The Trail of the Argonauts

I

ON a January day, apparently only one more of a series of monotonous days, in a place where he had been working for months, James W. Marshall, superintending the building of a sawmill, picked up some yellow dust from the excavated earth in the tail-race of his mill, and counted the first sands of a new era in his own life, and in the history of the world.

The day was January 24, 1848. The place, which belonged to John A. Sutter, was near the present little town of Coloma, in Eldorado County, on the South Fork of the American River—a stream which, forty miles to the southwest, flows into the Sacramento at what was then Sutter’s Fort, but afterwards became the city of Sacramento, the capital of California. The yellow dust was gold.

From the days of De Soto and Coronado, three centuries earlier, thousands of adventurers had sought that metal in many places within the present area of the United States, and some obscure and sporadic ‘finds’ of it had been made. Marshall’s, however, was the first real gold discovery, the first to be registered in the story of his country.

At the very hour which sounded the new fortune of California and of the United States, down at Guadalupe Hidalgo, a little suburb of the City of Mexico, twenty-five hundred miles away, the American and Mexican commissioners were arranging the terms of the treaty of peace which was to end the war between their respective countries. In that pact, signed nine days later, Mexico ceded California and New Mexico, including the present Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, to the United States. But at that moment nobody in either nation dreamed of the treasure thus transferred, or of the significance of that discovery near the foothills of the Sierra.

Even in the absence, however, of railroads, telegraphs, and steamboats, in that wilderness on the sunset border of the newly acquired lands, the secret could not long be kept by Sutter, Marshall, and their men. It penetrated to other settlements in California, made its way to San Francisco, and thence by ship to Hawaii, Australia, China; to the Hudson Bay Company’s posts in British Columbia; to Mexico, South America, and round Cape Horn to the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, and to Europe. Some of Sutter’s Mormon employees, journeying to the newly established Zion of their sect in the Salt Lake Basin, told it there. Government couriers crossed the Sierras and Rocky Mountains, carrying the news eastward and telling it, as they went, to the west-bound immigrants whom they met on the Oregon Trail.

A tale it was of lands of gold That lay toward the sun. Wild wing’d and fleet It spread among the swift Missouri’s bold Unbridled men, and reached to where Ohio roll’d.

A prose translation of these lines is to be found in a letter dated from Monterey, at that time the capital of California, August 29, 1848, and published in the New York Journal of Commerce : —

’The people are running over the country and picking gold out of the earth here and there, just as a thousand hogs, let loose in a forest, would root up ground-nuts. Some get eight or ten ounces a day; the least active get one or two. . . . There is one man who has sixty Indians in his employ; his profits are a dollar a minute. The wild Indians know nothing of its value, and wonder what the pale-faces want to do with it. They will give an ounce of it for the same weight of coined silver, or a thimble-full of glass beads, ora glass of grog. And white men themselves often give an ounce of it, which is worth at our mint eighteen dollars or more, for a bottle of brandy, a bottle of sodapowders, or a plug of tobacco.’

But prose itself becomes poetic in an art icle on ' The Age of Gold,’ attributed to Horace Greeley, and printed in the New York Tribune in November, 1848:—

’ It is coming — nay, it is at hand — there is no doubt of it. . . . We are on the brink of the Age of Gold. . . . And after the earth shall all be washed (and we don’t believe one half the gold is secured by the rude methods of washing in vogue in California), we have still the mines untouched, of which the gold thus obtained is manifestly but the waste — the overplus — the superabundance — cast about, as some lucky gambler might throw away a handful of change in stepping out of the room where he had won a vast fortune. The mines are in the solid earth, — amid the rocks and crags of the Sierra Nevada, — they are clasped by jealous walls of granite, and run radiant and priceless down to the earth’s centre. . . . We look for an addition, within the next four years, equal to at least a thousand million of dollars to the general aggregate of gold in circulation and use throughout the world.’

And even the unemotional President Polk, in his message to Congress on December 5,1848, says in referring to a report made to the War Department by Col. R. B. Mason, the military commander in California, ‘The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral district and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation.’

