INTRODUCTION
One of the loveliest gravestones in the Mountain West is in Nevada’s Austin Cemetery. This angel stands over Mrs. L. W. Compton, a native of County Limerick, Ireland, who died in 1900 at the age of fifty-six.
Not long after the Louisiana Purchase was completed in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent the Corps of Discovery, led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to explore the northwest portion of the purchase and to find a route to the Pacific Ocean. The area west of the purchase (then called Oregon Country, which was essentially today’s Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia) was, at that time, claimed by both the United States and England.
The Corps of Discovery’s route included crossing what would become Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. (Incidentally, Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who was instrumental in that expedition’s success, was born near what is now Salmon, Idaho.) The Corps of Discovery firmly established the United States’ land claims in 1805 and also kindled the interest of fur traders. Trappers and explorers, popularly known as mountain men, began to explore the Rocky Mountains in about 1810 and led the way to establishing trade routes and constructing trading posts. Some were independent, but most were employed by fur companies. Legends were told about mountain men Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, and John Johnson, the latter made famous in the fictionalized film account of his life,Jeremiah Johnson.
The Great Basin, most of which lies in Nevada and the western portion of Utah, was considered by the early explorers who saw it as worthless, essentially uninhabitable, and best left to the nomadic Native Americans who roamed it. Smith crossed it, as did military expeditions, one led by Captain John Frémont and his guide, Kit Carson. Frémont’s expeditions explored and mapped much of the Great Basin, and it was he who determined that the basin had no outlet to any sea.
In 1841, Congress passed the Pre-emption Act, which permitted white males, widows, and female heads of families to claim 160 acres of public land for farming purposes. Two years later a westward movement, known as the Great Migration, began, commencing from Independence, Missouri, along the Oregon Trail to Oregon. Frémont and Carson led one of the early expeditions. For three decades, more than three hundred thousand settlers took the two-thousand-mile journey with the promise of a new Eden.
What might have seemed an insignificant moment in New York in 1830 proved to have an enormous effect in Utah in 1847: Joseph Smith, in Palmyra, New York, founded what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although he was killed in Carthage, Illinois, his practitioners followed his successor, Brigham Young, to the Salt Lake Valley and found Utah, the only state among the six featured in this book settled primarily by families. The early arrivals in the other Mountain West states tended to be young, single, and male. One pioneer lad inscribed in his diary, “Got nearer to a female this evening than I have been for six months. Came near fainting.”
In 1849, gold was discovered in Coloma, California, attracting more hopeful emigrants along the Oregon Trail. The movement became the greatest migration of people in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
For argonauts heading to California, the Rocky Mountains were an obstacle to avoid or overcome. After those mountains came the Great Basin, which was either crossed at one’s peril or avoided by staying north of it.
As famous as the Gold Rush of 1849 is, it was rather brief for most of those who trouped there. As a result, disappointed prospectors began to look north and east from California for the new El Dorado.
Although there were small strikes in Oregon (1851) and British Columbia (1858), the larger jackpots were found in what would become the states of the Mountain West. Colorado was first, in the spring of 1859, followed just a few months later with Nevada’s astonishing Comstock Lode.
The “Pikes Peak or Bust” frenzy was fueled by an estimated one hundred thousand people, mostly young men, who crossed the Kansas Territory’s dusty plains to the foot of the Rockies in 1859. About three-quarters ultimately went home disappointed because of exaggerated accounts. (Mark Twain defined a mine as “a hole in the ground owned by a liar.”) There were, however, success stories, and they fill Colorado’s history books.
Nevada’s rush came originally from prospectors and then miners (for there is a difference) from the nearly tapped-out Mother Lode in California. The silver that was found in the Comstock Lode played a significant role in bankrolling the Union in the Civil War.
Idaho City, Idaho, and Bannack, Montana, each had gold strikes in 1862, bringing hopeful hordes to those respective areas. In both cases, prospectors then fanned out from those bonanzas to find more gold and silver in surrounding hills.
Utah’s mining began with soldiers from the California and Nevada Volunteers, who, with the blessing of their leader, Colonel Patrick E. O’Connor, filed claims southwest of the Great Salt Lake in 1863. Originally, Brigham Young had instructed his followers not to seek the riches of precious metal mining, so many of the original strikes in the Utah Territory were made by non-Mormons. After Young’s death in 1877, Mormon Church members and even church leaders became involved in silver mines. In the twentieth century, copper became Utah’s bonanza.
Gold seekers who had used the Oregon Trail passed right over a major gold deposit in Wyoming that wasn’t discovered until 1868 near South Pass. That discovery led to others in Wyoming, although coal turned out to be the state’s major mining product.
Inventions in the industrialized world had an enormous effect upon the United States, nowhere more dramatically than in the American West. Vastly improved communication came with Samuel Morse’s improved electromagnetic telegraph in 1832 and Alexander Graham Bell’s patenting of the telephone in 1876. Mining gained a powerful force for moving earth with the invention of dynamite in 1867 by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel.
But nothing changed the American West as much as the completion of the first Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. The British publication The Economist, in the middle of the nineteenth century, commented that in the 1820s the speed a man could go unaided was about four miles per hour, “the same as Adam.” By horse, it was up to about ten miles per hour for any significant distance. But, The Economist went on, by the 1850s, a man could, by train, habitually go forty miles per hour and occasionally as high asseventy.
The Transcontinental Railroad linked the Midwest to California. The journey that argonauts had made in 1849 to the Gold Rush, which took an average of about a hundred days, was reduced to seven days. Stagecoach lines became obsolete. The Oregon Trail became a relic. And the effect upon mining was enormous: With railroads to carry supplies in and ore out, costs were significantly decreased. Ore that had previously been too expensive to mine, mill, and smelt could now yield a healthy profit.
Nevertheless, mining towns are created to fail, as they exist to extract a finite quantity, and when that quantity is gone, the town is doomed—unless it can find another way to prosper.
To experience the Mountain West’s history, one can explore its remnants: the mining camps, railroad ghosts, and farming towns that were all but abandoned in search of more promising places. The tent camps have disappeared. The majority of the wood-frame towns have vanished as well, having fallen to fire, vandalism, or salvage. Some delightful towns still exist, however, and the best are showcased in this book.