A BOY'S TRIP OVERLAND.
Remembering my own love of adventure as a boy, I can not refrain from
giving here a chapter contributed by my son, Green Majors, which will be
found both instructive and interesting. He says: "At the inexperienced
age of twelve years I was seized with a strong desire to go overland to
Montana. For a number of years I had lived at Nebraska City, on the
Missouri River, a starting point in those days for west-bound freight
and emigrant wagon trains; and having so long seen the stage-coaches go
bounding over the hills and rolling prairies, headed for the golden
West, it was with a feeling of great satisfaction that on the morning of
April 26, 1866, I was seated on top of one of those same coaches, as a
fellow passenger with my father, Alexander Majors, bound for the Rocky
Mountains, and Helena, Mont., in particular. To my boyish fancy the
never-ceasing rocking to and fro of the overland coach of early days was
a constant delight. Denver we reached in six days and nights of
incessant travel. Rain nor shine, floods nor deserts, stopped us. If a
passenger became too sleepy or exhausted to hold on and sleep at the
same time on the outside, he could get inside by submitting to the
'sardining' process. But inside, the clouds of dust and the cramped
position necessary to assume made one at times feel like the coach were
spinning round like a top in the dark. At Denver we laid in a big supply
of luncheon material, for the next continuous ride, without a town, was
for 600 miles, to Salt Lake City. However, before we reached Zion, our
troubles were many, one of which was being caught in a violent
snow-storm one dark night while bowling along over Laramie Plains. Our
driver and his mules both lost the road. He so notified us, and we got
out to wade through the innumerable drifts to see if we could feel the
hard-beaten trail with our feet. But it was of no use. So for fear we
might wander away from the emigrant road too far, or that he might drive
over some precipice or into some hole or other in the blinding storm, we
unhitched his four mules and tied each one with its head to a wheel, so
there could be no runaway, and then all hands got back into the coach,
tucked our wraps about us as best we could, and there we sat, like
Patience on a monument, smiling at grief, with the wind whistling in all
its many sad cadences through the flapping wings of that desolate coach,
until the longest night I ever saw went by. Next morning we found two
and a half feet of 'the beautiful' on the level, and the struggle to
gain another station began. We tramped snow and broke trails for that
coach to get through the drifts for about ten or fifteen miles, before
we got to a lower altitude, out of the path of the storm, for all of
which distance we of course paid the stage company 25 cents a mile fare,
with no baggage allowance to speak of.
"Not a great ways farther on, we struck the famous Bitter Creek country,
a section that was the terror of travelers, because of poor grass, water
that was foul and bitter, and alkali plains that were terrific on man
and beast. At one place along Bitter Creek its water was as red as
blood, at another as yellow as an orange; but generally its color was a
dark muddy drab, and highly impregnated with vegetable and earthy
matter. I suppose Bitter Creek is the only place on earth where
highwaymen had the cold-blooded nerve to charge travelers $1.50 for
nothing but fat bacon, poorly cooked, and an inferior quality of
mustard, as a meal's victuals, but the stage station-keepers had it
there. By the time we finished our Bitter Creek experience we were proof
against peril, so that subsequent floods in the cañons from melting
snows in the mountains, sitting bolt upright with three on a seat to
sleep over the rough mountain roads at night, and passing over long
stretches of country with no water fit to drink, were trivial
circumstances.
"After a thirty-day siege of this sort of experience, we alighted on the
gravelly streets of Helena, Mont., then a town of canvas houses and
tents, and log huts. Helena at that time was the liveliest town I have
ever seen in my life, either in America or Europe, over the whole of
both of which I have since traveled. At that time her business houses
were largely propped up on stilts, while underneath the red-shirted
placer miner was washing the blue gravel soil for gold-dust. Her
streets, in many places, were bridged over, to allow of the same thing.
Sunday was the liveliest day in the week for business. The plainest meal
at a restaurant cost $1.50, and bakery pies, with brown paper used for a
crust, cost 75 cents each. Everybody had money, and nobody appeared to
want to keep what he had. Gold-dust was the money of the country, no
greenbacks nor coin being used. A pennyweight of the yellow dust passed
for a dollar, but expert cashiers, at the gaming places and stores, were
said to know how to weigh the article so deftly that $100 of it in value
would only go $50 in distance. However, wages were very high, and so was
everything else, so that if a man were robbed pretty badly, he could
soon recuperate his lost fortunes. There were no churches in Helena
then, if, indeed, there were any in the Territory. The first Sunday
after arriving there, I remember attending divine service in a muslin
building, but the blacksmith's hammer next door and the lusty
auctioneer's voice in the street made so much noise the congregation
could not understand the divine's injunctions, so that church-going
there, at that time, was attended with considerable annoyance.
Everything was crude and primitive, everybody was cordial, generous, and
open-hearted, and anything or anybody justly appealing to those roughly
appareled yeomanry for aid or sympathy invariably opened the floodgates
of their plenty and fired the great, deep, warm heart-throbs of their
noble natures.
"But they were as prompt in meting out retributive justice to the
wrong-doer as in loosing their purse-strings to a worthy applicant, and
many were the wayward souls jerked into eternity through the deadly and
inexorable noose of the ubiquitous vigilante, whose will was law, and
the objects of whose adverse edicts were soon plainly told to recite
their last prayers in the body.
