“After spending a few weeks there, he concluded that he could find better diggings, and about the time that we returned to Deer Lodge (in 1860), he quit sluicing and went to prospecting all over the country. His favorite camping ground was about the Hot Springs, near where Helena now stands. He always maintained that that was a good mining region, saying that he had got better prospects there than on Gold Creek. He told me after ‘Last Chance,’ ‘Grizzly,’ ‘Oro Fino,’ and the other rich gulches of that vicinity had been struck, that he had prospected all about there, but it was not his luck to strike any of those big things.
“About the twenty-ninth of April, 1862, P. W. McAdow, who, in company with A. S. Blake and Dr. Atkinson (both citizens of Montana), had been prospecting with but limited success in a small ravine which empties into Pioneer Creek, moved up to Gold Creek and commenced prospecting about there. About the tenth of May they found diggings in what we afterwards called Pioneer Creek. They got as high as twenty cents to the pan, and immediately began to prepare for extensive operations. At this time ‘Tom Gold Digger’ was prospecting on Cottonwood Creek, a short distance above where the flourishing burgh of Deer Lodge City now stands, but finding nothing satisfactory, he soon moved down and opened a claim above those of McAdow & Co. In the meantime we had set twelve joints of 12 × 14 sluices, this being the first string of regular sluices ever set in the Rocky Mountains north of Colorado.
“On the twenty-fifth of June, 1862, news reached us that four steamboats had arrived at Fort Benton loaded with emigrants, provisions, and mining tools, and on the twenty-ninth Samuel T. Hauser, Frank Louthen, Jake Monthe, and a man named Ault, who were the advance guard of the pilgrims to report upon the country from personal observation, came into our camp. After prospecting on Gold Creek for a few days, Hauser, Louthen, and Ault started for the Salmon River mines by way of the Bitter Root Valley. Jake Monthe, that harum-scarum Dutchman who wore the hat that General Lyon had on when he was killed in the battle of Wilson’s Creek, continued prospecting along Gold Creek.
“Walter B. Dance and Colonel Hunkins arrived on the tenth of July, and on the fourteenth we had the first election ever held in the country. It was marked by great excitement, but nobody was hurt—except by whiskey.