When looking at those two great locomotives I could not avoid thinking of the contrast between them and the two Mexican mules, and of the motive power on the old trail, and the motive power on the new. The little mules were thirteen hands high and drew one thousand pounds; each of the big locomotives is fifteen feet, or forty-five hands, high, and draws six hundred and seventy tons. It is to me like a dream to think of the great changes that have taken place since that time.
Then Helena was but a mining camp, consisting of but a few log cabins. There is where I helped to run a drain ditch, commencing at Discovery Claim, near where now stands the Montana Club building. We reached bed rock in the upper end of the city. Among the gravel in this drain ditch, about forty-five feet from the surface and near where the Helena fire department building is, a mastodon tooth was found; it was a grinder, three inches on top, six inches deep and eight inches lengthwise; it was as perfect as it was when it came from the monster’s mouth, when this northern country was a tropical region. In another claim a tusk was found like that of an elephant. Many other remains of animals have been found in mines and rock formations in the Rockies, showing that the Rocky mountain region has, at one time, been the home of animals that are not now in existence, at least not in the western hemisphere. It is estimated that thirty millions of dollars have been taken out of Last Chance gulch and its tributaries, and most of it from where the streets of Helena now are.
From Painting by C. M. Russell.
A PRAIRIE SCHOONER CROSSING THE PLAINS.
Miners’ wages were then ten dollars per day; common laborers seven dollars. During the winter of 1865 eatables of all kinds were very dear, except meat, for game was plentiful; flour sold for one hundred and twenty-five dollars per one hundred pounds. “Then” my friend Charley Cannon was an humble baker, and was selling dried apple pies that were not sweetened, with crusts as thin as a wafer, for one dollar a piece. “Now” he is an honored and respected citizen and one of the wealthiest men in the state. “Now” Helena is a city of twelve thousand inhabitants and the capital of the state. The capitol building is in course of construction, and, when completed, will be one of the finest in the West. Where the log cabins stood, handsome business blocks and pleasant homes are everywhere visible.
Besides the Montana Central, which runs north and south and through Helena, the transcontinental line of the Northern Pacific connects the Atlantic and Pacific by extending east and west. Their freight and passenger depots are located on the old mining claims, where husky miners, in their overalls and flannel shirts, swung the picks and tossed the shovels with their brawny arms and contributed thousands of dollars to the world’s treasury. Today railroad conductors and other officials are skipping over the same ground in broad cloth, with pen and pencil behind ears that are braced up by high collars attached to boiled shirts.
And so it goes—the miner, the mechanic, the herdsman and plowman, the conductor, the railroad official and the man with the pencil, yes, the tie ballaster and the newsboy, all are linked in the endless chain of Western progress. And now a commerce is created which brings a revenue to our government amounting to millions of dollars annually, besides many millions more to the laborers and those who furnished the money to carry on these industries and enterprises that are continually developing and adding to the wealth of the nation.
Thus the wheel of progress has moved forward with tremendous speed since my first arrival in Helena in 1864 with the man who had the two “Jerusalem ponies.”