Virginia City, the Strategic Necessity
Gold nuggets from Virginia City
Given by Capt. James Liberty Fisk to President Lincoln in 1863
It's May and it's cold on the eastern slopes of the Idaho Rockies (the part that will soon become Montana Territory). "The cold will slow down the rattlesnakes", thought Bill, "They may even appreciate the warmth of my hands". Bill stooped and bent over, and two of his captors lunged toward him until they saw him slowly reach under a wary rattlesnake and scoop it up. He let the snake run through his fingers and coil around his arms. The Indians guarding him leapt back, astonished.
Quickly the voices of his Indian guards attracted the attention of the rest of the band and all were focused on Bill Fairweather and his rattler as he scooped a second from under a sage bush. The two rattlesnakes were enjoying the warmth of his arms, while he held the rapt attention of the Indians and his fellow captives. In this way the band of Indians and whites entered the village and encountered the chief and the medicine man.
The sudden capture of the attention and awe of the Indian leaders led to an immediate gathering in the grand lodge of the medicine man. Before entering the lodge, Bill went to the edge of the village and released his two snakes. Not one of his captors took a step to restrain him. In the center of the big ceremonial lodge was a sacred tree and a fire. The Indians held a ceremony which required several solemn passages around the sacred tree. This was followed by long discussion, including a speech of several hours made to the captives. Only one of the party could understand the words, and they made no sense even to him.
The captives were required to march around the sacred tree several times and then were banished from the lodge to permit their fate to be decided in their absence. They were guarded while they stood back to back in two lines of three men each. Bill said that if the damn Indians made him walk around that bush again he'd pull it up and whack the medicine man with it. Well, they did and he did, and the immediate heavy silence was frightening. Evidently the Indians handled like the rattlesnakes. They were so awed by Bill Fairweather's audacity that they let them all go. And leave they did. Quickly.
They concealed themselves as they traveled across the mountains and then down into a creek bottom tangled with alder, according to Henry Edgar's account. There, well concealed, they camped and even made a small cooking fire with reasonable hope the Indians would not discover them. Before dark they checked the creek for gold and discovered the largest placer gold deposit ever discovered. Unfortunately gold has distinct characteristics in each locality, so they only spent a few grains of their new gold and the entire populace of Bannack knew that they had a new discovery. In but a few days, their campsite became Varina, Idaho Territory, and later, Virginia City, Montana Territory. The bloody war blazing away in the States wasn't even a thought.
NOTICE of the 1864 James Stuart trip to search for Gold
The 1863 trip resulted in the discovery at Alder Gulch
Back in the States, scenes of equal horror occurred every day on the battlefield.
While the majority of emigrants coming north from California and from Salt Lake City were mainly loyal to the Confederacy, a greater majority simply wanted to forget what was happening back in the States. Often on the streets of the towns and in the wagon trains fights would break out. They were usually concerning secessionist issues and often were dropped as quickly as they began. In Oro Fino (the Idaho side of the Rockies) two Union soldiers were shot in a bar as they drank. This being Union territory, the only Confederates (other than a possible undercover unit) were drifters, wounded, deserters, civilians avoiding the call to arms, women and older persons, and a few Confederate soldiers whose mission was to stop gold from flowing into the Union coffers and to see to it that gold did flow south to support the Rebel war effort. A Famous example of the kinds of Confederates who populated Virginia City, Montana was a Missourian, Mark Twain, who deserted from the Confederate Army and went to the other Virginia City, in Nevada Territory, where silver was shipped to the south. Union troops were a rarity because they could not be spared from the war in the States. The loyalty of the people in Idaho Territory was definitely Democrat and secessionist. For the Republican Administration to preserve it and its incredibly strategic liquid assets of gold for the Union cause was a major concern back in Washington. In September, 1863 while thirty five thousand Americans lay dead or wounded at Chickamauga Tennessee, one of the Civil War's bloodiest battles, Sidney Edgerton, arrived in Bannack, Idaho. He was the person who would assure that the gold of Virginia City would support th cause of his friend, Abraham Lincoln, in the wilds of the remote and peaceful mountains.
