Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman Read Free Book Online

and across the ContinentalDivide. Only fifteen or so of the party continued all the way on the Montana Trail to Bannack, others being diverted by news of gold in the Boise area. As a reminder of the constant danger on the trail, W.A. “saw the newly made graves of several recently murdered emigrants.”
    The evening before the Fourth of July 1863, their first night in Idaho Territory, the young men got into a keg of “old rye” whiskey and got to feeling pretty lively, dancing around the campfire. “This we began after supper time,” W.A. recalled, “with rattling our tin pans, blowing an old horn, and singing occasionally a few strains of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ to which we had some very enthusiastic responses from the coyotes in the surrounding hills.” The young men called out for any Indians who might be listening to join them: “Come on, you red devils, we are ready for you!” Yet these brave young men were missing the real fight. The Battle of Gettysburg, with some 46,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, was ending in W.A.’s native Pennsylvania that day.
    • • •
    Despite his ambition, his energy, and his book-learning, W.A. proved to be no genius at prospecting. He described himself as naïve when he arrived in Bannack, where men were streaming out, not in, flocking instead to a new gold strike to the east at Alder Gulch. A group of men hiding from Crow Indians had happened upon gold there, swearing to keep their discovery a secret. That secret hadn’t lasted long.
    “We found some stampeders already on the way,” W.A. later said self-deprecatingly, “some of them afoot, others on horseback, and all we had to do was to follow the crowd.” All the claims had been staked out, and W.A.’s group wandered the desolate ridges, hoping to spot quartz veins with gold locked up in the rock, and searching the inside bends of creeks where gold dust might have been deposited. They found nothing promising, but a man named Baugh, for whom they had hauled some whiskey, did them the good turn of staking them in on his claim on a dry gulch, setting aside about two hundred feet for each man to work. An ex-Confederate, Baugh named the area Jeff Davis Gulch. When W.A. went into Bannack to buy grub and lumber for sluice boxes, used for separating gold from the auriferous sands, he was soon down to his last fifty cents. W.A. wrote:
    Upon my arrival at Bannack I found five letters from home that anticipated me and had been carried from Salt Lake by a private express which had been established between that place and Bannack. The price of the transportation of a letter at that time was $1.00 each, and I had just $5.00.… I had, besides, a fractional greenback currency of the denomination of fifty cents. I gladly dispensed with the $5.00 for the letters, therefore, I was obliged to endeavor to get credit for the lumber and some few other articles which we needed, and this I readily obtained.
    His fortunes soon reversed. “During our prospecting trip I had found a very fine pair of elk antlers, which I brought into Bannack, and for which Cy Skinner, who kept a saloon … offered to give me ten dollars, and this I readily accepted.” W.A. would never again need to ask for credit.
    • • •
    Sorting out gold on the surface, known as placer (pronounced PLASS-ur) mining, is hard work, and has been since before the Bronze Age, particularly as far from water as these souls were. The idea is to use water to separate the dirt from the gold. To mine their dry Jeff Davis Gulch, W.A. and his pals had to strip off about four feet of the dirt and rock with picks and shovels to reach gold-infused loose sediment near the bedrock. Then they had to haul the sediment half a mile in a cart they had built from the front wheels of their Schuttler wagon. The water of nearby Colorado Creek ran through their handmade sluice boxes, the tiered channels creating eddies that allowed the heavier gold nuggets and gold dust to separate