Old Missoula

Women, Gold and Weather.

Flathead Country, July 3, 1875.

Editor Missoulian:

I desire to give you a few facts relative to the early history of our county and territory, which may be of interest to your numerous readers:

Women,

A former correspondent of your paper was in error concerning the name of the first white woman who came to Missoula county, and in fact to Montana. To a Mrs. J. Brown belongs the honor of being the first white woman who came to Montana. She came from the East in the year 1854, and while crossing the Rocky Mountains gave birth to a male child now grown to be an athletic American citizen. She with her baby and two fair little girls rode alternately, a stout, hardy, Manitoban steer and a Canadian pony. She visited the Hudson Bay Company’s Post, in the Northern part of Missoula county, and remaining there some days, proceeded that same season to reside, where she now resides, by one of the lesser streams of the Columbia, in Washington Territory. She thus preceded Mrs. Miller in 1855, one year. Mrs. Brown is a native of the North of Scotland. So much for the women, now for

Gold.

There is now in Missoula county an intelligent Indian woman, who, while digging for water in one of the dry gulches of the arids of Colorado, in 1840, dug by accident, three or four nuggets of gold.[1] This was as you will see eight years in advance of the California discovery by Marshall. When this fact was made known, one hundred armed men were enrolled in one evening on the banks of the Columbia to go and make a prospecting campaign of three or four years into the Arizona wastes, but circumstances accorded not with their going, and the design was left in abeyance. The first proven gold of Montana was found in the vicinity of Flint Creek, tested at Colville, and made known in 1850. The first information of gold in British Columbia was given to the British Government in 1855.

Now for a little of the

Weather.

The severest winter in the West in the memory of our oldest pioneers was that of 1847. Beginning in October, it ended with April. Horses and cattle, deer, antelope and elk were swept away. One instance of its desolating power is known to have been in a little valley of the Columbia river in Washington Territory. Five hundred fat, wild horses grazed there in one band in October, 1846. Before the winter following was over, a sheet of one mile square would have covered all of them, frozen fast where they tried to paw and stand, with little to be seen of them in the deep icy snow, but their backs, ears and manes. Fancy the glancing back of a lean porpoise through or above the foam and any of those horses can be painted. In 1849 the three springs on the present Flathead Reservation were glazed hard in ice in seven consecutive nights, and the Flathead Lake opened late in April. In 1875, two only of said springs were frozen over. Our horses fared well as you know on our steeps (sic) and plains.

At Wallula, the Columbia river is about 1,200 yards broad, with a current of from three to six miles an hour, and wild horses crossed there on the 25^th of March, 1858.

The winter of 1862 was the severest on live stock in the west since 1847, and, as in the winter of 1875, several “reds” and “whites” lost their lives from presumption and carelessness.

The above article appeared in The Missoulian newspaper on July 22, 1875.

[1] Zebulon Pike heard rumors of gold while in Colorado as early as 1807.