rmission to use in this chapter material from the
author's "The Story of the Cowboy," acknowledgment is made to D.
Appleton & Co.

Chapter V. The Mines

If the influence of the cattle industry was paramount in the development
of the frontier region found by the first railways, it should not be
concluded that this upthrust of the southern cattle constituted the
only contribution to the West of that day. There were indeed earlier
influences, the chief of which was the advent of the wild population of
the placer mines. The riches of the gold-fields hastened the building of
the first transcontinental railroads and the men of the mines set their
mark also indelibly upon the range.

It is no part of our business here to follow the great discoveries of
1849 in California. * Neither shall we chronicle the once-famous rushes
from California north into the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia;
neither is it necessary to mention in much detail the great camps of
Nevada; nor yet the short-lived stampede of 1859 to the Pike's Peak
country in Colorado. 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.

The mad treasure-hunters of the California mines, restless,
insubordinate, incapable of restraint, possessed of the belief that
there might be gold elsewhere than in California, and having heard
reports of strikes to the nort