The rich placer fields of Idaho and Montana, from which
enormous amounts were taken, offer typical examples of the mining
communities of the Rockies.
* See Stewart Edward White: "The Forty-Niners" ("Chronicles of
America").
We may never know how much history remains forever unwritten. Of
the beginnings of the Idaho camps there have trickled back into
record only brief, inconsequent, and partial stories. The miners
who surged this way and that all through the Sierras, the upper
Cascades, north into the Selkirks, and thence back again into the
Rockies were a turbulent mob. Having overrun all our mountain
ranges, following the earlier trails of the traders and trappers,
they now recoiled upon themselves and rolled back eastward to
meet the advancing civilization of the westbound rails, caring
nothing for history and less for the civilized society in which
they formerly had lived. This story of bedlam broken loose, of
men gone crazed, by the sudden subversion of all known values
and all standards of life, was at first something which had no
historian and can be recorded only by way of hearsay stories
which do not always tally as to the truth.
Pages:
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76