essible mountain
fissure. The more remote the diggings, so much the greater the
excitement. Half the people of Helena lately hurried, in the depth of
winter, to diggings on Sun River, (where many and many a brave fellow
perished in the snows,) to learn that far richer mines had lain
unclaimed for months within a stone's throw of their homes. The
excitement over quartz lodes rapidly followed; and every spot on the
mountains which showed any slight indications of auriferous quartz was
claimed by the prospecters. Hardly a third of these can ever prove rich,
but here and there is one of great value.

Helena, supported by the trade of the surrounding mines, already rivals
Virginia. Perhaps in years to come it may have a larger population and a
more reckless enterprise. One hundred and fifty miles north from Helena
is Fort Benton, an old fortified post of the American Fur Company, and
the head of navigation on the Missouri. Steamers have arrived here in
the spring, but the uncertainty of the water will fix the terminus of
travel at some point farther down. A town charter for such a terminus
was granted to a party of Virginia speculators at the mouth of Maria's
River. They called it Ophir, which a friend of mine says is a very
appropriate name and of poetic origin, being derived from Cowper's line,

"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"

On the first visit of the proprietors to their new site, every one of
them was murdered and scalped by the Indians.

These regions are held by the Blackfeet, who, with their offshoots, the
Bloods, Gros Ventres, and Piegans, are the most formidable Indians of
Montana. They are polygamists, being in that respect exceptional among
the Indians. But Catlin rather unsentimentally apologizes for this, on
the ground that the chiefs are required to give expensive
entertainments, in getting up which the labor of a hundred wives is no
trifling assistance. Attempts have long been made to civilize and
Christianize these savages by the Catholic missions under Father de
Smet, and the government has furthered these attempts by establishing a
fine farm on Sun River. The chiefs would sometimes be induced to
stolidly witness the grain-planting; but Captain Mullan quietly
describes all this waste of philanthropy in the words: "I can only
regret that the results as yet obtained would not seem commensurate with
the endeavors so manfully put forth."

The noble Indians of history and poetry do not exist a