CHAPTER XLVIII

THE FRONTIER OF THE MINERAL EMPIRE

For ten years after the discovery of gold in the Pike's Peak country, the map of the Rocky Mountain area was in a condition of continual revision, as Congress, on half knowledge or worse, tried to keep the institutions of government abreast with the activities of the gold seekers. The task was great and involved because gold was everywhere; it was elusive because the gold was generally in small amounts; and great communities, gathered hurriedly by a new find, dispersed as quickly when the limits of the deposit were ascertained.

The new Colorado Territory was the first step in the procedure of breaking up the mountain wastes into orderly governments to meet the needs of the shifting population. It was accompanied by other steps, however, which had been deferred like Colorado because of the deadlock over the slavery question, and which were released in the closing days of Buchanan's administration, after the southern obstructionists had gone home. These were the admission of Kansas, the organization of a new territory, Dakota, for the farmers of the upper Missouri country, and the creation of an overflow mining territory east of the California line, for the Washoe gold and silver seekers.

Kansas, in spite of the war that had raged over its plains, was not much of a State even in 1861. Most of its settlers lived in its extreme eastern counties, near the rivers that were its sole connection with the Union. Two hundred miles west of Missouri was still the open range, and the village at the old Council Grove, where the caravans had been in the habit of completing their protective organization, was on the actual frontier even yet. The Jayhawkers and the Blue Lodges, and Old John Brown at Osawatomie, had kept up the turmoil; but there had not been a rush of incomers on any terms. The fourth State constitution, made at Wyandotte in 1859, and ratified by what people there were that autumn, waited for acceptance by Congress for more than a year.

1 Oswald G. Villard, John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After (1910), is one of the most exhaustive books of its kind. But historians are not in complete agreement on John Brown; a local interpreter is Hill P. Wilson, John Brown, Soldier of Fortune: A Critique (1913).

The southern vote would not play true to itself, and admit that Kansas was entitled to be a free State if it so desired, yet it had, in 1854, welcomed Douglas's discovery that the people had a right to determine their institutions for themselves and that popular sovereignty was superior to the Missouri Compromise. When Kansas was at last admitted in 1861, Congress cut off its western portion, at the 25th meridian, in order to make room for Colorado Territory whose creation was only a matter of a few weeks.

Dakota Territory was formed under an act of March 2, 1861, and included all of Nebraska Territory lying north of the 43d parallel. In addition, it embraced a fragment of domain that had been without government since 1858, and whose people provided the motive force for the whole transaction. The admission of States and the creation of territories was never an exact process, and more than once Congress, without intending it, did destruction as well as construction by its laws. Thus in 1848 the admission of Wisconsin, with a western boundary at the St. Croix River, turned adrift a settled part of the territory between that stream and the Mississippi. This became a part of Minnesota in 1849. Similarly the admission of Minnesota in 1858, with a western boundary near Sioux Falls on the Big Sioux River threw away the angle between the Big Sioux and the Missouri, into which settlers had entered by way of the Missouri Valley. This large triangular tract, west of Minnesota as it now is, and extending to the Missouri River, was added to the northern slice taken from Nebraska, to form Dakota. At the lower end of this triangular area, was a village of Yankton, near the mouth of the James River, and for a hundred miles or so along the Missouri near Yankton there was an occasional farmer. Not until 1868, however, did Joseph Ward bring here his bride and undertake to found a parish and a college for the Congregational Church. Several hundred miles north of Yankton, at Pembina on the Red River of the North, were a few more residents who had come there with the Canadian settlement, and who maintained a precarious connection with the world by means of an annual ox-cart caravan to Fort Snelling. The creation of Dakota was only incidentally concerned with the content of the Rocky Mountain empire, and belonged to the western margin of the agricultural frontier. Like Kansas and Nebraska, Dakota was not under heavy pressure of settlement.

Nevada Territory, born the same day as Dakota, was rather a George H. Durand, Joseph Ward of Dakota (1913).

supplement to California than a following of the new principle of subdivision of the mountain area, although in fact it accomplished such a division. In the same summer of 1858 in which prospectors found gold on Cherry Creek, there were other wanderers at work on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, near Lake Tahoe and the arbitrary eastern boundary of California. On the eastern slopes of Mount Davidson they found silver rather than gold, although there was much gold with it, and the new camp was "on the public highway to California," where tens of thousands of emigrants had passed, without seeing the wealth beneath their feet. The mining district took its name at first from Lake Washoe, at the foot of Mount Davidson, and it drew its people mostly from the California towns, although some came "from Kansas and Nebraska, from Pike's Peak and Salt Lake." 3

This was in the extreme western end of Utah Territory and had had thus far no interest except as the route of the California trail, along the Humboldt Valley. The Mormon colony on Great Salt Lake kept its hand on the highway, principally through the maintenance of service stations for emigrants. Carson County, Utah, was founded on the trail in 1854; Carson City, near Washoe Lake, sprang into life in 1858. Not until the spring of 1859, when the famous deposits known as the Comstock Lode were found, did the Washoe mines arouse much interest, and then they were outshone in the public eye by those of Pike's Peak. But that autumn, as at Denver, the Carson City miners made themselves a constitution and organized a spontaneous State, which they pretended was superior to the government of Utah Territory.