By this time, in the sailing-vessels of the period, bands of adventurers were beginning to cross the Pacific from Hawaii, Australia, and China; hordes from New York, Boston, Baltimore, London, Havre, and other ports on the west and east side of the Atlant ic were starting for Cape Horn, thence to sail northward along the big Western sea; and ships were landing their loads at Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama, to cross to the Pacific side of the continent, and make their way Californiaward either by boat or on foot. All roads led to San Francisco. Along the coast, companies and battalions of soldiers abandoned their posts, sailors deserted their ships, and whole towns were virtually depopulated.

More than two hundred vessels left the Atlantic and Gulf ports of the United States in the winter of 1848-49 alone, and the ports of Europe and Asia contributed to the procession. In one day in September, 1849, sixty-six vessels passed in through the Golden Gate. Into the valleys and foothills of the Sierras poured representatives of all the colors — white, black, red, yellow, and brown — into which the sons of Adam had divided themselves, speaking more tongues than Babel ever heard.

By far the larger portion, however, of the immigrants to California crossed the United States overland, and of course most, of these were Americans. Proximity gave Oregon the precedence in sending them, and among the earliest of them we find a man whom we met in the pages of this magazine a few months ago.¹

II

‘Next morning we left for the Yuba; and, after traveling eight or ten miles, we arrived at noon overlooking Long’s Bar. Below, glowing in the hot sunshine, and in the narrow valley of this lovely and rapid stream, we saw the canvas tents and the cloth shanties of the miners. There was but one log cabin in the camp. There were about eighty men, three women, and five children at this place. ... It was the first mining locality we had ever seen, and here we promptly decided to pitch our tent. We drove our wagons and teams across the river into the camp, and turned out our oxen and horses to graze and rest. . . . No miner paid the slightest attention to me, or said a word. They were all too busy. At last I ventured to ask one of them . . . whether he could see the particles of gold in the dirt; . . . and, taking a handful of dirt, he blew away the fine dust, with his breath, and showed me a scale of gold about as thick as thin paper, and as large as a flaxseed. This was entirely new to me.'

These were the words of Peter H. Burnett. The camp which he mentions was in the present Sutter County, California, near the Yuba, a tributary of the Feather River, which is one of the branches of the Sacramento; and the date of his arrival was November 5, 1848. In the five years since we saw him, when he was one of the leading spirits in the great column of immigrants which left Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1843, for the valley of the Columbia, he had assisted in organizing the Territory of Oregon, and had been successively a member of its legislature and a judge of its supreme court.

Burnett makes his appearance in 1848 as the head of a wagon company which journeyed down from Oregon City, by the Willamette, and was the first regularly organized party of prospectors to enter California from the outside.

As a gold-miner on the Yuba, as the first governor of the state (1849-51), as a member of its supreme court (185758), and as one of its leading bankers, Burnett, for many years, played an important rôle in the life of California.

Many of the Oregon gold-seekers followed Burnett’s route, leading by way of Lake Klamath, Goose Lake, and the upper waters of Pitt River, It had already been partly blazed by Peter Lassen, a well-known Oregon and California character of those days, who was overtaken by Burnett. But most of the immigrants came from east of the Rocky Mountains, some from the Atlantic seaboard, but a majority from the Mississippi Valley. They heard of the gold discoveries later than the Oregonians, and were behind them in starting, besides having a longer way to go.

These overland companies, with many of t he sea-voyagers of the earlier inrush, constituted the famous ‘fortyniners,’ who made such an indelible impress upon the social and political life of California during the era preceding the Civil War.

For a large part of the distance to the gold diggings the overland travelers had two thoroughfares to guide them. These were the Santa Fé and the Oregon trails, both of which were well marked by 1840, each having still its starting-point near Independence, Missouri. The conveyances ranged from the heavy prairie schooner, which had for many years been a familiar vehicle in the trade between the Missouri and the capital of New Mexico, to the light: wagon, the cart, and the pack-animal. In these migrations were many entire families, with household furniture and utensils.

Those who went by way of Sante Fé distributed themselves along several routes westward from that town — on that traversed by the army of General Stephen W. Kearny on its march to the conquest of California in 1846; on that followed by the Mormon battalion, under Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, on the same errand and in the same year; and on the more northerly course called the Old Spanish Trail. By all those routes the travelers reached the coast not far from Los Angeles, and thence proceeded northward to the Sacramento Valley.

