Upon the trial of Donahue the jury failed to agree. He was remanded to prison, from which he afterwards escaped, fled to California, where he was rearrested, and released upon a writ of habeas corpus, by the strange decision that the provision of the Constitution of the United States requiring one State to deliver up a fugitive from justice to another claiming him, did not apply to Territories.
To certain of my readers, some explanation for detailing at such length the life of a ruffian and murderer may be necessary. Not so, however, to those familiar with mountain history. They will understand that both Patterson and Pinkham were noted and important members of frontier society, representative men, so to speak, of the classes to which they belonged. Their followers regarded them with a hero-worship which magnified their faults into virtues, and their acts into deeds of more than chivalric daring. Their pursuits, low, criminal, and degrading as they are esteemed in old settled communities, were among the leading occupations of life among the miners. Said one who had been for many years a resident of the Pacific slope, after spending a few weeks in the Atlantic States: “I can’t stand this society. It is too strict. I must return to the land where every gambler is called a gentleman, and where every woman, no matter what her character, is called a lady.”
CHAPTER XIII
EARLY DISCOVERIES OF GOLD
Gold was first discovered in what is now known as Montana by Francois Findlay, better known as Be-net-see, a French half-breed, in 1852. He had been one of the early miners in California, having gone there from his home in the Red River country soon after Marshall’s discovery. At this time, however, he was engaged in trapping for furs and trading with the Indians. While travelling along the border of Gold Creek he was induced by certain indications to search for gold, which he found in the gravelly bed of the stream.
Intelligence of this discovery was given to a party of miners who were on their return from California to the States in 1857, and they immediately resolved to visit the creek and spend a winter there in prospecting. James and Granville Stuart and Resin Anderson, since known as prominent citizens of Montana, were of this party, and I insert here as an interesting bit of early history the narrative which Granville Stuart has since furnished of the discovery then made by them:
“We accordingly wintered on the Big Hole River just above what is known as the Backbone, in company with Robert Dempsey, Jake Meeks, Robert Hereford, Thomas Adams, John W. Powell, John M. Jacobs, and a few others. In the Spring of 1858 we went over into the Hell Gate valley, and prospected a little on Benetsee’s or Gold Creek. We got gold everywhere, in some instances as high as ten cents to the pan, but, having nothing to eat save what our rifles furnished us, and no tools to work with (Salt Lake City, nearly six hundred miles distant, being the nearest point at which they could be obtained), and as the accursed Blackfeet Indians were continually stealing our horses, we soon quit prospecting in disgust without having found anything very rich, or done anything to enable us to form a reliable estimate of the richness of the mines.
“We then went out on the road near Fort Bridger, Utah Territory, where we remained until the Fall of 1860. In the Summer of that year a solitary individual named Henry Thomas, better known to the pioneers of Montana, however, as ‘Gold Tom’ or ‘Tom Gold Digger,’ who had been sluicing on the Pend d’Oreille River, came up to Gold Creek and commenced prospecting. He finally hewed out two or three small sluice boxes and commenced work on the creek up near the mountains. He made from one to two dollars a day in rather rough, coarse gold, some of the pieces weighing as high as two dollars.
“After spending a few weeks there, he concluded that he could find better diggings, and about the time that we returned to Deer Lodge (in 1860), he quit sluicing and went to prospecting all over the country. His favorite camping ground was about the Hot Springs, near where Helena now stands. He always maintained that that was a good mining region, saying that he had got better prospects there than on Gold Creek. He told me after ‘Last Chance,’ ‘Grizzly,’ ‘Oro Fino,’ and the other rich gulches of that vicinity had been struck, that he had prospected all about there, but it was not his luck to strike any of those big things.
“About the twenty-ninth of April, 1862, P. W. McAdow, who, in company with A. S. Blake and Dr. Atkinson (both citizens of Montana), had been prospecting with but limited success in a small ravine which empties into Pioneer Creek, moved up to Gold Creek and commenced prospecting about there. About the tenth of May they found diggings in what we afterwards called Pioneer Creek. They got as high as twenty cents to the pan, and immediately began to prepare for extensive operations. At this time ‘Tom Gold Digger’ was prospecting on Cottonwood Creek, a short distance above where the flourishing burgh of Deer Lodge City now stands, but finding nothing satisfactory, he soon moved down and opened a claim above those of McAdow & Co. In the meantime we had set twelve joints of 12 × 14 sluices, this being the first string of regular sluices ever set in the Rocky Mountains north of Colorado.
