Hundreds of tents, brush wickiups, log cabins, even houses of stone quarried from the hills were springing up daily in the windings of Alder Gulch and Daylight Gulch, in the hollows of the hills and along the ramblings of Alder Creek and the Stinking Water. Soon over a stretch of fifteen miles a cluster of towns had assumed the importance of names--Junction, Adobetown, Nevada, Virginia City. Pine Grove, Highland, Summit. In a few weeks the population numbered into the thousands. Every foot of earth in the gulches was being turned upside down. Rough-clad men with long hair and flowing beards swarmed everywhere. Some were digging for bedrock, others were bunt over barrow loads of the pay dirt, which they were wheeling to the sluice boxes, and into these boxes yet others were shoveling the dirt. Up and down the narrow streets labored bull trains of sixteen- and twenty-horse teams pulling three and four wagons lashed together, and long strings of packhorses, mules or donkeys. Loafers lolled at the doors or slouched in and out of saloons and hurdy-gurdy houses too numerous to mention. Frequently the sounds of brawling, insults, oaths echoed through the gulch. When my stepmother sent me down the street on errands she often said, "Now run, Mollie, but don't be afraid." I was never spoken to in any but a kindly way by those men.

Our surroundings I took quite for granted as the way of all places in which little girls lived. Nevada, Central City, Denver and Virginia City were much alike. Here, as in those other towns, was a certain class of women whom I heard called "fancy ladies" because of their gaudy dress, so different from that of the ladies who were our friends. They were always to be seen either walking up and down or clattering along on horseback or in hacks. Sometimes one was glimpsed through a window lounging in a dressing gown and puffing on a cigarette. They were so in evidence that I felt no curiosity about them. I knew that they were not "good women," but I did not analyze why.

After a while I made the acquaintance of Carrie Crane, Lizzie Keaton and some other little girls, not many though, for few were in Virginia City as long as I lived there. We spent our leisure playing in the back streets or learning the haunts and names of the wild flowers and their times for blossoming.

There were tall buttercups and blue flags in the valley. Up Alder Gulch snow and timber lilies bloomed, wild roses and syringa grew in sweet profusion and flowering currant bushes invited canaries to alight and twitter. There were great patches of moss-flowers with a scent and blossom like sweet-william. And such forget-me-nots – larger and bluer and glossier than any others I have ever seen. On the tumbled hills among and over which the town straggled the primroses made pink splotches in early spring; there the yellowbells nodded and the bitterroots unfolded close to the ground their perplexity of rose petals. In watered draws among the hills blue, yellow and white violets bloomed; in secret places, so we thought, by the creek in Daylight Gulch was a patch of white violets tinted with pink. Wild gooseberries were to be gathered in the Gulch and service berries and choke cherries on its steep sides. Robins, meadowlarks, bluebirds, blackbirds, beautiful as flowers and tantalizingly elusive, and camp-robbers, bluejays, crows and magpies lured us from where men were ravishing the gulch.

A walk that was never denied us because it branched away from the diggings, led up Daylight Gulch to a spruce grove called Gum Patch, in a wooded canyon. We learned to distinguish the fir and nut pine and juniper and the dwarf cedar with blue berries. Stripped badgers were everywhere among the hills, and so were their holes, which menaced a horse’s way. Gophers amused as, whistling, flipping their tails and whisking down their holes. It was fun to startle the cottontails and to watch them dart into the underbrush, or to climb up the mountainside and make the rockchucks scurry away along the sunny walls. Sometimes a deer flashed a white signal of danger as we glimpsed it leaping to cover. On rare occasions we were permitted to go so far out on the benchland that we saw or thought we saw antelope in the distance – sometimes, possibly, a lone buffalo or a wraith of Indian smoke signal. Under the blue, blue sky in the clear air of that high valley, nearly seven thousand feet above sea level, we could see a hundred miles.