The main current, however, of overland immigration to California in 1849 and subsequent years surged along the Oregon Trail. Starting from either Independence or St. Joseph, Missouri, the caravans reached the Platte, a hundred and fifty miles west of Omaha, at a point now on the Union Pacific Railway; followed the river for many miles, passing Chimney Rock, Scott’s Bluffs, Fort Laramie, and Independence Rock; crossed the continental divide at South Pass, and pressed onward to Fort Bridger and Fort Hall, the former in southwestern Wyoming, on Black’s Fork of the Green River, one thousand and seventy miles from Independence, and the latter more than two hundred miles beyond, near where the Portneuf flows into the Snake River, in Idaho.

At Fort Bridger most of the goldseekers diverged southwestward from the Oregon Trail, and followed the course taken by Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, Heber C. Kimball, and the rest of the Mormons, in the exodus from Nauvoo in 1847, which led them to Salt Lake. Those who went by way of Fort Hall traversed the valleys of the Snake and Humboldt rivers, and each track crossed the Sierras at one or another of the passes discovered by the fur-traders or, later, by Frémont and Kit Carson.

And they were in numbers such as were never seen in any gold hegira before or since, not even in the wild rush for the Klondike in 1897. As soon as the grass began to peep out of the ground in the latter part of April the advance parties started from the mouth of the Kaw, and as early as the middle of June there was an almost continuous procession from that point to South Pass. By the Fourth of July some of the earlier voyagers had reached Fort Bridger.

Except when small parties drifted away from the main course, their numbers protected them from molestation by the Indians: but a far more formidable foe was on their trail. Asiatic cholera, which ravaged many cities in the East, and along the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans, in the summer of 1849, overtook the later immigrants before they left the Missouri, spread through the caravans before they reached high ground at South Pass, and scored several thousand victims. When midsummer came, the heat, fatigue, lack of verdure and of water, and diminution of the foodsupply, brought other thousands to the verge of death; and scores did die from these causes, from July till November, when the snow closed the mountain passes, and the stream of fortyniners poured into the valley of the Sacramento.

If we had made a survey of the gold diggings by the end of that year we should have found the settlements of Bidwell’s Bar, Coloma, Spanish Flat, Tuolumne, Table Mountain, Horseshoe Bar, Dry Diggings, Diamond Springs, and many other camps with whose strange denizens of a few years later Bret Harte has made the world familiar.

With so great an influx, the necessity for establishing stable and effective government among the heterogeneous elements of its population was so imperative that California was knocking for admission as a state before the authorities at Washington had time to organize it as a territory. Its admission was one of the features of the Clay Compromise of 1850; it had Burnett as its first governor, and Frémont as one of its first Senators.

And what reward did fate extend to the original gold-discoverers? Disaster. In the mad scramble of a horde of treasure-seekers, Sutter and Marshall were thrust aside. ‘My grist-mill never was finished,’ said Sutter, in his Personal Reminiscences. ‘Everything was stolen, even the mill-stones. My men all deserted me. I could not shut the gates of my fort and keep out the rabble. There was no law.’ Saved from actual want in his latter days by a pension granted to him by the State of California, he died in Washington, D. C., in 1880, aged seventy-seven.

Marshall’s end was still more pathetic. Threatened with hanging by casual adventurers when he failed to repeat for them his original discoveries; having his ‘claim’ appropriated by others when he chanced to make a ‘strike’; unable to seize any of the opportunities which were creating millionaires — Ralston, Crocker, Flood, Fair, Huntington, Mackay, Sharon, Stewart, and dozens of others — in many parts of California and in many fields of activity, Marshall passed the latter part of his life in poverty, dying in 1885, at the age of seventy-three, within sight of the spot where he had made the first of that series of ‘ finds ’ by which California by that time had added more than a billion dollars to the gold stock of the world. Counting from Marshall’s discovery to the end of 1910, it has produced gold to the amount of $1,573,000,000.

