If we look for causes contributory to the history of the mining-camp, we shall find one which ordinarily is overlooked--the invention of Colt's revolving pistol.At the time of the Civil War, though this weapon was not old, yet it had attained very general use throughout the frontier.That was before the day of modern ammunition.The six-shooter of the placer days was of the old cap-and-ball type, heavy, long-barreled, and usually wooden-handled.It was the general ownership of these deadly weapons which caused so much bloodshed in the camps.The revolver in the hands of a tyro is not especially serviceable, but it attained great deadliness in the hands of an expert user.Such a man, naturally of quick nerve reflexes, skillful and accurate in the use of the weapon through long practice, became a dangerous, and for a time an unconquerable, antagonist.
It is a curious fact that the great Montana fields were doubly discovered, in part by men coming east from California, and in part by men passing west in search of new gold-fields.The first discovery of gold in Montana was made on Gold Creek by a half-breed trapper named Francois, better known as Be-net-see.
This was in 1852, but the news seems to have lain dormant for a time--naturally enough, for there was small ingress or egress for that wild and unknown country.In 1857, however, a party of miners who had wandered down the Big Hole River on their way back east from California decided to look into the Gold Creek discovery, of which they had heard.This party was led by James and Granville Stuart, and among others in the party were Jake Meeks, Robert Hereford, Robert Dempsey, John W.Powell, John M.
Jacobs, Thomas Adams, and some others.These men did some work on Gold Creek in 1858, but seem not to have struck it very rich, and to have withdrawn to Fort Bridger in Utah until the autumn of 1860.Then a prospector by the name of Tom Golddigger turned up at Bridger with additional stories of creeks to the north, so that there was a gradual straggling back toward Gold Creek and other gulches.This prospector had been all over the Alder Gulch, which was ere long to prove fabulously rich.
It was not, however, until 1863 that the Montana camps sprang into fame.It was not Gold Creek or Alder Gulch, but Florence and other Idaho camps, that, in the summer and autumn of 1862, brought into the mountains no less than five parties of gold-seekers, who remained in Montana because they could not penetrate the mountain barrier which lay between them and the Salmon River camps in Idaho.
The first of these parties arrived at Gold Creek by wagon-train from Fort Benton and the second hailed from Salt Lake.An election was held for the purpose of forming a sort of community organization, the first election ever known in Montana.The men from the East had brought with them some idea of law and organization.There were now in the Montana fields many good men such as the Stuart Brothers, Samuel T.Hauser, Walter Dance, and others later well known in the State.These men were prominent in the organization of the first miners' court, which had occasion to try--and promptly to hang--Stillman and Jernigan, two ruffians who had been in from the Salmon River mines only about four days when they thus met retribution for their early crimes.An associate of theirs, Arnett, had been killed while resisting arrest.The reputation of Florence for lawlessness and bloodshed was well known; and, as the outrages of the well-organized band of desperadoes operating in Idaho might be expected to begin at any time in Montana, a certain uneasiness existed among the newcomers from the States.
Two more parties, likewise bound for Idaho and likewise baffled by the Salmon River range, arrived at the Montana camps in the same summer.Both these were from the Pike's Peak country in Colorado.And in the autumn came a fifth--this one under military protection, Captain James L.Fisk commanding, and having in the party a number of settlers bound for Oregon as well as miners for Idaho.This expedition arrived in the Prickly Pear Valley in Montana on September 21, 1862, having left St.Paul on the 16th of June, traveling by steamboat and wagon-train.While Captain Fisk and his expedition pushed on to Walla Walla, nearly half of the immigrants stayed to try their luck at placer-mining.But the yield was not great and the distant Salmon River mines, their original destination, still awaited them.Winter was approaching.
It was now too late in the season to reach the Salmon River mines, five hundred miles across the mountains, and it was four hundred miles to Salt Lake, the nearest supply post; therefore, most of the men joined this little army of prospectors in Montana.Some of them drifted to the Grasshopper diggings, soon to be known under the name of Bannack--one of the wildest mining-camps of its day.
These different origins of the population of the first Montana camps are interesting because of the fact that they indicate a difference in the two currents of population which now met here in the new placer fields.In general the wildest and most desperate of the old-time adventurers, those coming from the West, had located in the Idaho camps, and might be expected in Montana at any time.In contrast to these, the men lately out from the States were of a different type, many of them sober, most of them law-abiding, men who had come out to better their fortunes and not merely to drop into the wild and licentious life of a placercamp.Law and order always did prevail eventually in any mining community.In the case of Montana, law and order arrived almost synchronously with lawlessness and desperadoism.