My family lived In a big log cabin on Wallace Street, the main thoroughfare running up Daylight Gulch. Because my father was a freighter the Sheehans were well provisioned and always set as good a table as was possible in a remote mining town. My stepmother's and Ellen's dried apple pies and dried peach pies were rare delicacies, much in demand, and so it came about that we began to take boarders. Among them were the discovery men," as Bill Fair-weather, Henry Edgar, Barney Orr and others were called. Among the men who dropped in now and again to a meal was our companion on the journey to Montana, Jack Gallagher. To us he was always courteous and soft-spoken, and yet within the year we came to know that he was one of the most hardened of all the road agents. Another of this gang who came often enough so that I remember him distinctly was George Ives. Childlike, my attention was directed to him because of the long blue soldier's overcoat which he wore. From admiring that I went on to notice that he stood head and shoulders above most of the men who gathered around our table, that unlike the others he was smooth-shaven. and that he was blonde and handsome. Henry Plummer was only a name to me, but after his execution I heard him discussed at home – when he had last come to Virginia City, how picturesque he was In appearance, how gentle in manner. Long before the Vigilantes organized, my father evidently made his own conclusions about the character of some of the patrons Of our boardinghouse, for he soon closed the doors of our cabin to the public and moved the family Into a little two-room cabin off the main street.

Grasping desperately and by any means for gold, brawling, robbing, shooting and hanging were not all of life In this mining camp. Into our midst came the man of God. He was indeed that, Father Joseph Giorda, S.J., the sweet-faced Italian gentleman whom I came to know so well in later years. He had made the long drive from St. Peter's Mission and had to leave in two days. When he asked where he might say Mass, two young Irishmen, Peter Ronan and John Caplice, placer-mining in partnership, offered a cabin they were having built. Miners from neighboring claims helped to level the floor and to put the cabin in shape for Mass the next morning. My stepmother was asked to dress the improvised altar. She and I covered the roughhewn boards with sheets and arranged the candles. The first Mass in Virginia City was held on the Feast of All Saints, November 1, l863. It was a simple, reverent congregation that knelt on the dirt floor within the four walls of newhewn logs. By far the majority were bearded miners in worn working clothes. Many received the Holy Eucharist.

I was distracted from contemplating things spiritual to those human by the tinkling sound in large tin cups that were being passed from one man to another. I saw each pour a trickle of gold dust from his buckskin pouch. Then the dust was poured from all the cups into a new yellow buckskin purse and laid upon the altar by Peter Ronan, whom the miners had chosen to make the presentation to the priest.

When Father Giordo went to the stable where he had left his team and asked for his bill, he was told that it was forty dollars for the two days. He turned to Mr. Ronan saying that he had not enough money to pay so excessive a price. Mr. Ronan inquired if he knew how much he had in the yellow purse. Unworldly and unconcerned with money, Father Giordo had not thought of weighing its contents. Together, he and Mr. Ronan did so and found that the purse contained several hundred dollars in gold dust.

Almost every morning the miners cleaned their sluice boxes with a tin contrivance called a scraper, but much fine gold was left in the cracks of the boxes and around the edges. After the miners had gone into their cabins for supper, a little friend and I would take our blowers and hair brushes, which we kept for the purpose, and gather up the fine gold. We took it home, dried it in the oven and blew the black sand from it. Sometimes our gold dust weighed to the amount of a dollar or more. It was the only kind of money I ever saw in Virginia City. I kept my dust in a small gutta-percha inkwell, which had traveled with us from Denver, and carried it when I went to the store to buy rock candy. My friend and I thought that this sweet was kept especially for little girl shoppers--the phrase rock and rye was familiar to us but not meaningful. Sometimes the storekeeper had stick candy, candy beans, or ginger snaps. Twenty-five cents was the least that was ever accepted across the counter. Once I bought my father a present of a shirt, which cost $2.50 in gold dust.

