“Walter B. Dance and Colonel Hunkins arrived on the tenth of July, and on the fourteenth we had the first election ever held in the country. It was marked by great excitement, but nobody was hurt—except by whiskey. “On the fifteenth, Jack Mendenhall, with several companions, arrived at Gold Creek from Salt Lake City. They set out for the Salmon River mines, but having reached Lemhi, the site of a Mormon fort and the most northern settlement of the ‘Saints,’ they could proceed no farther in the direction of Florence owing to the impassable condition of the roads, so they cached their wagons, packed their goods on the best conditioned of their oxen, and turned off for Gold Creek. They lost their way and wandered about until nearly starved, when they fortunately found an Indian guide, who piloted them through to the diggings. On the twenty-fifth Hauser and his party, having failed to reach Florence, also returned nearly starved to death.” The leading men among this little band of pioneers were admirably qualified to grapple with the varied difficulties and dangers incident to their exposed situation. The brothers Stuart, Samuel T. Hauser, and Walter B. Dance were among the most enterprising and intelligent citizens of Montana, and to the direction which they, by their prudence and counsel, gave to public sentiment, when with twenty or thirty others, they organized the first mining camp in what is now Montana, was the Territory afterwards indebted for the predominance of those principles which saved the people from the bloody rule of assassins, robbers, and wholesale murderers. They were men bred in the hard school of labor. They brought their business habits and maxims with them, and put them rigidly into practice. Having heard of the lawlessness which characterized the Salmon River camps, and of the expulsions which had taken place there, they were on the alert for every suspicious arrival from that direction.