Typical of the flow of emigrants was one Paris Pfouts. A resident of Missouri, he was an ardent secessionist. To protect his family from reprisals expressed against his outspoken Confederate stance, he left them with relatives and migrated to Colorado. Later, when he heard of the money to be made as a merchant in the gold fields, he left for Virginia City in eastern Idaho Territory. He arrived in time to have a major impact upon its history. He was rigid about his political convictions but glad to settle in, far from the war back in the States.
Most of the inhabitants were in Virginia City for "six weeks", the mythical time which it would take them to make their fortune and move on. Motivated by "gold fever" and survival, they worked harder than one can imagine, and under the worst of conditions. To understand the culture of the communities which comprised the Territory of Idaho and later the eastern slope called "Montana Territory" one must understand how the miners lived and died, and how and by whom they were exploited.
Placer Mining
Finding this beautiful streak of bright gold in strips across the black sand is exciting. It can add up to a grand amount. But even when it doesn't, the few cents of gold which show up motivate the miner to work harder and harder in a mindless sort of way similar to the obsession called "compulsive gambling". Many miners worked long hard hours barely making a "living". They worked against incredible odds. In Virginia City the water froze early, or it deluged down Alder Creek, flooding the mines and washing out sluice boxes and claims. Miners suffered frost bite and lost their feet and hands. Some were drowned in their flooded claims. Many dug shafts down to bed rock to search for the gold, and then dug drifts in the sand and gravel along the bed rock, picking the gold out of cracks in the rock. Often these shafts and tunnels caved in on the miners. Some were rescued and others died. Frequently they would bring good gravel to the surface to find someone stealing the nuggets from their sluice boxes.
The work was hard and often unrewarding, but they managed to accumulate little leather bags (called "pokes") filled with gold. Thirsty, they would give some for beer or whiskey. Hungry they might buy an egg. Whatever they bought, from sex to mining equipment, the merchant took a heavy percentage of the miner's hard earned gold. Then there were the thieves who managed to steal from the unwary, and the robber and murderer who would bushwhack the traveler with his "six week's" take. The prostitutes made so much money that they had nothing to use it for. When the Masonic Temple was built the "ladies of the night" contributed great sums of gold for the building. It was clear to everyone that the miner did all the work, while the banker, merchant, thief, barkeep, prostitute and road agent took all the spoils. Already they knew the drill. The war was the same. The poor fought and suffered so the rich could live easy. This led to constant resentment and frequent fights, among the miners and with the merchants. The experience the miners had with their diggings and the leeches who stole their gold merely emphasized what they had always known. The war was exactly the same. The rich Northerner could buy out. In the South, farmers who did not own slaves were forced to fight and die while wealthy slave owners were exempt and stayed home to prosper through the suffering and death of the poor.
Most of the miners had had experience with the war and knew it to be "The rich man's war and the poor man's fight". The Federals often had to rely upon a draft. Early in the war there was a steady stream of enlistments, on both sides. But as the war went on, while the southerners enlisted to defend their homeland, the North saw less and less point to the bloody and costly war. The unpopular draft was how the army was raised. And the draft had an "out" if you had the money. For $300 a person whose number came up could buy out of serving. Since your number could come up again, it was often preferable to hire a substitute to take your place, often at a far lower cost. Note that $300 was a good laborer's annual salary, so a man could support his family for a year by being drafted in place of a rich man. It was by this means that large numbers of relatively wealthy men could emigrate to Virginia City with wagon loads of supplies with which to steal the hard earned gold of the miner. It was by this means that Paris Pfouts could leave his family in Missouri and depart for Colorado so that his family would not have to suffer as a result of his outspoken support of the Confederate cause. It was by this means that Paris Pfouts could travel to Virginia City through Salt Lake City, be stopped by the Union Army and then be permitted to travel on after merely signing a statement of loyalty to the Union. He was obviously a wealthy man and not a draft dodger. Such men did not have to serve in the army because of the high number of enlistments early in the war and because they could easily and legally pay their way out of the draft. After all, even Abraham Lincoln (who was exempt from the draft) paid a substitute to fight in the army in his place.