A man would have entered another's sluice-box at the risk of being shot on sight. but it amused the miners to have us little girls clean up after them. One never-to-be-forgotten evening I busied myself about the property of Peter Ronan. I was wearing my new shaker. a straw poke bonnet. trimmed in pink chambray. which my stepmother had just made. I laid it on a cross-piece of a box while I stooped to brush and blow. Mr. Ronan, not noticing me, lifted a gate above and let muddy water run through his boxes. It splashed on the adored pink chambray "valance." Many times afterward I heard Mr. Ronan tell in his inimitable way how the angry little girl suddenly stood straight, then scrambled from the sluicebox, crying out, "I'll never, never, never again. Mister, take gold from your sluicebox." His dark eyes flashed and he laughed gaily as he apologized and begged me to reconsider. This is my first memory of Peter Ronan.

My father objected to my going about where men would speak to me. He did not approve of the expeditions to the sluiceboxes and finally forbade them. From some of my Alder Gulch gold a jeweler later, in Last Chance Gulch, wrought me a ring, which I was later to give to Mr. Ronan.

On Christmas Day, 1863, the first marriage in Virginia City was that of Ellen Sheehan, seventeen years of age, and William Tiernan, who owned what was called "the upper discovery claim." Bill was black-bearded. tall. rangy, the type familiar in Wild West romances. Ellen was small and as trim as a brown wren. Henry Edgar was the best man. My father disapproved of the carriage without an officiating priest. Ellen and Bill went to live in a cabin up the Gulch at the discovery claim. Ellen took the discovery men to board and kept the toll gate for the road leading farther up the narrow gulch. She also became in a certain sense a banker. Miners who had no safe place to keep their gold dust and nuggets left their buckskin purses with her for days at a time. She would hide them in her mattress. She has often told how lumpy her bed would get as the bank deposits grew and how doubly relieved she was when the savings accounts were drawn out and sent by stagecoach to Salt Lake City.

First one person and then another would start a school in Virginia City. Professor Thomas J. Dimsdale (every man who taught school was a professor) I remember most distinctly. He was an Englishman, small, delicate-looking and gentle. It seemed to me that he knew everything and I liked him. In his school all was harmonious and pleasant. While his few pupils buzzed and whispered over their readers, arithmetics and copybooks, the professor sat at a makeshift desk near the little window of the log schoolhouse writing, writing during the intervals between recitations and at recess, always writing. When, during 1864, his Vigilantes of Montana was being published in the Morning Post I thought it must have been the composition of those articles which had so engrossed him. Lettie Sloss is the only other teacher of this period whose name I recall.

Coming from school one winter day, January 14, 1864, I cut across the bottom of the gulch, climbed the steep hill and passed close behind a large cabin which was being built. People were gathered in front on Wallace Street. The air was charged with excitement. I looked. The bodies of five men with ropes around their necks hung limp from a roof beam. I trembled so that I could scarcely run toward home. The realization flashed on me that two forms were familiar--one was Jack Gallagher, the other was Club-Foot George.

One frosty morning a few weeks later when I opened the back door of our cabin I saw In the gulch below a crowd of men gathered around a scaffold. High above other men and directly beneath the scaffold stood a young man with a rope around his neck. He shook hands with several of the men, then pulled a black cap over his face. I knew the portent. I slammed the door and rushed into the house. but I could not shut out from my memory, then or ever, that awful creaking sound of the hangman's rope.

One day when my stepmother sent me to the meat market with the usual Injunction, "Now run, Mollie, and don't be afraid." I was alarmed by a clatter past me of horse's hoofs and the crack of pistol shots. A man galloping his horse recklessly down the street was firing a six-shooter in the air and whooping wildly. Suddenly he reared his horse back on its haunches, turned it sharply and forced It through the swinging door of a saloon. I sidled into the first open doorway that I dared enter. "That's Slade," said the storekeeper, "one of his sprees, shootin' up the town, scarin' women and children. That smart alec orter be strung up." He led me out the back door and warned me to run home quickly and stay in the house out of range of stray bullets. "He'll git his needin's yit," he threatened.

