The Vigilantes of Montana:
1864 Revisited

The Montana Mining Camps 1862-64

In 1862 there were only a handful of white men, and almost no white women or children in the area which is now the State of Montana, but that changed dramatically after John White discovered a rich placer deposit on Grasshopper Creek, a tributary of the Beaverhead River. It was on July 28, 1862, that he panned the first pay dirt that was to bring the flood of gold seekers to the area.

There was some placer mining on Gold Creek near Hell Gate (the present city of Missoula), where the Stuart brothers, James and Granville had been panning gold earlier in 1862. M.H. Lott and party had discovered gold in the Big Hole River drainage, just over the hill from Grasshopper, on July 10th, on Pioneer (Ruby) Creek. John White and his party were actually looking for Lott when he stopped to pan dirt on Grasshopper.

By 1862 the rich placer deposits of California had played out, and the pickings in Colorado were also pretty slim by then. So miners were moving from both areas to new fields in British Columbia and North Idaho. Many of the miners who flocked to the "Beaverhead Diggings" were from either Colorado or from "over the mountains."

An original account of a trip to the mines is given in Perilous Passage, A Narrative of the Montana Gold Rush, 1862-1863, edited by Kenneth N. Owens. The map of Edwin Purple's travels shows the relation of principle locations of the gold rush time.