history lesson warned that earthquakes sometimes shook the earth. Lewis and Clark trekked through, describing the Bear’s Tooth—once a local landmark—and naming the “Gates of the Rocky Mountains,” the pristine waterway that flows between steep limestone walls. Ancient people left mysterious marks and images painted on the rock faces for modern visitors to ponder. Montana’s first gold discoveries brought hopeful miners to the valley. By 1863, local mining camps already thrived at Montana City, Jefferson City, and Silver City where miners worked claims scattered along Little Prickly Pear Creek. With the first greening of spring in 1864, John S. Cowan of Georgia, D. J. Miller of Alabama, John Crabb of Iowa, and Reginald (Bob) Stanley of Nuneaton, England set out from Alder Gulch without directions or compass or roads to follow. They reached the Little Blackfoot River where the previous Fall, Stanley had found some color in his pan. But this time the men were discouraged and found none, so they pushed on, over the mountains to try the east side of the Continental Divide. Lost in the mist, cold and wet, the four wandered and climbed until after several miserable days, the sun emerged and the
party reached the top. Stanley climbed to the summit of a high peak. He saw the Missouri River far to the east and the sweeping valley below. Encouraged, they pushed down the mountain and that evening camped in a narrow gulch where a stream trickled through gravel. While their horses grazed, the men passed the evening panning. They did find color, more than they had found elsewhere, but they were anxious to find better diggings and so they pressed on. Six weeks later, they had found nothing. The four discouraged miners began to talk of the gulch where they had spent their first night camped on the east side of the mountains. Nearly out of provisions, the men returned to the little steam to take one last chance. It was the evening of July 14, 1864. Stanley later wrote: “…while my partners dug some holes near the mouth of the gulch, I took pick, shovel and pan and made my way upstream looking for a bar on which to put down a hole likely to have bedrock. [It was] a fine still evening with the charm of treading the unknown and unexplored.… A tiny stream rippled under gravel banks, bordered with choke cherry and sarvice berry bushes….
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I commenced a hole on the bar and put it down to bedrock, some six or seven feet. Taking a pan of gravel from the bottom, I clambered out and panned it in the little stream close by. Three or four little flat, smooth nuggets was the result; nuggets that made the pan ring when dropped into it….” Stanley’s account describes the “Georgian method” of placer mining, digging pits to bedrock and then panning the gravel at the bottom. Before the rush to California in the late 1840s and 1850s, most of the gold mining in the States was done in Georgia and in the South. Only Cowan was from Georgia, but the discovery men were known thereafter as “the Georgians” not for their places of birth, but for the way they worked their claim. Stanley also noted on a return visit to Helena in November 1883 that the men made their camp at the discovery site “on bar ground back of the present site of the First National Bank.” This definitively identifies the parking lot south of today’s Colwell Building, near the intersection of Last Chance Gulch and Wall streets, as the place where the first gold was found. The gulch was thick with rattlesnakes and so the men outlined their campsite with a horsehair lariat, believing this would keep the snakes at bay. They took their time and chose the best ground before Crabb and Cowan went to Virginia City for supplies and a whipsaw to build their sluice boxes. While Cowan and Crabb were discreet, their purchase of a whipsaw was proof to other idle miners that they had found enough color to warrant building sluice boxes. Other miners followed Cowan and Crabb to Last Chance and secured claims. There was no great stampede; rather, a slow trickling in of eager prospectors. The Georgians christened the new diggings “Rattlesnake District.” It was a wild and lonely place. A monster rattler with ten buttons on his tail, nailed to a post, warned of the danger and huge horse flies bothered the horses. A monstrous grizzly bear that made nightly visits at the gulch’s south end, gorging on the chokecherries along Last Chance Creek, inspired the name Grizzly Gulch. The howling and barking of wolves and coyotes, Stanley recalled, “made the nights hideous.” Other miners joined the Georgians to pitch tents and mine claims during the summer of 1864. Some stayed and some moved on discouraged by the scant supply of water. In mid- September, the first group of emigrants arrived with the Thomas A. Holmes wagon train from Shakopee,