A day In early spring not long after this Incident we children were delayed at school because of a milling crowd of men In Daylight Gulch, directly across the homeward path of most of us, around a corral called "The Elephant's Pen." Many of the men were armed. From the steep hillside path I looked down Into their midst. I recognized Slade, dressed in fringed buckskin, hatless, with a man on either side of him, who forced him to walk under the corral gate. His arms were pinioned, the elbows were bent so as to bring his hands up to his breast. He kept moving his hands back and forth, palms upward, and opening and closing them as he cried, "For God's sake, let me see my dear, beloved wife!" I distinctly heard him say this three times in a piercing, anguished voice.

The stir among the men Increased; voices rose louder, gesturing arms pointed to the long winding road down the hill from the east. Down that long hill-road a woman was racing on horseback. Someone shouted, "There she comes!" A man in a black hat standing beside Slade made an abrupt, vigorous movement. I turned and sought the refuge of home. Soon excited neighbors came in to say that the woman galloping so swiftly down the hill was, Indeed, Mrs. Slade, on her Kentucky thoroughbred. Billy Boy, that when she was recognized the men of the Vigilance Committee made haste to do their dreadful duty for fear her presence would arouse so much sympathy among bystanders that the hanging would be stayed. They dealt grimly upon the details of how the man in the black hat had hastily adjusted the rope, had kicked the box from under Slade so that he swung with a broken neck from the cross piece atop the corral gate.

Many good citizens, among them my own people, criticized this sort of summary vengeance, because Slade had actually committed no crime In Montana. All admitted that he was a braggart and a brawler and had risked manslaughter on many a rowdy spree when he put on a show by shooting up the town. When he was sober he was said to be a good workman and a likable fellow. Slade's body was taken from the scaffold, used ordinarily for hanging beeves, and delivered to his wife in the old Virginia Hotel.

My heart ached for Mrs. Slade. I slipped away from home, determined to go and tell her how sorry I was for her. I found her sobbing and moaning, bowed over a stark form shrouded in a blanket. I stood beside her for a moment, trembling and choking, then I slipped away unnoticed. So I have always thought.

Though he was on the road so much, freighting to and from Salt Lake City or Fort Benton, my father was never robbed by the road agents. He hired a man to drive one wagon; the other he always drove himself. His gold he always carried in buckskin bags attached to a belt which he wore under his clothing. We lived through days and nights of anguished uncertainty whenever he went on his lonely expeditions for supplies. One time we were even more desperately anxious than usual, in the fall of 1863 when the reign of terror of the road agents was at its height and my father had so much gold dust to carry out of Virginia City that it was too heavy to conceal in his accustomed way. He was warned that the road agents had him spotted, but, if his business was to continue to operate, he had to make the trip. He decided to try a ruse. He put the buckskin purses into the old carpetbag in which he carried his clothes, tossed it into the bottom of the wagon and on it threw his bedding and camping equipment. He hired a driver for this wagon and sent him on with instructions where he was to camp, telling him that he would overtake him later. The driver went, unsuspecting that he carried the treasure. Late at night my father sped away on horseback, alone, armed, and determined to dispute his rights. He overtook his driver without being challenged. Later, he learned through the confessions of Dutch John, I think, to Neil Howie, my father's friend, that he had not outwitted the highwaymen, that he had been allowed to pass on safely through the good grace of George Ives, who demanded of the others that this should be because "Jim Sheehan's nice wife and two little girls living in the gulch."

In the spring of 1864 when the work of the Vigilantes had been accomplished, life became quieter, happier, more orderly and ordinary. My schoolmates and I could roam the hills, gullies and benchlands freer and farther. Boardinghouse and hotel keepers began to offer us twenty-five cents In gold dust for a big bouquet of wild flowers with which to deck their tables, most of which were laid with red-checked cloths, half-Inch thick earthenware or tin cups and plates and cheap, strangely assorted knives, forks and spoons.

