The Northern Overland Expedition, as it was called, left St. Paul on the sixteenth of June, 1862. It was confided to the leadership of Captain James L. Fisk, whose previous frontier experience and unquestioned personal courage admirably fitted him for the command of an expedition which owed so much of its final success, as well as its safety during a hazardous journey through a region occupied by hostile Indians, to the vigilance and discipline of its commanding officer. His first assistant was E. H. Burritt, and second assistant, N. P. Langford (the writer); Samuel R. Bond, secretary, David Charlton, engineer, Dr. W. D. Dibb, surgeon, and Robert C. Knox, wagon master. About forty men were selected from the company, who agreed, for their subsistence, to serve as guards during the journey. One hundred and twenty-five emigrants accompanied the expedition to Prickly Pear Valley. This company was thoroughly organized, and ready at all times for instant service while passing through Indian country. Fort Abercrombie, Devil’s Lake, Fort Union, Fort Benton,[2] and Milk River were designated points of the route, and it was generally understood that the company should pursue as nearly as possible the trail of the exploring expedition under command of Governor Isaac I. Stevens in 1853.
Fort Union and Fort Benton were not United States military forts, but were the old trading posts of the American Fur Company.
All the streams not fordable on the entire route were bridged by the company and many formidable obstacles removed. The company arrived without accident, after a tedious but not uninteresting trip, in Prickly Pear Valley on the twenty-first day of September. It was the largest single party that went to the northern mines in 1862. About one-half of the number remained in the Prickly Pear Valley, locating upon the creek where Montana City now stands. The remainder accompanied Captain Fisk to Walla Walla. All who were officially connected with the expedition, except Mr. Knox and the writer, returned by way of the Pacific Ocean and the Isthmus to Washington.
Gold had been found on Prickly Pear Creek a short time before the arrival of our company. “Tom Gold Digger,” or “Gold Tom,” had pitched his lodge at the mouth of the cañon above our location and was “panning out” small quantities of gold. The placer was very difficult of development and the yield small. Winter was near at hand. Many of the party who had left home for Salmon River, where they had been assured profitable employment could be readily obtained, now found themselves five hundred miles from their destination with cattle too much exhausted to attempt the journey, in the midst of a wilderness, nearly destitute of provisions, and with no chance of obtaining any nearer than Salt Lake City, four hundred miles away, from which they were separated by a region of mountainous country, rendered impassable by deep snows and beset for the entire distance by hostile Indians. Starvation seemingly stared them in the face. Disheartening as the prospect was, all felt that it would not do to give way to discouragement. A few traders had followed the tide of emigration from Colorado with a limited supply of the bare necessaries of life, risking the dangers of Indian attack by the way, to obtain large profits and prompt pay as a rightful reward for their temerity. Regarding their little stock as their only resource, the company set to work at once, each man for himself, to obtain means to buy with. Prices were enormous. The placer was still unpromising. Frost and snow had actually come. With a small pack supplied from the remains of their almost exhausted larders, the men started out, some on foot, and some bestride their worn-out animals, into the bleak mountain wilderness in pursuit of gold. With the certainty of death in its most horrid form if they fell into the clutches of a band of prowling Blackfeet, and the thought uppermost in their minds that they could scarcely escape freezing, surely the hope which sustained this little band of wanderers lacked none of those grand elements which sustained the early settlers of our country in their days of disaster and suffering. Men who cavil with Providence, and attribute the escape of a company of half-starved, destitute men from massacre, starvation, and freezing, under circumstances like these, to luck or chance or accident, are either destitute of gratitude or have never been overtaken by calamity. Yet these men all survived to tell the tale of their bitter experience.