The greatest of American gold stampedes, and perhaps the greatest of the world, not even excepting that of Australia, was that following upon the discovery of gold in California. For twenty years all the West was mad for gold. No other way would serve but the digging of wealth directly from the soil. Agriculture was too slow, commerce too tame, to satisfy the bold population of the frontier. The history of the first struggle for mining claims in California--one stampede after another, as this, that and the other "strike" was reported in new localities--was repeated all over the vast region of the auriferous mountain lands lying between the plains and California, which were swiftly prospected by men who had now learned well the prospector's trade. The gold-hunters lapped back on their own trails, and, no longer content with California, began to prospect lower Oregon, upper Idaho, and Western Montana. Walla Walla was a supply point for a time. Florence was a great mountain market, and Lewiston. One district after another sprang into prominence, to fade away after a year or two of feverish life. The placers near Bannack caught a wild set of men, who surged back from California. Oro Fino was a temporary capital; then the fabulously rich placer which made Alder Gulch one of the quickly perished but still unforgotten diggings. The flat valley of this latter gulch housed several "towns," but was really for a dozen miles a continuous string of miners' cabins. The city of Helena is built on the tailings of these placer washings, and its streets are literally paved with gold even to-day. Here in 1863, while the great conflict between North and South was raging, a great community of wild men, not organized into anything fit to be called society, divided and fought bitterly for control of the apparently exhaustless wealth which came pouring from the virgin mines. These clashing factions repeated, in intensified form, the history of California. They were even more utterly cut off from all the world. Letters and papers from the states had to reach the mountains by way of California, via the Horn or the Isthmus. Touch with the older civilization was utterly lost; of law there was none.