Naturally, no fresh vegetables were to be had during that first spring. We girls knew that lamb's-quarters, as we called goosefoots, were edible, when young and tender a more tasty potherb than spinach. Lamb's-quarters grew riotously in the ground turned by the miners the previous summer and fall. From gathering these for the table at home we extended our activity to selling them at $1.50 in gold dust for a gallon bucket crammed full. My career as marketer of fresh flowers and greens lasted only until my father learned what I was doing. Indignantly he put a stop to it, saying that he would not have a daughter of his running about the streets and into hotels and public places. My gentle stepmother never questioned my flitting about as free as a bird.

Excitement ran high when in the summer of 1864 Cornelius and David 0'Keefe arrived in Virginia City from "over Hell Gate way" with a wagon-load of potatoes. I rushed home with the news of their precious cargo and my stepmother went in great haste to be in time to purchase some of the potatoes. As a result of the purchase she made the acquaintance of the gentle, witty, rollicking Cornelius 0'Keefe, afterwards given the soubriquet of "Baron" by General Thomas Francis Meagher for the magnificence of his manner of dispensing the simplest hospitality. My stepmother introduced him to Hannah Lester, whom he married.

On one of my father’s sojourns at home he moved the family from the little cabin off Wallace Street, whose location probably accounts for my being a witness to the terrible scenes of the Vigilante days, to a frame house on the hillside away from the main thoroughfare. In the one room used for storage of supplies were many bags of flour, most of it freighted by my father to Last Chance Gulch and sold at a hundred dollars for a hundred-pound sack.

My poor, dear father, himself so honest, so trusting that he was always being Imposed upon and losing money on his investments, must have been lucky rather than shrewd In getting Out of Alder Gulch with the flour before It was confiscated. The citizens rose in wrath at the price of flour and threatened to raid those who were hoarding. A committee was formed to search all known sources of supply and to secure an equitable distribution. My stepmother emptied a barrel of beans, half filled it with flour and put the beans on top. When the investigating committee searched our house they found only the amount of flour agreed upon for each family.

Near neighbors of ours while we were living on Wallace Street were Granville Stuart and his Indian wife. They had a baby that the mother used to put in a hammock made In Indian fashion with a blanket folded over suspended ropes. I liked to swing the baby and so was a frequent visitor. One day the Incongruity of the situation struck me, young as I was. Mr. Stuart, handsome, looking the scholar and the aristocrat, sat at a combination desk and bookcase writing. The Indian wife in moccaslned feet was padding about doing her simplified housekeeping. Impulsively I stepped close to his chair and said, 'Mr. Stuart. Why did you marry an Indian woman?" He turned, smiled, put his hand on my shoulder and said sweetly. "You see, Mollie, I'm such an old fellow – if I married a white woman she might be quarreling with me."

The W.F. Sanders family were also our friends. Mrs. Sanders lived in a small frame house, whitewashed. with green shutters on the windows. I thought it was beautiful. It was cozier than any other house I had entered since we had left the cousins in Missouri. Mrs. Sanders had a board floor in her house and pieces of furniture and bits of carpet that she had brought "from the States." She once told me she had sold almost all of her Brussels carpet in two- and three-yard strips to saloon keepers who had besieged her for it.

We also had some Jewish neighbors named Goldberg. Once they concluded their celebration of the Feast of the Passover by serving supper at sundown to all the Jewish people in Virginia City. Mrs. Goldberg asked me to help her serve her guests. When I was going home she gave me a generous basket, with the good things she had prepared, to take home to the family.

