Fall was coming on, and after digging out a small amount of dust, the party deemed it wise to return to the settlements for a more thorough outfitting. Accordingly, they went to Walla Walla and located with J. C. Smith, to whom they imparted their secret. So impressed was Mr. Smith with the tidings that he organised a party of fifteen, with whom he returned just at the opening of the winter of that same year, 1860. Soon shut in by deep snows in inaccessible mountains, the little company built five rude huts, and in the intervals of the storms they dug for gold along the streams, meeting with such success that in March Mr. Smith made his way to Walla Walla with $800 in gold-dust. The dust was sent to Portland. Now ensued another gold excitement and stampede almost equal to that of '49 in California. As the miners rushed into Idaho, every other species of industry rushed up the River with them. The cowboy came side by side with the miner. In fact, already following close on the heels of the Indian war, had come an inrush of cattle, horses, and sheep. During the last years of the decade of the fifties, stockmen had driven from the Willamette Valley thousands of head of stock to the rich pasture lands of the Walla Walla, Umatilla, and Yakima. When the gold discoveries of 1860 and 1861 became known, the activities of the cowboys were multiplied, added bands of stock were driven in, all the wild and extravagant features of a combined cowboy and mining age, vendors of "chain-lightning and forty-rod," gamblers, prostitutes, murderers,--and with them missionaries and teachers,--became reproduced again on the shores of the Columbia, Snake, Clearwater, Salmon, Walla Walla, and other rivers of the Inland Empire. It was another of those wild eras in which the worst and the best that are in human nature jostled each other at every turn.