Thousand of dollars were printed by both the Union and the Confederate governments. These pieces of paper had no backing at all. They were worth only that value which people assigned them in their economic commerce. It is worth noting that the same is true of the value of gold. When Dimsdale published The Vigilantes of Montana his broadside advertising the book gave the price as "$2.25 in greenbacks, $2.00 in good gulch gold".
With the universal recognition of gold as a medium of exchange and as a store of value (the two often opposed elements of money in any form), the flow of gold mined in Virginia City, Montana into the economy of the North, and the prevention of that flow of gold into the economy of the South became of strategic concern to the President and Legislature of the United States. Achieving that imbalance of flow of gold to the warring parties increased the strength of the industrial economy in the North and weakened the already minimal industrial aspects of the economy of the South. This resulted in an overwhelmingly winning balance of power for the North in its efforts during the Civil War. Without question, the gold from Virginia City had a pivotal effect on the economics of the North and its victory. In short, the statement that "Virginia City gold won the Civil War for the North" is valid.
In Virginia City, gold was often exchanged for greenbacks because they were easier to conceal when a miner decided to take his earnings back home to the states. Large quantities of gold moved through the merchants and the bankers. It constantly flowed back to the "states" and doubtless much of it also flowed into the coffers of the Confederate States of America. The wealth represented by the gold enabled industrialists to build factories (the hardware used on President Lincoln's casket was produced by the Sargent family's 1864 factory in New Haven, Connecticut), to establish railroads and to produce arms and materiel for war. The combination of the Virginia City gold, the general prosperity and the financial solidity of the government in the North made the greenbacks, which Congress issued with no backing, desirable even in foreign countries. As part of this overall effort, industrialists, President Lincoln, and his government accelerated the western expansion. The Homestead Act of 1862 can be viewed as part of the North's war effort. It encouraged soldiers who had done their stint or who had been wounded, and others who were exempt or who had purchased their freedom from the draft, and their families, to move west. Strategically, it was important to increase the Union minority in the mountain northwest. The Rebel population far outnumbered those with Union allegiance in many areas, particularly in Virginia City. To protect the gold, loyal emigrants were needed, as well as loyal authorities for the territories.
Captain James Liberty Fisk led a contingent of United States troops to protect emigrants traveling from Saint Paul on several occasions for this express purpose, paid for by a Congress burdened with other war expenses. In 1863, Fisk took two gold nuggets to President Lincoln. In 1864, the Chief Justice of Idaho Territory, Sidney Edgerton, went to Washington with a display of Virginia City gold to show the President and Congress. These displays of wealth raised the respect for the Union greenback considerably, as well as increasing the support for whatever might be necessary to protect the gold from rebel hands and deliver it to the Union.
Overall, the wealth and prosperity fed back on itself and increased the economy, industry and ability to wage war in the Union cause. The glitter of the gold served a vital purpose in this powerful dynamic.
One of the nasty facts about Civil War economics and social change is that while the South was fighting (perhaps unawarely) to preserve the already disintegrating way of life of the "Old South" (including slavery), the facts of this new type of warfare required the South to abandon that way of life. It was a classic "no win" situation, because the more powerfully the war was prosecuted by the Confederacy the more effectively the South was replacing the old way of life with the substance of the Industrial Revolution.