The eastern boundary of Nevada Territory was placed in 1861 at the 39th meridian west of Washington, and California was invited to assent to a western boundary along the watershed of the Sierra Nevada. When California failed to do this, which meant a reduction of territory for her, Nevada was given an additional degree along the eastern side, making the 38th meridian the boundary. In 1864 there was a further extension to the 37th meridian, and an addition to the south which carried Nevada beyond the 37th parallel to the Colorado River. At Carson City a territorial government was set up, whose most important member, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was the private secretary of the ter

H. H. Bancroft, History of Nevada, Colorado and Wyoming (1890); Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (1912), has rare interest and gives a vivid picture of this place and period.

ritorial secretary. The overland journey of "Mark Twain," with his brother Orion Clemens, to this new post in the summer of 1861, has become a classic jaunt, immortalized in Roughing It (1872). The mining camp which occasioned their trip would have justified itself, if it had done no more than bring to this new type of frontier its greatest artist.

A few thousands of the fifty-niners stayed in Colorado to help set up a State; some fewer thousands remained in Nevada for the same purpose. But many times their number ranged over the mountains between, and north and south, under the unsettlement that the Civil War brought into many minds and subject to the hypnotic influence of the search for gold. There were drifters, who kept on drifting, war or no war. There were deserters from Union armies and from the Confederacy. There were sympathizers with both causes who left home because of unpopularity, and there was an admixture of that class that "left their country for their country's good." Once in a while, spurts of loyalty, or the reverse, set a mining camp aflame. There were personal conflicts that revealed how many men were sensitive enough to fight, if not loyal enough to stay at home to do it. Before the war was over the succession of camps that followed the discoveries into every corner of the mountains provided reason for as thorough a subdivision of the mountain West as Congress need ever undertake.

In the summer of 1860 gold was found in the Clearwater Valley, one of the eastern tributaries of the Snake River. The new field was somewhat northeast of the main Oregon Trail, which cut across the great bend of the Snake, towards Walla Walla; but it was not so far that miners from Oregon and Washington Territory could not flock there in the spring of 1861. Five thousand, or more, were on hand by mid-summer and brought Lewiston to life, in the angle between the Clearwater and the Snake, and in the heart of the reserve of the Nez Percé Indians. As the news spread, they kept on coming. "The Idaho miners," said H. H. Bancroft, "were like quicksilver. A mass of them dropped in any locality, broke up into individual globules, and ran off after any atom of gold in their vicinity. They stayed nowhere longer than the gold attracted them." In quick succession they spread to the Salmon River, another eastern tributary of the Snake, and to the Boise. They pushed south of the Snake to the Owyhee, and at every station they found more gold and planted temporary camps. By 1862 Congress was under pressure to create a territory for them, for the

seat of Washington was too far west and that of Dakota too far east.

Before Congress acted on the problem of the Snake River miners, there was a like problem of Missouri River miners. The Columbia and Snake, and their eastern tributaries, interlock upon the northern continental watershed with the headwaters of the Missouri, and the Bitter Root Valley, although it drains into the Pacific, is as easily accessible from the east as from the west. It was through this country that Lewis and Clark went in 1806; and in 1853 Isaac I. Stevens at the head of the northern survey for the Pacific railroad. Stevens was deeply impressed with the fertility of the valleys and the ease of crossing the divide, and his reports to the War Department are full of the confident rhetoric of the convert. No great trail had crossed the continent here, however, because of the lack of a population around Lake Superior to feed it, and because of the ease of access to the main Platte trail.

For a generation before gold was found in the Bitter Root and the Beaverhead, the Missouri had been put to occasional use. In 1832 the fur traders' steamer reached Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone. Later, as spring freshets encouraged greater penetration, the boats worked their way farther up the shallow stream, until in 1859 they made a new head of navigation near the great falls of the Missouri, at Fort Benton. Nearly every year thereafter, until the railroad came, the boats reached Fort Benton, with annuity goods for the northwest Indians, supplies for the trappers and fur traders, and with emigrants who became more numerous after the suspicion of easy gold got abroad. West of Fort Benton, to Walla Walla, was the obvious route for a cut-off, to shorten the overland journey. Congress authorized in 1855 a road from the Falls of the Missouri to Fort Walla Walla, and John Mullan was placed in charge of its construction. It was passable by 1860, but few emigrants used it because of the rarity and uncertainty of the river connection at Fort Benton. It none the less attracted attention when the miners sought the upper affluents of the Missouri and Columbia.

Missoula County, Washington Territory, was organized in 1862 for the benefit of miners in the Bitter Root, and Boise County a few months later for the prospectors on the Boise branch of the

Hazard Stevens, The Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens by his Son (1900).

"Hiram M. Chittenden, History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River. Life and Adventures of Joseph La Barge (1903).