development of the frontier region found by the first railways,
it should not be concluded that this upthrust of the southern
cattle constituted the only contribution to the West of that day.
There were indeed earlier influences, the chief of which was the
advent of the wild population of the placer mines. The riches of
the gold-fields hastened the building of the first
transcontinental railroads and the men of the mines set their
mark also indelibly upon the range.

It is no part of our business here to follow the great
discoveries of 1849 in California.* Neither shall we chronicle
the once-famous rushes from California north into the Fraser
River Valley of British Columbia; neither is it necessary to
mention in much detail the great camps of Nevada; nor yet the
short-lived stampede of 1859 to the Pike's Peak country in
Colorado. The rich placer fields of Idaho and Montana, from which
enormous amounts were taken, offer typical examples of the mining
communities of the Rockies.

* See Stewart Edward White: "The Forty-Niners" ("Chronicles of
America").


We may never know how much history remains forever unwritten. Of
the beginnings of the Idaho camps there have trickled back into
record only brief, inconsequent, and partial stories. The miners
who surged this way and that all through the Sierras, the upper
Cascades, north into the Selkirks, and thence back again into the
Rockies were a turbulent mob. Having overrun all our mountain
ranges, following the earlier trails of the traders and trappers,