Montana Gold

By Douglas Ewan Cameron

“There’s gold in them there hills.”

An adage from the old west. And indeed there was gold in Alder Gulch...lots of gold with lots of miners looking to strike it rich. And lots of bandits just waiting for the right moment to strike and get rich in their own way.

Sent by President Abraham Lincoln to assure that the newly discovered riches didn’t help the Confederate cause, Wilhelm Clark, part-time judge and full-time lawyer recruits several men of good—more or less—character to aid in maintaining peace and protecting the miners from the marauders that would turn Alder Gulch into an outlaw hell-hole where no honest man—or woman—would be safe. As luck would have it, the outlaws chose to build their headquarters on land held sacred by the Crow Native-American tribe, which was a major lapse in judgment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W & B Publishers
• Release date: Sep 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781635543421

Book preview

Introduction

This book is historical fiction. It takes place in the Dakota Territory in 1862-4 and is about two gold rushes in what will become southwest Montana. I first learned about this on Easter Day, 2019 when my wife and I had brunch with Mary and John Fazio and then went to their house for dessert. John, a big Civil War buff, started telling me about his latest passion which he called the most important battle fought in the Civil War. The main personage in it was Sidney Edgerton from Akron OH, which is basically where we were at the time. He said Lincoln sent Edgerton out to Montana with the edict to keep the gold from going to the South which was in desperate need of money at that time. I thought There has to be a story there. Doing a perusal of some literature, I decided that IF Lincoln had actually done this (and I have found nothing to substantiate this), he would have done it before Edgerton, who didn’t arrive in the sites of Montana gold strikes until late September1863 . I decided that Lincoln would have already worried about earlier gold strikes in a part of the Dakota Territory which is now Idaho and would want someone out there NOW and preferably someone from there. Therefore, he called for Wilhelm Theodore Clark, my main protag-onist. So, Clark had to get to Washington D.C. from Fort Benton at the head water of navigation of the Missouri River. This required travel by steamboat and train to Washington D.C. and back via ocean going steamboat to Panama, across the isthmus by train and up the west coast by steamboat. Then from San Francisco to Salt Lake City and then to Bannack where the action really began. There is a second story or thread in the book about John Beecher who deserts the Union Army during the Battle of Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing if you wish) and then gets to Florence, Idaho by steamboat and horseback. Basically, all the steamboat occurrences in the Book I of this novel are factual but Wilhelm Clark and John Beecher aren’t. They exist the way characters in historical fiction are supposed to exist. The Spread Eagle and Emilie did have a race. I found two different accounts of it and pulled them all together to build my version. You can find the story of these two steamboats and their partners Key West and Shreveport in The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840-1865, John E. Sunder, University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. I’ll explain the rest at the end of the book. Don’t want to spoil anything.

~~Douglas Ewan Cameron, Author

MONTANA GOLD

By

Douglas Ewan Cameron

Montana Gold © 2021. All rights reserved by author.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any informational storage retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

W & B Publishers

For information:

W & B Publishers

9001 Ridge Hill Street

Kernersville, NC 27284

www.a-argusbooks.com

ISBN: 9781635543421

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

Book Cover designed by Dubya

PROLOGUE

The room was small, probably ten feet by ten feet. A partners desk occupied most of the room. It was the only thing that could fit through the door and that was enough to satisfy the judge. It was set cater-cornered to a wall on the right which had two small windows high in the middle of it and to a wall on the left which also had two small windows high in the middle of it. The other two walls had doors in the middle of them. The door in the left wall, as one would sit at the desk, led into the owner’s living quarters. The other door led into the main room of the building. It was being used as a courtroom although it was empty now. Other than the desk, the room contained three chairs, one behind the desk and two on the opposite side of the desk and set facing the desk. The one behind the desk had a high back and arms and had black leather padding on it. The other two were chairs without arms or padding and were like the ones in the courtroom. They were also black.

That man sitting in the chair behind the desk was Judge Wilhelm Theodore Clark. The title of judge was an honorific bestowed on him by the people in the area. The area was the small town that had sprung up outside the fort. It was called Fort Benton but it wasn’t a military fort. It was northernmost outpost of the American Fur Company because it was at the top of the navigational part of the the second longest river in North America. 2,341 miles in length, it was just 7 miles shorter than the longest river in North America. It was called The Big Muddy although officially it was the Missouri. Wilhelm (never Will or Bill) Clark was a lawyer who had treated everyone fairly and when the need came to have some legal redress, Wilhelm was the man to whom they had turned. He was dressed all in black including his shirt. He wore a black frock coat with black pants, black shirt, black vest (single breasted) and a black puff tie. The only spot of color was a stick pin in the tie which had a small diamond for its head. His boots were black, his stovepipe hat was black – it was sitting on the desk to his right. It was rumored but never proven that his underwear was black. The only thing that he had that wasn’t black was his Colt Model 1948 Percussion Army Revolver or Colt Dragoon as it was commonly called. Lest it be forgotten, his pocket watch wasn’t black. It was gold as was the chain that connected it to his belt.