III

In the spring and summer of 1858, just as California had lost its distinctive aspect as a mining community and had developed activities of a more stable character, a few parties of Cherokees and whites, prospecting in the foothills of the present Colorado, struck gold in several spots. The most importantof these discoveries w as made by William Green Russell and three or four associates on Dry Creek, seven miles south of the site of Denver. A diary kept by Russell fell into the hands of another prospector, D. C. Oakes, who printed it with some embellishments of his own in Mills County, Iowa, in the early winter of 1858-59, under the title of Pike’s Peak Guide and Journal.

This and other publications issued about the same time, all of them studtied with exaggerations, spread the story of the new gold field through the country. Pike’s Peak, the most conspicuous landmark in that region, gave its name to the whole locality.

The spring of 1859 saw the scenes of 1849 repeated, and the prairies of Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska alive with pack-animals and all sorts of vehicles, all heading for the valley of the Platte, and all bound for Pike’s Peak. It is estimated that one hundred and fifty thousand people started for Colorado in the spring, summer, and early fall of that year, but fifty thousand of these were turned back by the adverse reports of discouraged miners who had left the diggings.

On the canvas covers of many of the wagons in that westward current of immigrants was inscribed ’Pike’s Peak,’ sometimes with a facetious remark attached. The story of the ’Pike’s Peak or Bust’ wagon was a true one. When the wagon brought its disappointed owner back toward the Missouri, its inscription had the addendum: ’Busted by Thunder.’

But George Jackson, on May 7, 1859, and John H. Gregory, on May 10, made discoveries which, as soon as they became known, checked the homeward movement, and encouraged prospectors to extend their search through the mountains. Jackson’s was on Clear Creek, near Idaho Springs, about forty miles west of Denver, while Gregory’s was a few miles farther west, on the North Fork of Clear Creek, and was the richest gold ‘find’ ever made in Colorado until the Cripple Creek discovery a third of a century later.

Before the aforementioned prospectors were born, gold had been found by an American adventurer named James Pursley, or Purcell, on the South Fork of the Platte, near the centre of the present Colorado. When Captain Zebulon M. Pike, on his exploring expedition of 1806-07 along the western verge of the Louisiana Purchase, wandered into Spanish territory in the southern part of Colorado, he was carried a prisoner to Santa Fé, and there he met Purcell. ‘He assured me,’ said Pike, in his report, ‘ that he had found gold on La Platte, and had carried some of the virgin mineral in his shotpouch for months, but that, being in doubt whether he should ever again behold the civilized world, and losing in his mind all the ideal value which mankind had stamped on that metal, he threw the sample away. He had imprudently mentioned it to the Spaniards who had frequently solicited him to go and show a detachment of cavalry the place; but, conceiving it to be in our territory, he had refused, and was fearful that the circumstance might create a great obstacle to his leaving the country.’

This refusal was probably fortunate for the United States. Had Purcell led the Spaniards to South Park, where he had found the gold, the riches of the Pike’s Peak and Cripple Creek region might have gone to another race than that which obtained them many decades later, the territory from the western verge of the Rocky Mountains to California might have been prospected by its Spanish owners, and the subsequent history of our present Southwest have been a wholly different one. As the record stands, however, the real gold-producing era of Colorado begins with the discoveries by Russell, Jackson, and Gregory. Denver, Central City, Golden, and other towns in the state, date from 1858. William N. Byers began the publication of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver on April 22, 1859, when that place had about five hundred inhabitants. Colorado was organized as a territory in 1861, and admitted as a state in 1876.

But the supremacy of gold, undisputed till 1871, was shaken in 1876 by the rich silver discoveries, beginning with those in the San Juan country, followed in the same year by others in the vicinity of Leadville, and later by the opening up of silver-mines in the Gunnison Country, in 1879, and near the present town of Creede, in Mineral County, in 1889. To each of these districts in succession there was the familiar rush of prospectors and adventurers from all over the country.

Then came another turn in Fortune’s wheel. One day in 1891, in a region which had been trodden by hunters, trappers, soldiers, explorers, and argonauts ever since the time of Purcell and Pike, and used for years as a pasture ground for cattle, where no one had dreamed of the treasure lying underfoot, Robert Womack, a cowboy, made the famous Cripple Creek discovery which opened up the richest gold deposits of the United States. Beginning with a yield of $200,000 in 1891, which had reached $7,000,000 in 1895, and $22,500,000 in 1900, Cripple Creek quickly sent Colorado to the front among the gold-producing communities of the country, a rank which she maintains to this day.

