n the hills 6 miles north of Three Forks, in south-central Montana, the Emerson Mining District had all the potential of being highly productive, but it never quite got going. Ironically, as the adjacent valley contains the headwaters of the Missouri River, the main obstacle it faced was a dearth of water. In the mid-1860s, when placer mining for gold was in style, local rancher and sometime prospector Al Nichols found promising quartz samples in a dry stream bed in these hills. He hauled a sackful of the rocks 4 miles
