The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

[CHAPTER X]
FROM ARIZONA TO MONTANA

The Pike's Peak boom was only one in a series of mining episodes which, within fifteen years of the discoveries in California, let in the light of exploration and settlement upon hundreds of valleys scattered over the whole of the Rocky Mountain West. The men who exploited California had generally been amateur miners, acquiring skill by bitter experience; but the next decade developed a professional class, mobile as quicksilver, restless and adventurous as all the West, which permeated into the most remote recesses of the mountains and produced before the Civil War was over, as the direct result of their search for gold, not only Colorado, but Nevada and Arizona, Idaho and Montana. Activity was constant during these years all along the continental divide. New camps were being born overnight, old ones were abandoned by magic. Here and there cities rose and remained to mark success in the search. Abandoned huts and half-worked diggings were scars covering a fourth of the continent.

Colorado, in the summer of 1859, attracted the largest of migrations, but while Denver was being settled there began, farther west, a boom which for the present outdid it in significance. The old California trail from Salt Lake crossed the Nevada desert and entered California by various passes through the Sierra Nevadas. Several trading posts had been planted along this trail by Mormons and others during the fifties, until in 1854 the legislature of Utah had created a Carson County in the west end of the territory for the benefit of the settlements along the river of the same name. Small discoveries of gold were enough to draw to this district a floating population which founded a Carson City as early as 1858. But there were no indications of a great excitement until after the finding of a marvellously rich vein of silver near Gold Hill in the spring of 1859. Here, not far from Mt. Davidson and but a few miles east of Lake Tahoe and the Sierras, was the famous Comstock lode, upon which it was possible within five years to build a state.

The California population, already rushing about from one boom to another in perpetual prospecting, seized eagerly upon this new district in western Utah. The stage route by way of Sacramento and Placerville was crowded beyond capacity, while hundreds marched over the mountains on foot. "There was no difficulty in reaching the newly discovered region of boundless wealth," asserted a journalistic visitor. "It lay on the public highway to California, on the borders of the state. From Missouri, from Kansas and Nebraska, from Pike's Peak and Salt Lake, the tide of emigration poured in. Transportation from San Francisco was easy. I made the trip myself on foot almost in the dead of winter, when the mountains were covered with snow." Carson City had existed before the great discovery. Virginia City, named for a renegade southerner, nicknamed "Virginia," soon followed it, while the typical population of the mining camps piled in around the two.

In 1860 miners came in from a larger area. The new pony express ran through the heart of the fields and aided in advertising them east and west. Colorado was only one year ahead in the public eye. Both camps obtained their territorial acts within the same week, that of Nevada receiving Buchanan's signature on March 2, 1861. All of Utah west of the thirty-ninth meridian from Washington became the new territory which, through the need of the union for loyal votes, gained its admission as a state in three more years.

The Mining Camp

From a photograph of Bannack, Montana, in the sixties. Loaned by the Montana Historical Society.

The rush to Carson valley drew attention away from another mining enterprise further south. In the western half of New Mexico, between the Rio Grande and the Colorado, there had been successful mining ever since the acquisition of the territory. The southwest boundary of the United States after the Mexican War was defined in words that could not possibly be applied to the face of the earth. This fact, together with knowledge that an easy railway grade ran south of the Gila River, had led in 1853 to the purchase of additional land from Mexico and the definition of a better boundary in the Gadsden treaty. In these lands of the Gadsden purchase old mines came to light in the years immediately following. Sylvester Mowry and Charles D. Poston were most active in promoting the mining companies which revived abandoned claims and developed new ones near the old Spanish towns of Tubac and Tucson. The region was too remote and life too hard for the individual miner to have much chance. Organized mining companies here took the place of the detached prospector of Colorado and Nevada. Disappointed miners from California came in, and perhaps "the Vigilance Committee of San Francisco did more to populate the new Territory than the silver mines. Tucson became the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and crime.... It was literally a paradise of devils." Excessive dryness, long distances, and Apache depredation discouraged rapid growth, yet the surveys of the early fifties and the passage of the overland mail through the camps in 1858 advertised the Arizona settlement and enabled it to live.