ng between
the plains and California, which were swiftly prospected by men who had
now learned well the prospector's trade. The gold-hunters lapped back on
their own trails, and, no longer content with California, began to
prospect lower Oregon, upper Idaho, and Western Montana. Walla Walla was
a supply point for a time. Florence was a great mountain market, and
Lewiston. One district after another sprang into prominence, to fade
away after a year or two of feverish life. The placers near Bannack
caught a wild set of men, who surged back from California. Oro Fino was
a temporary capital; then the fabulously rich placer which made Alder
Gulch one of the quickly perished but still unforgotten diggings.

The flat valley of this latter gulch housed several "towns," but was
really for a dozen miles a continuous string of miners' cabins. The city
of Helena is built on the tailings of these placer washings, and its
streets are literally paved with gold even to-day. Here in 1863, while
the great conflict between North and South was raging, a great community
of wild men, not organized into anything fit to be called society,
divided and fought bitterly for control of the apparently exhaustless
wealth which came pouring from the virgin mines. These clashing
factions repeated, in intensified form, the history of California. They
were even more utterly cut off from all the world. Letters and papers
from the states had to reach the mountains by way of California, via the
Horn or the Isthmus. Touch with the older civilization was utterly lost;
of law there was none.

Upon the social horizon now appeared the sinister figure of the trained
desperado, the professional bad man. The business of outlawry was turned
into a profession, one highly organized, relatively safe and extremely
lucrative. There was wealth to be had for the asking or the taking. Each
miner had his buckskin purse filled with native gold. This dust was like
all other dust. It could not be traced nor identified; and the old
saying, "'Twas mine, 'tis his," might here of all places in the world
most easily become true. Checks, drafts, currency as we know it now, all
the means by which civilized men keep record of their property
transactions, were unknown. The gold-scales established the only
currency, and each man was his own banker, obliged to be his own peace
officer, and the defender of his own property.

Now our desperado appeared, the man who had killed his man, or,