The war drew off large numbers of the southern working class, while slave owners themselves were exempt from conscription because they were needed to manage their slaves and to protect their families from the dangers of increasing agitation by the blacks. In spite of the known danger that knowledge caused increased will for independence, slaves were slowly allowed to enter industry, producing just one of the fatal blows to the dissolution of the Old Southern Way of Life. Arming them to fight for the Confederate cause was a frightening fantasy. Overall, fear of the slaves greatly increased as the manpower needed to "keep them in their place" was drawn off to fight the war. Here was a society, desperate to resist the industrialization which was happening around it, confronting a savage war which required this new industrialization. Resistance to the industrialization would assure the loss of the war. Acceptance of the industrialization would assure the loss of the major "cause" for which the war was being fought, the way of life (including slavery) which had been enjoyed by some in the Old South.
To consider it in another way, the culture of the old southern way of life did not contain the motivations required to pull off the Industrial Revolution, while an Industrial Revolution in the South was required for them to fight the war effectively. Conversely, in the North the society had been for some time motivated as a whole to bring in the Industrial Revolution and all its benefits for peace and prosperity, as well as for war. Notice the bales of cotton on the wharves of the Confederacy. They were sitting there idle, waiting to be shipped to the mills of industrialized England or to the mills of industrialized New England. Granted, these mills suffered from the Union blockade, but southern life stopped as "King" cotton became idle.
The obvious conclusion is that, had the South won the Civil War, the results would have been exactly the same. The South had already crossed the threshold of the Industrial Revolution, but they crossed it impoverished and demoralized, as the Old South and its disruptive slavery crumbled before their eyes. Slavery could remain in this society only as a frightening vestige of its former self. The triumphant South would be open to carpet baggers invited to come to pick the bones of a disintegrating society.
Looking back at the horrors of that period of time, it is sad to realize the powerful role played by the dynamics of the social systems struggling in this barbaric manner. Within those battling dynamics is the irresistible force of economics. From here they can be easily represented by bales of cotton sitting idle on the wharves of the blockaded South, in contrast with the gold nuggets being held in the hands of Lincoln and his legislators, thankful that this wealth of Virginia City gold was flowing to the North (with the help of the Vigilantes), and not to the South, so that the war could soon be won and over, with the borders of the nation intact.
Art Brown
Bummer Dan
During the winter of 1863-64, the very time that Jeremiah Johnson was in Virginia City looking for the Vigilante strangler X. Beidler to find out where the Blackfeet chief Wolf was, the "enemies" back in the States, who were slaughtering each other, had found an abandoned cabin located between their adjascent armies. By night, the Confederate patrol occupied it, lighting the stove for comfort. By day they left and the Union patrol occupied it. Each side began to make sure that there was enough stove wood for the comfort of the "enemy" patrol which would soon move in. At the same time in Montana Territory, Jeremiah Johnson and Del Gue, having found Wolf's camp in Willow Creek north of Virginia City (thanks to X. Beidler) led their band of forty mountain men into a bloody battle, during which all seventy Indians died, with two mountain men wounded. Johnson's horse, Hawkin rifle and his side arms were recovered and Wolf's head was left on a stake in the middle of the trail. This activity was a matter of course. It would hardly seem an "act of violence" in the setting in which it occurred. While the war was a frequent source of violence among the citizens of the west, it was hardly the central issue. If two actively warring patrols could peacefully and courteously share an outpost, the citizens of the west could carefully avoid the fact of a war between them. Most of the time.
Jeremiah Johnson left the Territory within a few weeks of his war with Wolf, and with a group of trappers he enlisted in the Union Army in St. Louis. He was quickly identified as a sharpshooter and used as a sniper. This gave him the freedom to get himself in trouble. In the height of battle he disappeared and soon returned with about forty Indian scalps. He was slightly indiscriminate. His killings were half Union Indians and half Confederate Indians, while to him an Indian was an Indian. He was court marshaled and forced to give up his trophies. He returned to Montana after an honorable discharge from the Army and became Sheriff of Red Lodge.
The next (it's the last) file has the final sections of The Civil War in Montana
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Tom Sargent
P.O. Box 134
Virginia City MT 59755 Tel. (406) 843-5503
or
22A Lakeshore Drive #2
Farmington CT 06032 Tel. (860) 674-1635
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