The California population, already rushing about from one boom to another in perpetual prospecting, seized eagerly upon this new district in western Utah. The stage route by way of Sacramento and Placerville was crowded beyond capacity, while hundreds marched over the mountains on foot. "There was no difficulty in reaching the newly discovered region of boundless wealth," asserted a journalistic visitor. "It lay on the public highway to California, on the borders of the state. From Missouri, from Kansas and Nebraska, from Pike's Peak and Salt Lake, the tide of emigration poured in. Transportation from San Francisco was easy. I made the trip myself on foot almost in the dead of winter, when the mountains were covered with snow." Carson City had existed before the great discovery. Virginia City, named for a renegade southerner, nicknamed "Virginia," soon followed it, while the typical population of the mining camps piled in around the two. In 1860 miners came in from a larger area. The new pony express ran through the heart of the fields and aided in advertising them east and west. Colorado was only one year ahead in the public eye. Both camps obtained their territorial acts within the same week, that of Nevada receiving Buchanan's signature on March 2, 1861. All of Utah west of the thirty-ninth meridian from Washington became the new territory which, through the need of the union for loyal votes, gained its admission as a state in three more years. [Illustration: THE MINING CAMP From a photograph of Bannack, Montana, in the sixties. Loaned by the Montana Historical Society.]