My stepmother took Kate and I with her to spend a day with a friend named Mrs. McGrath, who lived a mile down the gulch in Nevada City. Her home was next door to her husband's place of business, no doubt a saloon, for it was referred to as "the place." While the ladies chatted we children went to play in the back yard. Beyond the high board fence which shut off "the place" from the residence we heard shouts, cheers, murmurs, thuds, grunts, and heavy breathing--a melee of sounds. We found a broken board, pried the crack wider and peeked through. Two men, all but stripped, on a platform circled round with a rope, were pommeling each other furiously, brutally. Crowds of men surged about in seething excitement. We were glimpsing one of the historic fights between Con Orem and Hugh O'Neil.

On St. Patrick's Day, whether in 1864 or 1865 I cannot be certain, my parents took me to a dance. Candles in sconces stuck into the log walls of the cabin flickered Softly over the festivity, leaving more shadowy than lighted places. Out of the dimness of memory emerge two forms: a fiddler at one end of the crowded cabin, sitting with knees crossed, tapping one foot on the floor, swinging the other, nodding, swaying, now rising, gyrating, bending, bowing, always tap, tap, tapping with one foot to accentuate the rhythm of the quadrille, reel, varsovienne, Schottische, polka, minuet, waltz, jig or whatever his rapid bow and nimble fingers were tearing or picking from the fiddle strings. Wreathing gracefully through every dance with first one and another shadowy partner was a slender, beautiful, interesting woman in a tight-waisted, furbelowed, black dress. Her black hair was smoothed back from her eager face and coiled softly low on her neck. A bit of a spray broken from a cedar branch was tucked under the coil at one side and laid against the glossy black hair just above one delicate ear. She was Mrs. Lyons. That is all I have ever known of her. Though I was twelve years old, or scarcely that, men sought me for dances because women and girls were so few. While this flattered me, it made me more uncomfortable than happy, for I felt very young and very, very shy. I enjoyed sitting quietly and watching Mrs. Lyons.

News, only a little belated, of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln came In by pony express. The girls who were my friends and playmates were all the children of Southern parents . . . . It pains me now to recall what we did when we were told of Lincoln's death. It was noon and we were in the schoolhouse eating our lunches. The Southern girls, by far the majority. picked up their ankle-length skirts to their knees and jigged and hippety-hopped around and around the room cheering for the downfall of the great. good, simple man whom they had been taught to regard as the arch enemy of the South and the first and last cause of every misfortune which had befallen their parents. He had driven them to seek fortune anew amid the difficulties and hardships of a far western frontier. When my playmates called, "Come on, Mollie, join the dance; you're from Kentucky' you're a Southerner," I did join, half-heartedly, with a guilty feeling. At home that evening I told what we had done. My father was shocked. "I am ashamed of you. Mollie," he said, "I am a Democrat, but I am first, last and always for the Union and for Lincoln."

The last recollection I have of Virginia City is of a day atingle with motion, color and music. People thronged the streets in wagons or on horseback or jostled each other on the board walks and footpaths to view the proud parade of July 4, 1865. There I was, proudly riding with thirty-six other little white-clad girls in a triumphal float, a dead-ax wagon bedecked with evergreens and bunting and drawn by eight mules. The tallest and fairest of us, her long blonde hair flowing over her shoulders, dressed in the still-approved Grecian tunic corded in at the waist, stood in the center – Columbia! Sitting in groups at her feet were we, the States of the Union, forming, so the Montana Post stated, "the prettiest tableau vivant we have ever seen In a procession." On a blue scarf crossing the left shoulder and tied under the right arm was lettered the name of the state each of us represented. And therein, for me, was one of the two drops of bitter in the ointment: my scarf flashed the name, Missouri. I thought it essential to an adequate celebration of Virginia City's first Fourth of July that I should represent Kentucky, the state of my birth. The other bitter drop was the worry that my hair, which I had worn done up for a night in the sufferance of rags, was too kinky and bushy.

Then. again. we were on the road with all our household possessions loaded in the wagons, trekking the hundred and twenty-five miles to a new home In Last Chance Gulch.