was made the Territorial capital, and after Montana was admitted to the Union, it was made the permanent capital of the State.

Other discoveries followed those here mentioned, many of them rich and of permanent value, but none equaling those of Alder and Last Chance gulches. The Territory at once took rank with California and Colorado as a gold-producing territory, and has held its high place ever since.

The mighty metamorphosis which, in the space of five years, came over the country at the headwaters of the Missouri, produced an equally marvelous change in the commercial business of that stream. The river gave a sure highway for travel to within one hundred to two hundred miles of the mines. There was no other route that could compete with it, for this could carry freight from St. Louis to Fort Benton, in cargoes of one to five hundred tons, without breaking bulk. The emigrants themselves went in large numbers by overland routes, but a great number also by the boats; while nearly all merchandise, including every necessary of life, and all mining machinery and heavy freight, came by the river.

[Sidenote: HIGH WATER MARK.]

[Sidenote: AN EXTRAORDINARY SCENE.]

The steamboat trade jumped suddenly to enormous proportions. Prior to 1864 there had been only six steamboat arrivals at the levee of Fort Benton. In 1866 and 1867 there were seventy arrivals. The trade touched high-water mark in 1867, and at this time presented one of the most extraordinary developments known to the history of commerce. There were times when thirty or forty steamboats were on the river between Fort Benton and the mouth of the Yellowstone,[48] where all the way the river flowed amid scenes of wildness that were in the strictest sense primeval. To one who could have been set down in the unbroken wilderness along the banks of the river, where nothing dwelt except wild animals and wilder men, where the fierce Indian made life a constant peril, where no civilized habitation greeted the eye, it would have seemed marvelous and wholly inexplicable to find this river filled with noble craft, as beautiful as any that ever rode the ocean, stored with all the necessaries of civilization, and crowded with passengers as cultured, refined, and well dressed as the cabin list of an ocean steamer. What could it all mean? Whence came this handful of civilization and what brought it here? Certainly a most extraordinary scene, flashed for a moment before the world and then withdrawn forever.

[Sidenote: PERILOUS VOYAGE.]

It was not the steamboat alone, however, that made up the romantic history of Missouri navigation in these exciting times. There were every year many men from the mines who wanted to return to the States because they were weary of the country or wished to carry down the crude wealth which they had secured. The steamboats came up only in the spring, and if passengers were not ready to go down it was necessary to seek other conveyance. The usual resource in such cases was the mackinaw boat. It was a perfectly comfortable and very cheap mode of traveling, with only one drawback--danger from the Indians, who, at this time, were intensely hostile all along the river. It was regarded as a sort of forlorn hope to go down in an open boat, and yet many tried it every year. Generally they got through all right, with their precious freight, but there were some terrible tragedies as the penalty of such reckless daring.

Some statistics have survived showing the magnitude of the steamboat business on the Missouri River during these years. In the year 1865, 1000 passengers, 6000 tons of merchandise, and 20 quartz mills went to Fort Benton. In the year 1867 forty steamboats had passed Sioux City before June 1 on their way up the river. They carried over 12,000 tons of freight, most of it for Fort Benton. There was not much downstream traffic, although all the boats carried golddust. In 1866 one boat, the _Luella_, had on board $1,250,000 worth of dust.

[Sidenote: FABULOUS PROFITS.]

The profits of a successful voyage were enormous. The reported profits for some of the trips of 1866 were as follows: The _St. John_, $17,000; the _Tacony_, $16,000; the _W. J. Lewis_, $40,000; the _Peter Balen_, $65,000. In 1867 Captain La Barge cleared over $40,000 on the trip of the _Octavia_.

Freight rates from St. Louis to Fort Benton in 1866 were 12 cents per pound. Insurance rates were 6 1-2 per cent. in the case of sidewheel boats and 8 per cent with sternwheel boats. The fare for cabin passengers was $300. It was not everyone, however, who had a share in the high prices of those times. The master of the boat received $200 per month; the clerk $150; the mate and engineer each $125. The pilot was the only member of the crew who could command what salary he pleased. So indispensable were his services that as high as $1200 per month was paid for the best talent.