Sitting on the left side of the desk was a kerosene lantern which was lit to provide more light than came through the windows. On the right side of the desk was a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. Clark was waiting for a friend who was also a lawyer. Today his friend was a lawyer for the defendant who had already been tried and was waiting to get his sentence. The verdict had been decided by a jury of twelve men, six from the town itself and six fur trappers who were here to sell their winter’s catch of furs to a representative of the American Fur Company. Wilhelm Clark was not happy with the verdict. He felt there were too many questions unanswered and he was trying to figure out what the answers were. He had asked the defense attorney to come in early to discuss it.

He knew that outside the front of the building, 47 men had gathered to come in and watch the proceedings even though it was almost an hour before court would begin. He was expecting David Kimberly to arrive shortly. He wished he would hurry because he needed a drink. Then he heard footsteps outside in the courtroom, stood and reached for the bottle and started to uncork it when there was a knock on the door.

Who’s there? Clark asked.

David Kimberly, Judge. I have a question.

Clark looked at the bottle in one hand and the cork in the other. He put the cork back in the bottle and, sitting down, put the bottle in the area behind the bottom right hand door in the partners desk.

Come in, David. You’re always welcome.

The door opened and David started appearing from behind the door. He had hardly taken one step when there was a gunshot and he fell. Almost as soon as Kimberly hit the floor, Clark was out from behind the desk with his Navy Colt in his right hand, moving past the window to the wall which divided the office and the courtroom and then two long steps to the door, now standing half open because David Kimberly’s body was lying on the floor just over half-way into the office. Clark grabbed the doorlatch with his left hand and pulled the door open, stepping out so he could see through the doorway. On the other side of the doorway lay a body of a man and by the body was a revolver. The man lay on his back, a splotch of wetness showed on his dark jacket. He had a black beard which was shaggy, dirty, ill-kempt, his teeth were half rotten which was obvious because his mouth was open as was his right eye. His left eyelid was closed, and Clark knew that the eye behind it was glassy basically destroyed as the result of a fight that had brought him before Clark in the first place.

Clark heard footsteps coming across the courtroom and turned his head and his gun to see who it was. It was Clay Turner, one of Mike Callahan’s deputies. You okay, Judge? Clay asked as he knelt by the body to see if the man was alive.

How did he get in here, Clay? Clark asked.

I don’t know, Clay said. I was …

It was my fault, David Kimberly said as he got up by the floor and brushed his clothes off. He came to my office to see me and said he needed to see you. I told him that was impossible today because of the trial. That’s when he pulled his gun and told me we were going to see you. He had a friend waiting outside, and when we came out of the office, Hunter nodded at him and he took off at a fast walk ahead of us. When we got to the court, he was in a tussle with another guy and Clay was trying to separate them. Nobody was paying us any attention and Hunter just opened the door and shoved me through. Then he pushed me to this door and told me to go in like I always did.

If he had gone in like he always did, he would have said Clark, it’s David. And waited to hear Clark say Enter. What was said between the two alerted Clark to the fact that something was wrong and David to the fact that Clark understood something was wrong. Clark had his gun out pointed at the door when David opened it and as he fell to get out the of way, Clark fired.

It’s okay, Clay, Clark said. Go see if you can find the other man. And get someone in here to get this deadbeat’s body out of here.

Clay got up and pulled the body out of the doorway and closed the door.

Drink? Clark asked holstering his gun and heading for the desk.

Thought you’d never ask, David said.

Book I

1862

Travels and Travails

Historical Interlude

The Dakota Territory, which was formally founded March 2, 1861, basically consisted of today’s states of North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and part of Nebraska. Most of it came from the northernmost part of the Louisiana Purchase and was made up of land from the Minnesota and Nebraska Territories combined when Minnesota became a state in 1858. The territory was named after the Dakota branch of the Sioux nation. There was no formal military presence during the Civil War, but the territory did provide some troops when some Sioux tribes in Minnesota tried to oust the white man in what is known as The Dakota War of 1862.

