. Many of these are colossal pillars, surmounted by boulders
weighing many tons. The softer rock and gravel have washed down the
ravines, leaving these as monuments of the primal ages. The ravines
penetrate the mountain on every side, and little by little wear the
monster away. The beavers choose the prettiest nooks in them for their
villages, and the miner, finding the water cut off, often learns that in
a single night these busy architects have built a tight and closely
interwoven dam up the stream, which it takes him many hours to demolish.
Is it strange that, in speaking of the beaver dam, he should sometimes
transpose the words?

We ride down the pleasantest of the ravines, till it develops into the
Prickly Pear River, and past embryo cities,--at present noticeable for
nothing except their rivalry of each other,--and hurry on to Last Chance
Gulch and the city of Helena. A few emigrants from Minnesota had been
here for many months. They made no excitement, no parade, but steadily
worked on amid their majestic mountain scenery, and asked no heralding
of their wealth. On either side of their cabins grew tall pines straight
as arrows, and in front spread a vast fertile valley watered by clear
rivulets, marked here and there with the low cottages of the rancheros,
and dotted everywhere with innumerable herds of cattle. Beyond the
Missouri rose abruptly chains of snow-capped mountains, glistening in
the sunlight and veined with gold and silver. Reports of these men came
at times to Virginia,--reports always of a quiet and unostentatious
prosperity. In the winter of 1864 their secret became known, and half
the nomadic population of Virginia hurried to the new mines, and puzzled
the slow-moving Minnesotians by their bustle and activity. Claims
advanced rapidly in price, and the discoverers reaped fortunes. A city
rose like an exhalation. Yet I never saw better order than in the
earliest days of Helena, though I am afraid that Hangman's Tree could
tell some stories of too much haste and injustice in taking the lives of
criminals.

The hundred ravines near Helena showed gold, and every one of them was
soon claimed from mouth to source. Every night I heard the clattering
hoofs of the stampeders for some new gulch, starting in the utmost
secrecy to gain the first right for themselves and friends. A trifling
hint induces these stampedes. A wink from one old miner to another, and
hundreds mounted their horses to seek some inacc