"Cattle-raising on the rich, nutritious bunch-grass of the broad valleys
of the Territory also soon grew to be a very lucrative business, to
supply the numerous placer-mining towns of Montana, a number of which
were quite important and thrifty camps at that time. Farming was also
followed to a limited extent. Inasmuch as potatoes, cabbage, and other
vegetables were largely imported from Salt Lake, about five hundred
miles, all sorts of soil products yielded handsome returns.
"Montana has had her periods of depression as well as of prosperity. For
after her then-discovered and easily accessible placer ground became
washed out, which took several years, times there grew very dull, but
not until something like $200,000,000 worth of gold had been washed from
her auriferous gulches and hillsides. Quartz mining was rare in those
days, because freight and everything else was so high that few had the
means to engage in that kind of mining. From a State of such prosperous
activity in the sixties, with a large and well-to-do population, in
1874-75 it grew so dull and so many had left the Territory that those
remaining wished they could get away too. In the Centennial year of
1876, however, Montana's true era of prosperity dawned, when rich silver
quartz was discovered at the now famous city of Butte, styled 'the
greatest mining camp on earth.' The Territory's business in every avenue
soon rose from its low ebb to an affluent flood, all kinds and lines
almost immediately feeling its vitalizing, stimulating influence. From
an isolated mountain fastness it forthwith again became the theater of
activity and thrift, and the stream of precious metals that it again
poured into the world's commercial channels not long after required the
capacity of a line of railroad to handle its vast volume. Chicago, New
York, Boston, and other Eastern centers recognized Montana merchants as
among their heaviest and best-paying customers, again demonstrating that
mining for the precious metals is the great vanguard of a rapid and
substantial civilization. The Utah & Northern was the pioneer railroad
into her confines, but its business soon grew to such enormous
proportions that the Northern Pacific followed in three or four years,
and then Jim Hill swooped in with his Great Northern Road. So that that
apparently isolated section has three transcontinentals now running east
and west through her entire length, with the Chicago, Burlington &
Quincy on her eastern border, impatient to share her immense traffic,
and the Butte, Boise & San Francisco soon to give her a direct outlet to
San Francisco Bay.
[Illustration: SUNRISE IN CAMP.]
"But to return to the early days of Montana, certainly one of the
grandest and richest sections of the Union. It is in this State that the
muddy Missouri River has its source, although in the mountainous part of
its course its water is as clear as crystal. Here, also, the broad and
majestic Columbia has its inception, the heads of these two noble
streams bubbling up out of her lofty mountains quite close together. And
it is a striking coincidence that the same section that sends these two
noble streams down through fertile fields to the sea, bearing on their
mighty bosoms the wealth and water supply of empires, should also
possess the largest and richest deposits of the precious metals that the
world has ever known. But such is the case. Speaking of precious metals
recalls some of the 'stampedes' to newly discovered mining camps in
early days. A 'stampede' is a panic reversed, usually instigated by the
wild and rainbow-colored statements of over-enthusiastic persons, and
often those statements had utterly no foundation in fact. Men would rise
from their beds in the middle of the night, if thought necessary, and
with insufficient food, clothing, or implements, afoot or horseback,
climb dark mountains or cañons, swim floods, tramp over alkali plains,
or submit to any and all kinds of hardships, all for the sake of being
among the first on the ground of newly discovered 'diggins.' 'First
come, first served,' was the rule, and each man was determined, as
nearly as possible, to be first served. In the famous Sun River
stampede, in the winter of 1866-67, with the mercury coquetting with the
30-degree-below-zero point, it was said men actually started out in
their shirt sleeves to make a hundred-mile journey through the deep snow
to the reputed new camp without food supplies to carry them through. And
as it often proved in other cases, there wasn't a particle of truth in
the reputed rich fields. Dame Rumor, that ever versatile and
fertile-brained jade, had had an inning, and she batted hard, firing her
hot balls of deception to all quarters of the field. In those days
buffalo were plentiful on the plains of Eastern Montana. I think I have
seen from twenty to fifty thousand in a single herd there. They
blackened the hills and plains with their shaggy coats, they swarmed the
rivers in their peregrinations, and raised clouds of dust like a simoon
in their journeys across the country. I have seen hundreds of them in a
group mired down in the quicksands along the Upper Missouri River.
Hunters walked on their backs and shot the fattest of them as trophies
of the chase, and the ever ubiquitous, keen-scented wolves came and
gnawed their vitals while they were yet alive, but helpless, in their
inextricable positions. At that time bands of stately elk also abounded
there. Deer were plentiful, and the fleet-footed antelope bounded over
every plain. Mountain sheep, whose tender meat was fat and juicy,
climbed the terraced rocky cliffs in great numbers, while ducks, geese,
pheasants, fool hens, and many other table fowl were to be had for a
little effort on the part of the hunter. A fool hen is a species of bird
weighing about two pounds, that is so foolish as to allow the gunner to
lay aside his fire-arms and kill the whole flock with sticks and stones,
so closely can it be approached without taking flight. Its meat is
delicious.
"Many volumes could be written on Montana's early reminiscences, her
vast resources, her brilliant past, and her glorious prospective future.
But the brief space allotted me precludes the possibility of detailed
mention of people, places, or things, and I reluctantly stop sharpening
my pencil. Montana has been great in the past, but her future will be
much grander and greater still."