Population of the territory was not very large although there were outposts like Fort Benton. The furthermost site was Fort Lewis, which was fifteen more miles upstream. In 1847 Alexander Culberson, an em-ployee of Auguste Chouteau and Pierre Chouteau, Jr. who did business as the American Fur Company, basically moved the fort to the current site and it was named Fort Benton in 1850.

Although fur was the first to draw people to the northwest in search of money, it was gold that was the real attraction and for the Montana gold strikes as with most, it was crazy luck that led to gold rushes. In the case of Montana, it was two brothers James and Granville Stuart who played important roles although they were not the ones who discovered the precious metal. They got there by a curious route that took a number of years. It started in Virginia, then in Iowa and for a time in Trinity River, California. But in 1857 with pockets empty, they started home, taking the desert route north of Salt Lake City which was the way they had come in 1852. And even though lightning is said not to strike the same place twice, illness apparently does not abide by the same rules. Granville fell ill at almost the same place he had five years earlier. When he had recovered enough to be able to travel, the brothers decided that the wisest choice was to return to California and go home by a different path. But chance showed its hand and they camped near Joe Meek who was moving stock between Beaverhead Valley in what would become Montana and the California Road. They joined his party and got into the Beaverhead Valley and spent several years there unsuccessfully looking for gold. By chance, spring of 1861 found them in Fort Benton. A big steam-boating year had been expected but at least eleven steamboats tried but failed to catch the early spring water. The only one to get close was Chippewa which burned and exploded.

Not knowing what had happened and expecting to find the supplies he had ordered for a store and the mines, James Stuart led a pack train into Fort Benton circa July 1, 1861. With nothing available, the Stuarts headed for Colorado. There they passed word about gold they had found in Montana and it reached a bunch of ‘Pike’s Peakers’, a term given to Colorado gold hunters. And so at least one group headed north. Two years later, although headed for Idaho, a party of Pike’s Peakers led by John White paused to prospect when it made its way through the area of southwest Montana. Included in the party were Colonel McClain (first delegate to Congress from the territory of Montana), Washington Stapleton, William Gibson, and three men identified by the names Root, David and Dance. Coming to Lewis and Clark’s Willard Creek although perhaps not knowing that was its name, they headed up its gulch to practice their trade.

On July 28, 1862, while panning the gravels of what they called Grasshopper Creek — owing to the dense population of hoppers which were really Alders on its banks — the prospectors hit upon a bonanza. The place of discovery came to be called White’s Bar and the Grasshopper Diggings. Mining camps near and far could hear the sound of Eureka and a gold rush to the Dakota Territory began which brought an unprecedented change to a sparsely inhabited area of the Dakota Territory.

The area in which gold was found was about three miles downstream from where the city of Bannack was to be situated. The name of the camp came from the local tribe – the Bannock Indians. The spelling was inadvertently changed when the town’s name was submitted to Washington, D.C., for the post office in 1862. It is not surprising that the town got its name from the Indians because as the new miners started to drift in, the Bannock tribe arrived. They were basically Northern Paiute but culturally more Northern Shoshone. Numbering four to five hundred warriors they could easily have driven the pros-pectors out or even killed them but their chief Winnemutta said to leave the prospectors alone. His telling argument was that if the prospectors were killed, more white men would than there were blades of grass in the meadow where they stood. The prospectors and Indians talked for several days and reached an agreement that the white men could mine for gold provided they left the following year and did not start farming. In return, the miners gave the Indians much of their supplies and invited them to come back in the spring to trade furs. During the talks, the peace-pipe was smoked by members of both sides and there were several circles through which the pipe had to be passed. After the talking was over, the Indians left to go to hunt buffalo in the Yellowstone.

The gold discovered by White’s group was rich placer gold deposits (placer gold is gold that is found by sifting gravel in streams) along the banks of Grasshopper Creek, a tributary of the Beaverhead River which together with the Big Hole River form the Jefferson River which joins the Madison River forming the Missouri River. The Bannack gold was a very deep hue, as soft as a thumbnail and purer than that used to mint coins. It was more than 990 fine or 99% pure. It was the purest gold ever found in the western United States or the world.