IV

‘You’ve struck it, boys.’ Thus said Henry Paige Comstock to Peter O’Riley and Patrick McLaughlin, who were his fellow prospectors in a search for gold in Six-Mile Canyon, near the present Virginia City, the capital of Nevada. The date was June 10, 1859, just a month after John H. Gregory, six hundred miles to the eastward, discovered the gold-bearing ledge which helped to make Colorado’s fortune.

In that remote spot in the American wilderness, by these three obscure men, a discovery was made that day which was destined to affect the current of American polil ics for many years, and to have for long a disturbing influence on the world’s finances. The thing which was ‘struck’ on that June day of 1859 was the vein covering what came to be known as the Comstock Lode, in which were hidden the richest deposits of silver ever found anywhere on the globe. Their development, years afterward, simultaneously with that of the silvermines of Colorado, started the downward flood in the price of silver, which broke the old ratio between the money metals; changed the monetary system of the leading nations from the double to the single gold standard; incited the movement, beginning in 1877, under the leadership of Richard P. Bland, for the reopening of the mints to silver on the same terms as to gold; led hence to the passing of the Bland-Allison limited silver-coinage law of 1878, and to that of the Sherman silver-bulliondeposit act of 1890; and was the issue which split the two great parties and made havoc among the smaller ones in 1896, resulting in the act of 1900, which gave statutory recognition to the gold standard in the United States.

In some respects, Nevada repeated the experience of California and Colorado. Several unimportant discoveries of minerals had been made there before the one with which history concerns itself; the news of this ‘find’ of 1859 brought columns of adventurers from all over the country; and the original discoverers profited comparatively little by their good fortune. Lacking the money with which to work their mine, and believing that the deposits would be exhausted in a year or two, the partners sold out in a few months, and dropped again into the obscurity from which they had just emerged. With eleven thousand dollars as the entire product of his interest in the mine, Comstock drifted to Oregon, then to Idaho and Montana, turning his hand to several sorts of employment, with but little success, and committed suicide in Bozeman, Montana, in 1870.

At the time Comstock made his discovery, Nevada had as its population only a few hundred adventurers scattered through its wide spaces. In 1861, when it was organized into a territory, it had about 7000 inhabitants, and the number had increased to 20,000 by 1864, when it was admitted to statehood. Its great days as a mining community, however, came later. For several years after it got fairly into operation the Ophir, the first, mine on t he Comstock Lode, yielded an annual average of about $4,000,000 in gold and silver, chiefly the latter, a sum which might have supported its discoverer and godfather, had he remained in the region.

But the ‘strike’ which made Nevada’s fame was still to be made. It came in a group of mines near the Ophir, and on the same lode, which were merged in 1867 under the title of the Virginia Consolidated, purchased for $80,000 in I860 by James G. Fair, John W. Mackay, James C. Flood, and William S. O’Brien. Fair and Mackay were practical miners. Fair being also a man of considerable learning and of some mechanical skill. He was one of the Senators from Nevada in 1881-87. Flood and O’Brien were liquor-sellers in the mining regions, and were admitted to partnership with the other two because of the money which they contributed, a large cash outlay being necessary in all quartz-mining, especially in a formation like the Comstock reef. All were natives of Ireland except Flood, who was born in New York, of Irish parentage; and all were about thirty-five years of age when they purchased the Virginia Consolidated.

After spending an additional $200,000 for the development of the mines, the new owners had their hour of triumph in March, 1873, when a fifteen-foot stratum of ore was reached, milling thirty-four dollars to the ton. The vein grew richer and larger as the months passed, until it touched a breadth of four hundred feet. This was the great ‘bonanza.’ About this time the owners purchased an adjoining mine, likewise on the Comstock reef, named the California, which became a marvelous producer. Stocks of these mines were listed on the exchange in San Francisco, and went up to high prices.

