Tuesday, May 26, 1863Alder Gulch
Evening, almost dusk, in an untrammeled gulch in the Beaverhead country.
Let's go see if we can find enough to buy a bit of tobacco, he suggests to Henry Edgar.
Fairweather shovels dirt into a pan. While Edgar takes it to the creek to wash it, Fairweather scratches around in the bedrock with his butcher knife.
"I've found a scad!" he calls. "If you have one I have a thousand," Edgar replies.
The discovery, at a place Edgar christens Alder Gulch, turns into the richest gold diggings in the Rocky Mountains - $30 million worth in the first three years alone. It isn't the first strike in what's now Montana. But more than any other, it will spur the settlement of what exactly one year later will become Montana Territory.
Prickly Pear country
Fourteen miners are digging a deep ditch near present-day Helena, from which they hope to excavate rich deposits of ore. They've gotten some prospects down to 18 feet underground, where a layer of gravel point is yielding 45 cents to the pan.
The enterprise won't
pan out and the ditch, more than a mile long, will be abandoned. But a year and change later, in the same neighborhood, the Four Georgians will strike a rich vein, precipitating another major rush to the famous Last Chance Gulch.
Gold Creek
On the same evening Fairweather and Edgar are making their fateful discovery 90 miles due south, Van Court is preparing to spend the night at Granville Stuart's roadside cabin in the Deer Lodge valley. Court is on his way back to the Prickly Pear diggings and tells Stuart of the activities there.
There's heavy traffic on the three-year-old Mullan Road, and Stuart keeps track of the comings and goings. A priest's wagon hauling a sick man rolls through during the day, bound for St. Ignatius from the new St. Peter's Mission on Sun River. The unnamed father looks at Stuart's left hand, which is swollen and painful after he'd burned three warts from it with nitric acid four days earlier. Blood poisoning, the priest judges.
Stuart had treated the wound with Merchants Gargling Oil, "a liniment good for man and beast," which he'd obtained at the Worden & Co. store in Gold Creek.
"Had it not been for the oil I suppose I would have died," he writes in his journal.
Bannack
Two days after he was elected sheriff, Henry Plummer is either on his way or preparing to leave for the Sun River Crossing, where he will marry Electa Bryan on June 20. For unknown reasons, his wife will leave for home in Iowa a few months later. Plummer will be hanged in Bannack by vigilantes the following January.
Vicksburg, Miss.
Union forces begin digging approaches to enemy breastworks as a five-week siege of the key Confederate fortress on the Mississippi River begins.
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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