This was in 1852, but the news seems to have lain dormant for a
time--naturally enough, for there was small ingress or egress for
that wild and unknown country. In 1857, however, a party of
miners who had wandered down the Big Hole River on their way back
east from California decided to look into the Gold Creek
discovery, of which they had heard. This party was led by James
and Granville Stuart, and among others in the party were Jake
Meeks, Robert Hereford, Robert Dempsey, John W. Powell, John M.
Jacobs, Thomas Adams, and some others. These men did some work on
Gold Creek in 1858, but seem not to have struck it very rich, and
to have withdrawn to Fort Bridger in Utah until the autumn of
1860. Then a prospector by the name of Tom Golddigger turned up
at Bridger with additional stories of creeks to the north, so
that there was a gradual straggling back toward Gold Creek and
other gulches. This prospector had been all over the Alder Gulch,
which was ere long to prove fabulously rich.

It was not, however, until 1863 that the Montana camps sprang
into fame. It was not Gold Creek or Alder Gulch, but Florence and
other Idaho camps, that, in the summer and autumn of 1862,
brought into the mountains no less than five parties of
gold-seekers, who remained in Montana because they could not
penetrate the mountain barrier which lay between them and the
Salmon River camps in Idaho.

The first of these parties arrived at Gold Creek by wagon-train
from Fort Benton and the second hailed from Salt Lake. An
election was held for the purpose of forming a sort of community
organization, the first election ever known in Montana. The men
from the East had brought with them some idea of law and