From $645,000 in 1873, the output of the Consolidated went up to $5,000,000 in 1874, to $16,700,000 in 1875, fell backto$16,600,OOOin 1876, dropped to $13,700,000 in 1877, and was down to $8,000,000 in 1878. The yield of the California advanced from $453,000 in 1875 to $13,400,000 in 1876, and to $19,000,000 in 1877, but shrank to $10,000,000 in 1878. After that the decline was swift, and the boom collapsed. As a consequence the population of the state decreased from sixtytwo thousand in 1880, to forty-five thousand in 1890, and to forty-two thousand in 1900.

But Nevada’s fortunes are again improving. Gold and silver discoveries, chiefly the former, in the past, ten or fifteen years, the richest being in the Goldfield, Tonopah, and Rhyolite districts, on the southwestern verge of the state, have materially increased its mineral yield, and have aided in diversifying its activities. Scattered through its vast vacant spaces on the map of to-day are more dots than were there a few years ago. Its gold production in 1909, $14,000,000, was seven times as great as in 1900, while its silver output, $4,657,000, was two and a half times as large as in the earlier year. It is now fourth on the list of the gold-producing communities of the United States, being preceded only by Colorado, California, and Alaska. Montana, Utah, and Colorado are the only states which go beyond it in output of silver.

v

At this stage of the chronicle of the days and deeds of the Argonauts the Missouri River and its tributaries come into view as highways to the mineral fields. The discoveries by Russell, Jackson, Gregory, Comstock, and their associates in Colorado and Nevada in 1858 and 1859, heightened the ardor and largely increased the number of the prospectors, and scattered them through the Rocky and Sierra Nevada ranges, and their outlying spurs, principally to the northward; and in the next few years the rich ‘ finds ’ in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota were made.

By carrying the gold-seekers and their supplies to the eastern terminals of the Santa Fé and Oregon trails, to Independence and Westport (the site of the present Kansas City), or by conveying them to Leavenworth, the Missouri rendered great service in the earlier migration to California. In the rush ten years later to Pike’s Peak it was sometimes used to great advantage as far up as St. Joseph. But in the gold-mining and in the general development of the Northwest the Missouri and its navigable affluents bore a yet larger and more important part.

The advent of the steamboat on the Missouri took place in 1819, when the Independence ran up that stream a few hundred miles. In 1831 the Yellowstone, owned by Astor’s American Fur Company, the first steamboat to appear on its upper waters, went as far as the site of the present Pierre, the capital of South Dakota. That company’s Chippewa and Key West reached the head of navigation at Fort Benton, far up in the present Montana, in 1860. Thus the Missouri stood ready to lighten the labors of the gold-seekers of the Northwest by the time that the first of the more important discoveries in that region were made.

With a few associates, E. D. Pierce, a trader among the Nez Percés, struck gold at several points along the Clearwater River and Orofino Creek in 1860, creating a stampede in 1861 from the diggings in Colorado, Nevada, and California, and also from points along the Missouri. In a few weeks a line of settlements was planted from Lewiston eastward to Pierce City. This was in western Idaho, on the sunset side of the continental divide. Steamboats began immediately to run up the Snake River to the western verge of the Idaho mines, carrying prospectors and supplies.

Discoveries along the Salmon, John Day, and Powder rivers shortly afterward, and on the upper waters of the Boisé in 1862, by George Grimes and a party of prospectors (Grimes being killed by the Shoshones later in that year), sent in a sufficient number of persons to oblige Congress to organize Idaho as a territory in 1863. Before that time, communication had been opened between the headwaters of the Missouri and the mines. Four steamboats arrived in 1862 at Fort Benton from St. Louis, all of them carrying prospectors and supplies for the Idaho diggings.

For diggings nearer and richer than those of Idaho the Missouri was now to be pressed into the service. William Fairweather and other prospectors, on the trail of another party of goldseekers, being captured and robbed by the Crows in the southwest corner of the present Montana, were turned back, and thus accidentally struck gold on Alder Creek, near which immediately rose Virginia City and other settlements. The place was two hundred miles south of Fort Benton, and four hundred miles north of Salt Lake City. The date was May 26, 1863. On July 21, 1864, John Cowan and a few others struck gold in Last Chance Gulch, at which point rose Helena, now the second largest town in Montana, and its capital.