The Missouri River with American Fur Company Outposts

Despite the rivers, getting to places in the Dakota Territory was the problem. Fort Benton was at the head of navigation on the Missouri River. Even so, steamboats could only make it partway up the river until 1860 when the steamboat Chippewa reached Ft. Benton. As stated previously, the Chippewa burned on the way to Ft. Benton the next year and that was the only steamboat to try that year. For land travel, in 1853 Congress approved a U.S. Army expedition lead by Isaac Ingalls Stevens. The party, organized in Minnesota, went up the Missouri as far as Fort Union and included Lieutenant John Mullan who was placed in charge of surveying. His prime assignment was to survey and construct a 25-foot wide wagon road (which became known as the Mullan Road) from Fort Benton to Fort Walla Walla (Washington). The trail could take people to Idaho where gold was discovered in 1860 in Canal Gulch, part of Orofino Creek. While the Mullan Road helped prospectors and settlers get to Idaho and Washington, it didn’t help get them to Bannack when gold was discovered there. However, shortly thereafter came the Montana Trail which ran from Salt Lake City to Bannack and later to Virginia City, but the trail was fraught with danger from bandits and Indians.

Our story begins June 17, 1862 when the steamboat Emilie (or Emily) first docked at Fort Benton. Emilie was the first side-wheel steamboat to make it to Fort Benton. The first steamboat to be recorded reaching Fort Benton or its environs was the Chippewa which reached Fort Brulé a little down river from Fort Benton on July 17, 1859. Fort Brule was built by soldiers and settlers in 1862, abandoned in 1868 and dismantled in 1873. On July 2, 1860 the Chippewa returned accompanied by the Key West. As stated previously, there were no steamboat arrivals in 1861. The problem was twenty-four stretches of rapids which began just below Fort Benton and reached all the way to Fort Union river 783 miles away. So, to have four steam-boats reach Fort Benton within days of each other in 1862 was certainly a monumental occasion and although important it was not the event which would make a lasting impact upon the Montana territory. That honor, if you wish to consider it an honor, belongs to a young lady who arrived aboard the Emilie. But that is getting ahead of our story and – to be truthful – she plays a small but significant part in our story.

Wilhelm Clark

June 17, 1862

Fort Benton, Dakota Territory

When a person walked into the room from the porch door, it was obviously a courtroom. Not a big courtroom but definitely a courtroom. It was probably ten feet by twenty feet with twenty-feet being the length of the wall with the doorway from the porch. The walls to the left and right of the doorway had two small windows set high in the middle. On the wall on either side of the doorway were kerosene lanterns and there were two on the opposite wall. They had been lit about five minutes before and turned up. On either side of the doorway were four rows of chairs: five per row on the left and six per row on the right. In front of the left group of chairs was a table with two chairs on the near side of the table. In front of the right group of chairs was another table but with one chair. The left table was for the defense and the right table for the prosecution. On the far side of the two tables was a third one with the one chair on the far side. That chair was different from the other chairs in that it had a high back and arms that were black. The table was also black making it difficult to see the book that lay on the left side of the table if it hadn’t been for the pages. It was well-used and had a red ribbon fastened in the spine and which disappeared between pages about three quarters of the way through book. Were a person to open the book to the marked page, the book would immediately become identified as a bible because the marked page was to John, Chapter 5, verse 30:

I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.

To the left side of this table was a solitary chair – the witness chair. On the back wall just a couple of feet to the left of the witness chair was a door. In the approximate middle of the door about heart high for a normal man was a bullet hole. Immediately to the right of desk was a flag on a pole stuck into a bucket of sand. The flag was that of the United States of America which in 1862 had thirteen stripes – seven red and six white – and thirty-four stars. If this had been a jury trial there would have been twelve chairs in two rows of six against the right wall; eight would made up of two from each of the spectator seats on the first and four made up of one from each of the rows on the left. But today was not a jury trial – it was a sentencing.

The room was empty but not for long. The hallway door opened, and a man stepped into the room. He wore brown canvas pants stuffed into the top of black boots and a white long-sleeved cotton work shirt under a brown buttoned vest. In his hands he had a long double-barreled shotgun which he favored because it was good in close quarter fighting. Not for shooting but for use as a club. On his head, he wore an open crown brown hat despite the fact that he was indoors. His face was craggy from the weather, not from age. His black hair showed under the hat. Dark eyes peered around the room from under thick black eye-brows. A nose which showed signs of having been broken at least once (actually it was thrice) seemed to poke out of the face over a handlebar mustache. His lips were shut tight as he concentrated on his job which at this point was making certain there were no surprises in the courtroom. Having ascertained that there were indeed no surprises, he turned his head to the left and said over his shoulder, It’s clear. Then Jethro Tucker walked down the aisle between the chairs and the two tables and turned around to face the hallway door, his shotgun basically at port arms although he was not a military man.

