"But they were as prompt in meting out retributive justice to the wrong-doer as in loosing their purse-strings to a worthy applicant, and many were the wayward souls jerked into eternity through the deadly and inexorable noose of the ubiquitous vigilante, whose will was law, and the objects of whose adverse edicts were soon plainly told to recite their last prayers in the body.
"Cattle-raising on the rich, nutritious bunch-grass of the broad valleys of the Territory also soon grew to be a very lucrative business, to supply the numerous placer-mining towns of Montana, a number of which were quite important and thrifty camps at that time. Farming was also followed to a limited extent. Inasmuch as potatoes, cabbage, and other vegetables were largely imported from Salt Lake, about five hundred miles, all sorts of soil products yielded handsome returns.
"Montana has had her periods of depression as well as of prosperity. For after her then-discovered and easily accessible placer ground became washed out, which took several years, times there grew very dull, but not until something like $200,000,000 worth of gold had been washed from her auriferous gulches and hillsides. Quartz mining was rare in those days, because freight and everything else was so high that few had the means to engage in that kind of mining. From a State of such prosperous activity in the sixties, with a large and well-to-do population, in 1874-75 it grew so dull and so many had left the Territory that those remaining wished they could get away too. In the Centennial year of 1876, however, Montana's true era of prosperity dawned, when rich silver quartz was discovered at the now famous city of Butte, styled 'the greatest mining camp on earth.' The Territory's business in every avenue soon rose from its low ebb to an affluent flood, all kinds and lines almost immediately feeling its vitalizing, stimulating influence. From an isolated mountain fastness it forthwith again became the theater of activity and thrift, and the stream of precious metals that it again poured into the world's commercial channels not long after required the capacity of a line of railroad to handle its vast volume. Chicago, New York, Boston, and other Eastern centers recognized Montana merchants as among their heaviest and best-paying customers, again demonstrating that mining for the precious metals is the great vanguard of a rapid and substantial civilization. The Utah & Northern was the pioneer railroad into her confines, but its business soon grew to such enormous proportions that the Northern Pacific followed in three or four years, and then Jim Hill swooped in with his Great Northern Road. So that that apparently isolated section has three transcontinentals now running east and west through her entire length, with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy on her eastern border, impatient to share her immense traffic, and the Butte, Boise & San Francisco soon to give her a direct outlet to San Francisco Bay.
SUNRISE IN CAMP.
"But to return to the early days of Montana, certainly one of the grandest and richest sections of the Union. It is in this State that the muddy Missouri River has its source, although in the mountainous part of its course its water is as clear as crystal. Here, also, the broad and majestic Columbia has its inception, the heads of these two noble streams bubbling up out of her lofty mountains quite close together. And it is a striking coincidence that the same section that sends these two noble streams down through fertile fields to the sea, bearing on their mighty bosoms the wealth and water supply of empires, should also possess the largest and richest deposits of the precious metals that the world has ever known. But such is the case. Speaking of precious metals recalls some of the 'stampedes' to newly discovered mining camps in early days. A 'stampede' is a panic reversed, usually instigated by the wild and rainbow-colored statements of over-enthusiastic persons, and often those statements had utterly no foundation in fact. Men would rise from their beds in the middle of the night, if thought necessary, and with insufficient food, clothing, or implements, afoot or horseback, climb dark mountains or cañons, swim floods, tramp over alkali plains, or submit to any and all kinds of hardships, all for the sake of being among the first on the ground of newly discovered 'diggins.' 'First come, first served,' was the rule, and each man was determined, as nearly as possible, to be first served. In the famous Sun River stampede, in the winter of 1866-67, with the mercury coquetting with the 30-degree-below-zero point, it was said men actually started out in their shirt sleeves to make a hundred-mile journey through the deep snow to the reputed new camp without food supplies to carry them through. And as it often proved in other cases, there wasn't a particle of truth in the reputed rich fields. Dame Rumor, that ever versatile and fertile-brained jade, had had an inning, and she batted hard, firing her hot balls of deception to all quarters of the field. In those days buffalo were plentiful on the plains of Eastern Montana. I think I have seen from twenty to fifty thousand in a single herd there. They blackened the hills and plains with their shaggy coats, they swarmed the rivers in their peregrinations, and raised clouds of dust like a simoon in their journeys across the country. I have seen hundreds of them in a group mired down in the quicksands along the Upper Missouri River. Hunters walked on their backs and shot the fattest of them as trophies of the chase, and the ever ubiquitous, keen-scented wolves came and gnawed their vitals while they were yet alive, but helpless, in their inextricable positions. At that time bands of stately elk also abounded there. Deer were plentiful, and the fleet-footed antelope bounded over every plain. Mountain sheep, whose tender meat was fat and juicy, climbed the terraced rocky cliffs in great numbers, while ducks, geese, pheasants, fool hens, and many other table fowl were to be had for a little effort on the part of the hunter. A fool hen is a species of bird weighing about two pounds, that is so foolish as to allow the gunner to lay aside his fire-arms and kill the whole flock with sticks and stones, so closely can it be approached without taking flight. Its meat is delicious.
"Many volumes could be written on Montana's early reminiscences, her vast resources, her brilliant past, and her glorious prospective future. But the brief space allotted me precludes the possibility of detailed mention of people, places, or things, and I reluctantly stop sharpening my pencil. Montana has been great in the past, but her future will be much grander and greater still."