Many gold and silver discoveries were afterwards made in different parts of Montana, some of them of greater richness than were known elsewhere except for the gold of California and Colorado and the Nevada silver. In 1864 copper was found near the present Butte, which is the largest city in Montana to-day, and the centre of the copper-mining industry there. On an appeal from the miners, Congress gave a territorial government to Montana in 1864.

Strangely enough, the great thoroughfare from the central West to the Pacific slope was for many years inhospitable to the prospectors. Father DeSmet, the Jesuit, who passed through our present Wyoming as early as 1840, on his way westward to establish a mission station among the Flathead Indians, said he saw traces of gold there, but that his object was the saving of souls and not the acquisition of eart hly treasure. A quarter of a century later gold was struck there (the Cariso Lode) by a group of men — Harry Hubbell, Noyes Baldwin, Henry Ridell, and others — who were not above wanting and looking for it. This was in the spring of 1867, on the upper reaches of the Sweetwater, near South Pass, the principal natural gateway through the Rocky Mountains before the advent of the railroad. Before the end of the year other deposits, placer and quartz, were found in the same locality. As a consequence, South Pass City and other hamlets sprang up with the usual rapidity of mining towns, while to the southward, the Union Pacific Railroad, pushing west to meet the Central Pacific, which was moving east , laid the foundations of Cheyenne, Laramie, and other towns along its course. By the creation of the Territory of Wyoming in the summer of 1868 the miners wrote their work into the statutes.

VI

What was the Indian doing while the gold-hunters were so busy in the land in which he was born, and of which he supposed himself to be the owner? In California t he tribes were comparatively peaceful when the first of the Argonauts reached there. Thousands of their members worked in the diggings, some of them independently, but most of them as employees of white men.

In the hegira to California in 1849 and to Colorado in 1859, the whites were protected, as was said above, by their numbers, though in each migration detached parties were often attacked and many of their members slain. Moreover, at the outset many of the Indians probably thought, that the passage of the gold-seekers would be only temporary, like the incursions at an earlier day of the hunters and trappers belonging to Manuel Lisa’s Missouri, to Ashley and Henry ’s Rocky Mountain, to Astor’s American, and the other fur companies.

But the Indians quickly roused themselves to their peril and struck back. They annihilated Colonel Fetterman’s command of ninety soldiers and a few citizens near Fort Philip Kearny, on the eastern base of the Bighorn Mountains, in Northern Wyoming, in 1866. They fought the track-layers of the Union Pacific Railroad until after they had crossed the Rocky Mountains to join the Central Pacific in Utah. They murdered Agent Meeker and all the other white men at the White River Agency in Colorado in 1879, and carried off the women; then they proceeded to kill Major Thornburg and many of his soldiers, and besieged the remnant of his command for six days, until a large body of troops went to their rescue.

But the most terrible at tack made by the red men in the whole history of Indian warfare west of the Mississippi, took place a few years earlier than the Meeker massacre, and a few hundred miles farther north.

Gold had been found near Harney’s Peak, in the Black Hills (how vividly that name comes to the mind of the reader of the frontier fiction of a quarter of a century ago and earlier!), in the present South Dakota, in 1874, but the danger from the Sioux, then very troublesome, impelled General Sherman to shut out immigration until 1875, when the Indian title to that region was bought by the government. In the wild foray of adventurers which followed, further gold discoveries were made, chiefly in Deadwood and Whitewood gulches, and Deadwood and many other towns within a radius of forty or fifty miles were laid out at once.

For the protection of the gold-seekers and settlers in the Black Hills and the rest of the region east of t he continental divide, a great expedition marched against the Sioux in 1876, in several columns, under Generals Crook, Terry, and Gibbon, Colonel Custer and the Seventh Cavalry being a part of the latter division. Coming upon the Indians, in unsuspected numbers, under Crazy Horse, Rain-in-the-Face, and Sitting Bull, on the Little Bighorn, in southern Montana, on June 25, Custer and five troops of his regiment charged them, and met the fate described by Longfellow in his ’Revenge of Rain-inthe-Face': —