“We then went out on the road near Fort Bridger, Utah Territory, where we remained until the Fall of 1860. In the Summer of that year a solitary individual named Henry Thomas, better known to the pioneers of Montana, however, as ‘Gold Tom’ or ‘Tom Gold Digger,’ who had been sluicing on the Pend d’Oreille River, came up to Gold Creek and commenced prospecting. He finally hewed out two or three small sluice boxes and commenced work on the creek up near the mountains. He made from one to two dollars a day in rather rough, coarse gold, some of the pieces weighing as high as two dollars. “After spending a few weeks there, he concluded that he could find better diggings, and about the time that we returned to Deer Lodge (in 1860), he quit sluicing and went to prospecting all over the country. His favorite camping ground was about the Hot Springs, near where Helena now stands. He always maintained that that was a good mining region, saying that he had got better prospects there than on Gold Creek. He told me after ‘Last Chance,’ ‘Grizzly,’ ‘Oro Fino,’ and the other rich gulches of that vicinity had been struck, that he had prospected all about there, but it was not his luck to strike any of those big things. “About the twenty-ninth of April, 1862, P. W. McAdow, who, in company with A. S. Blake and Dr. Atkinson (both citizens of Montana), had been prospecting with but limited success in a small ravine which empties into Pioneer Creek, moved up to Gold Creek and commenced prospecting about there. About the tenth of May they found diggings in what we afterwards called Pioneer Creek. They got as high as twenty cents to the pan, and immediately began to prepare for extensive operations. At this time ‘Tom Gold Digger’ was prospecting on Cottonwood Creek, a short distance above where the flourishing burgh of Deer Lodge City now stands, but finding nothing satisfactory, he soon moved down and opened a claim above those of McAdow & Co. In the meantime we had set twelve joints of 12 × 14 sluices, this being the first string of regular sluices ever set in the Rocky Mountains north of Colorado. [Illustration: JAMES STUART _Who set the first sluices in Montana_ ] “On the twenty-fifth of June, 1862, news reached us that four steamboats had arrived at Fort Benton loaded with emigrants, provisions, and mining tools, and on the twenty-ninth Samuel T. Hauser, Frank Louthen, Jake Monthe, and a man named Ault, who were the advance guard of the pilgrims to report upon the country from personal observation, came into our camp. After prospecting on Gold Creek for a few days, Hauser, Louthen, and Ault started for the Salmon River mines by way of the Bitter Root Valley. Jake Monthe, that harum-scarum Dutchman who wore the hat that General Lyon had on when he was killed in the battle of Wilson’s Creek, continued prospecting along Gold Creek.