uts where dwelt individual men, each doing his own cooking
and washing; and outside these huts the uptorn earth--such were the
camps which dotted the trails of the stampedes across inhospitable
deserts and mountain ranges. Church and school were unknown. Law there
was none, for of organized society there was none. The women who lived
there were unworthy of the name of woman. The men strode about in
the loose dress of the camp, sometimes without waistcoat, sometimes
coatless, shod with heavy boots, always armed.

If we look for causes contributory to the history of the mining-camp, we
shall find one which ordinarily is overlooked--the invention of Colt's
revolving pistol. At the time of the Civil War, though this weapon was
not old, yet it had attained very general use throughout the frontier.
That was before the day of modern ammunition. The six-shooter of the
placer days was of the old cap-and-ball type, heavy, long-barreled, and
usually wooden-handled. It was the general ownership of these deadly
weapons which caused so much bloodshed in the camps. The revolver in
the hands of a tyro is not especially serviceable, but it attained great
deadliness in the hands of an expert user. Such a man, naturally of
quick nerve reflexes, skillful and accurate in the use of the
weapon through long practice, became a dangerous, and for a time an
unconquerable, antagonist.

It is a curious fact that the great Montana fields were doubly
discovered, in part by men coming east from California, and in part by
men passing west in search of new gold-fields. The first discovery of
gold in Montana was made on Gold Creek by a half-breed trapper named
Francois, better known as Be-net-see. 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not to have struck it very rich, and to have withdrawn to Fort Bridger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 Bridg