The second man to enter the room did so faster but not nearly as gracefully because he stumbled in, having been pushed by the third man to enter the room. The second man (whose name was Ralph Durbin) was shackled hand and foot with a chain running from the middle of the foot shackle to the middle of the hand shackle with just enough chain so that his hands were down in front of his groin. His pants were filthy but looked gray. His shirt had been white but was now filthy and torn. His boots looked military if one removed the layers of dirt and mud which covered the black. His brown hair needed washing as he did , and a scraggly beard covered his face. Brown eyes peered search-ingly almost constantly during his short time in the court-room. He hardly ever spoke but if he had his voice would have been surprisingly low for his size. He didn’t smile because he had nothing to smile about having gotten himself into a hell of a fix being at the right place at the wrong time.

The third man to enter the room was wearing a Callahan Frock Coat in charcoal with a pair of charcoal pants. Underneath the coat he wore a white shirt with a black puff tie. Over the shirt was a black and white vertically striped double breasted vest. In every way he was immaculate down to his curly black hair with just the proper amount of oil to keep it in place. For that reason, he wore no hat because his hair was his trademark. When he was looking straight at you, his dark eyes appeared to be boring though to the very center of your soul but when he would look away, the left eye moved half as far as the right at half the speed and could never catch up. His nose was straight and just perfect with his pencil thin-mustache. Square jawed, he would have improved his appearance with a beard, but it was patchy when it grew in. He wore a holster with a Colt 1851 Navy Revolver and anyone who mentioned that this hinted at him being a Southern sympathizer was apt to find it being used to pistol-whip him because he was a Union man through and through. As he entered the room, his hands were empty since he had pushed Ralph Durbin through the door, and it was a good thing that he was empty-handed and quick because he was able to reach out with his right hand and grab the back of Durbin’s shirt to keep him from falling. Not that he would have minded but word would get out and tarnish his reputation. Mike Callahan was the law in Fort Benton – at least outside of the American Fur Company compound – and it was rough enough trying to keep the peace when honest citizens were criticizing his treatment of prisoners who, although judged by all who knew the case to be guilty, were still awaiting sentencing. Once that was done, let the bastard fall would become the cry.

Once through the door, Callahan shoved Durbin into one of the chairs behind the defense’s desk and took a seat in the first row just to Durbin’s right. As he sat, his right hand brushed the right front of the frock coat back and when he was seated the Colt 1851 was in his hand. Only when Callahan was seated did the deputy outside the door stand aside and let the waiting men in.

The men who filed in were quiet. Some of them cast a look at the prisoner but most kept their eyes down, glancing at Jethro Tucker because he was the man with whom to be reckoned. The forty-seven men considered themselves very fortunate because you had to be one of the lottery winners to get seats in the room for the sentencing. They had gone through a screening as they had come onto the porch on their way to the courtroom. Those carrying guns were forced to leave them on nails on the wall to the right of the entrance. There were forty-eight nails each with a number hand painted above the nail. Some of them had guns hanging on them with the nail through the trigger guard. If there was no gun, there was a wooden square with the number on it hanging on the nail and they corresponded to the wooden square the man with the gun had. Number 47 had a wooden square. Number one was the first man’s name to be drawn from the sentencing basket and forty-eight was the last man with forty-seven being omitted because that was Callahan’s seat. Several of the men (the original holders of numbers 17, 23, and 36) were from ten to twenty-five dollars richer because they sold the right to their seats to someone offering enough money. Those who paid for a number were certain that they had spent their money wisely. Twenty-five dollars was a lot in 1862 being worth $375.95 in 2020. Number forty-eight had been offered thirty-five dollars but had turned it down. His friends thought him stupid, but he didn’t because he thought that number was prime seating. The first six men through the door went to the right and filled in the back row, the next four men to the left and this process con-tinued which made number forty-eight the aisle seat on the left side in the first row. Other than number forty-four which he would have preferred, he considered this aisle seat to be the best because he was right next to Mike Callahan.

When all forty-seven men had entered, the deputy at the door closed it and took his place in the courtroom in front of it. Like Jethro Tucker, he had a shotgun. For several minutes it seemed that no one breathed or moved. Then Jethro Tucker turned, letting loose the shotgun’s barrel with his left hand and with his right moved the barrel so that it rested on his right shoulder. He stepped to the door to the left of the witness chair and raised his hand to knock. He was stopped momentarily by the hole in the door approximately at the height