Montana Gold Rush

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The Montana Gold Rush in Virginia City (Montana) , Bannack and Diamond City (Montana) began in 1863 and peaked in 1866/69.

course

In May 1863, a group of miners discovered gold in Alder Gulch , about 80 miles east of Bannack in Montana, which at the time was still called Montana Territory .

Diamond City, ca.1870

The gold rush town of Bannack became the first capital of this Montana territory in 1864, and in 1865 the capital was moved to Virginia City (Montana) . When they brought their gold to Bannack to buy supplies, the gold discoveries quickly became public and many more prospectors poured into Virginia City, which soon became a thriving settlement. In 1864, four prisoners of the Confederate States Army named Washington Barker, Pomp Dennis, Jack Thompson and John Wells decided to spend the winter together in the Confederate Gulch, a steep gorge on the western slopes, during their free time in late fall of the same year the Big Belt Mountains to look for gold. One day Thompson began to dig a hole in the mouth of this ravine to look for gold and immediately found a small piece of gold the size of a grain of wheat. The first gold finds were still very small, but in the meantime more gold prospectors had come from the south, the first log houses were built and the first settlement was named Diamond City. The naming was intended rather jokingly, but was based on the fact that these log houses were arranged in such a way that the tracks in the snow formed the shape of a perfect diamond.

Discovery of the Montana Bar

In 1865, a group of four men under their leader Carl Joseph Friedrichs (1831-1916), who were known as "The Germans", reached Helena (Montana) and soon found what they were looking for in a ravine that would later become famous as Cement Gulch. However, since they were not ready to look for the gold in the bedrock, they looked elsewhere. Friedrichs led the group, including John Schönemann, Alexander Campbell and Thaddeus Judson, through the forest of the main gorge of the Confederate Gulch, dug an exploration hole in the gravel of the valley in a side gorge and found a sensational find. The find in the now so-called "Montana Bar" was so huge and surprisingly large that in 1904 a newspaper (The Sumpter Miner) reported: "Richest Acre of Ground on Earth - Montana Bar Yielded Over $ 1,000,000 in Gold , Going $ 1,000 to The Pan. " "Richest acre of land in the world - Montana Bar returned more than $ 1,000,000 in gold, $ 1,000 in the pan." In his book "Notes from My Life", published in 1886, Friedrichs wrote: "My neighbor, a Wuerttemberg man named John Schönemann, won [1866] half a hundredweight of gold every week for two months" . All gold mines in Confederate Gulch combined, with the Montana Bar at the foot of Gold Hill turning out to be the most productive of all, extracted an estimated $ 19 to 30 million worth of gold in the period from 1866 to 1869 Based on the gold price of around 17 dollars an ounce of gold at the time), which would correspond to a current value of 301 to 475 million dollars (as of 2018). On August 18, 1866, the first gold prospectors set out from Helena with wagons and their enormous amounts of gold (dust) accompanied by an armed squad led by US Deputy Marshal John X. Beidler (1831–1890) on the journey home. From Fort Benton it went in so-called Mackinaw boats with max. 18 men per boat down the Missouri to Cow Island, where the steamship the Luella with Captain Grant Marsh (1834-1916) was already waiting for 230 guests. With an estimated total of around 2½ tons of gold on board (approx. 100 million dollars), this was the most valuable ship ever to go down the Missouri River ( "the richest cargo ever to go down the Missouri River" ).

literature

  • Dan Cushman: Montana, The Gold Frontier. Stay Away, Joe Publishers, Great Falls, Montana 1973, ISBN 0-911436-03-0 .
  • Kelly F. Flynn: Goldpans, Guns & Grit, Diamond City from Territorial Gold to Montana Ghost Town. Hidden Hollow Hideaway Cattle & Guest Ranch, 2006, ISBN 1-4243-0285-4 .
  • Carl Joseph Friedrichs: Notes from my life. Frankfurt am Main 1886. OCLC 70960458

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bannack, Montana - Gold to Ghost
  2. ↑ CONFEDERATE GULCH (area with mines in it)
  3. ↑ Friedrichs, Carl Joseph in the Rhineland-Palatinate personal database, accessed on January 23, 2019.
  4. ^ Friedrichs, Carl Joseph in the catalog of the German National Library, accessed on January 23, 2019.
  5. ^ John Schoenemann (February 8, 1830 - October 30, 1900). In: Joseph Wallace: Past and present of the city of Springfield and Sangamon County, Illinois. ( sangamon.illinoisgenweb.org ( memento of September 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), accessed December 25, 2018)
  6. ^ Hubert Howe Bancroft: History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana: 1845-1889. 1890, p. 722.
  7. ↑ Richest Acre of Ground on Earth - Montana Bar Yielded Over $ 1,000,000 in gold.
  8. ↑ Kristen inbody: Confederates in the gulch, cribbage in the canyon. November 7, 2017, accessed December 25, 2018.
  9. ^ Gold Mining at Confederate Gulch, Montana. accessed December 25, 2018.
  10. ↑ Confederate Gulch
  11. ^ An illustrated history of the Yellowstone Valley: embracing the counties of Park, Sweet Grass, Carbon, Yellowstone, Rosebud, Custer and Dawson, state of Montana by Western Historical Publishing Co. (Spokane, Wash.) 1907
  12. ↑ 1831 Montana “Vigilante X” is born. Stagecoach Guard and Deputy US Marshall John X. Beidler. ( history.com ( memento of April 10, 2019 in the Internet Archive ), in English, accessed on June 22, 2020)
  13. ↑ Beidler, John X. (1831–1890) born in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. US Marshall John X. Beidler Montana Post from Virginia City, In: Historical Dictionary of Law Enforcement, by Mitchel P. Roth, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, London 2001, ISBN 0-313-30560-9 in the Google Book Search United States
  14. ↑ Ken Robison: Montana Territory and the Civil War: A Frontier Forged on the Battlefield (=  Civil War Series ). Arcadia Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-1-62584-630-3 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  15. ↑ Captain Grant (Prince) Marsh (1834-1916) was King of the Missouri River