Robert Vaughn (born Robert Vaughan; June 5, 1836 – March 23, 1918) was a Welsh immigrant to the United States and an important rancher, farmer, and businessman in the U.S. state of Montana before and after the early years of its statehood. He homesteaded the Vaughn ranch in the Sun River valley in Montana, building a sandstone mansion as his home there. The town of Vaughn, Montana, is named in his honor, and helped co-found the city of Great Falls, Montana. He built the Arvon Block, a hotel and stable in Great Falls, one of the city's earliest buildings; the ranch and the hotel are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Early life and career
Robert Vaughan was born on June 5, 1836, to Edward and Elizabeth Vaughan. The family lived near the village of Dinas Mawddwy in what was the county of Meirionnydd (now the southeast part of the county of Gwynedd) in Wales, United Kingdom. He was the third of six children. His siblings included Jane, Hugh, Robert, Edward, John, and Mary. His father was a warden of (supervisor over) the royal forest. He was educated minimally at home, worked on the family farm, and attended the Anglican Church in Wales. He spoke Welsh at home, but no English.
Vaughan left home at the age of 19 to take a position as a gardener for the wealthy banker Benjamin Heywood Jones in Liverpool (where his sister Jane lived). He learned English, and in the fall of 1858 traveled to Rome, New York, in the United States to visit his brother Hugh, who had emigrated to the U.S. a year earlier. Vaughan traveled to America without telling his parents (doing so only after he arrived), and fully intended to return to Wales. After three months, he traveled to Palmyra, New York, to visit his father's sister. He stayed there a year, then moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked as a coal miner and farmer. Hugh having moved to McLean County, Illinois, Vaughan moved from Youngstown to live with his brother. He assisted on his brother's farm for three months in the summer of 1863 before moving to Fairbury, Illinois, where he mined coal.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, Vaughan resolved to become an American citizen. The official who filled out the paperwork misspelled his name as "Vaughn", an error noticed only after his citizenship had been approved. To avoid legal difficulties, Vaughan used the erroneous spelling for the rest of his life.
Travel to and early life in Montana
On March 4, 1864, Vaughn and six others left Youngstown for the gold fields of the Idaho Territory. They traveled by horse-drawn wagon to Council Bluffs, Iowa (which took 25 days), crossed the Mississippi River by ferryboat, and arrived in Omaha, Nebraska. They joined a large train of 65 wagons taking the Oregon Trail to points west. They followed the trail along the North Platte River until they reached the junction with the Bozeman Trail (about northeast of Fort Laramie in Wyoming). John Bozeman, who had cut the Bozeman Trail only in 1863, led the Vaughn party and 19 other wagons out along the Bozeman Trail. They were joined by other wagons coming in from Fort Laramie, and soon numbered more than 100 wagons.
The wagon train arrived in Alder Gulch (near Virginia City, Madison County, Montana) on July 13, 1864. They were startled to learn they were not in the Idaho Territory but rather in the Montana Territory, which Congress had created on May 26, 1864, out of part of the Idaho Territory. His goal was to get rich mining for gold in Montana. He spent July and August working for the company of Boon & Vivian mining gold as a day laborer. In September 1864, he and four other men headed east (encountering petrified wood in the Tom Miner Basin in what is now Park County), but found no gold deposits. They returned to Alder Gulch, having spent 29 days in the wilderness.
In December 1864, Vaughn and three others took two mules and followed the Madison River to the Missouri River and the Missouri River up to Last Chance Gulch (in what is now the city of Helena, Montana). In the gulch, he dug drainage ditches (and found a mastodon tooth). He moved to nearby Nelson Gulch, and was present when a gigantic gold nugget worth $2,000 was discovered on the Maxwell & Rollins Co. claim on July 3, 1865. He stayed in Nelson Gulch for three years, working first as a miner and then opening a meat market. His goal still was to get rich mining, but he had no luck doing so.