Montana Gold Rush

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Forty Years on the Frontier In 1852, Granville Stuart (1834-1918) traveled with his brother and their father to the Sacramento Valley of California, where they spent five years mining for gold and served in the Rogue River War. In 1857 he and his brother started back to Iowa but were delayed by the outbreak of war between the Utah Mormons and the United States. After relocating to Montana's Deer Lodge Valley, the Stuarts found gold, and news of their discovery sparked the first Montana gold rush in 1862. Stuart was instrumental in developing the Montana cattle industry and was a leader of the vigilantes who captured and executed numerous horse thieves in the summer of 1884. Stuart's edited reminiscences are a priceless and authentic account of pioneering, prospecting, and community building in the northern Rockies and Great Plains.

The Mechanics of Optimism: Mining Companies, Technology and the Hot Spring Gold Rush, Montana Territory,1864-1868 (American West in the Twentieth Century S.) For every successful mining district celebrated in history, there were failed dozens whose stories have been largely forgotten. This book fills a void by documenting, in rare detail, the boom-bust cycle of Hot Spring District, a mid-1860s Montana gold camp that didn't pay, despite early predictions of a bonanza. Author and historian Jeffrey J Safford examines how gold mining ventures were developed and financed during and after the Civil War, and how men, primarily Easterners with scant knowledge of mining, were willing to invest large sums in gold mines that promised quick and lucrative returns. Safford explains how these mining companies were organised and underwritten, and why a little-known district in southwestern Montana was chosen as a centre of operations. What were the businessmen involved in these ventures thinking? Why didn't new mining technology triumph as predicted? Why did their financial strategies fail to produce lavish profits? Relying on extensive primary sources, Safford answers these and other questions while reminding the reader that the rapid rise and decline of Hot Spring was not unique. The mining frontier is littered with short-lived "sure-fire investments". True bonanzas were the exception, not the rule.

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