Читать книгу Vigilante Days and Ways. The pioneers of the Rockies; the makers and making of Montana and Idaho онлайн

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In the Fall of 1862 there stood, on the bank at the confluence of Rattlesnake Creek and the Beaverhead River, a sign-post with a rough-hewn board nailed across the top, with the following intelligence daubed with wagon-tar thereon:

Tu grass Hop Per digins

30 myle

☞ kepe the Trale nex the bluffe

On the other side of the board was the following:

Tu jonni grants

one Hunred & twenti myle

The “grass Hop Per digins” are at the town of Bannack; and the city of Deer Lodge is built on “jonni grants” ranche.

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While the little community at Bannack were snugly housed for the winter, anxiously awaiting the return of warm weather to favor a resumption of labor in the gulch, numerous companies were in progress of organization in the States, intending to avail themselves of the same seasonable change to start upon the long and adventurous journey to Salmon River. The fame of Bannack and Deer Lodge had not yet reached them. In the Summer of 1862 an expedition under the direction of the Government was planned in Minnesota for the ostensible purpose of opening a wagon road between St. Paul and Fort Benton, to connect at the latter point with the military road opened a few years before by Captain John Mullen from Fort Benton to Walla Walla. This route of nearly two thousand miles lay for most of the distance through a partially explored region, filled with numerous bands of the hostile Sioux and Blackfeet. The Government had grudgingly appropriated the meagre sum of five thousand dollars in aid of the enterprise, which was not sufficient to pay a competent guard for the protection of the company. The quasi-governmental character of the expedition, however, with the inducement superadded that it would visit the Salmon River mines, soon caused a large number of emigrants to join it.