736 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



on the road in 1846, and as soon as the shout, " California gold ! " 

 was heard, the deep-trampled highways across the desert began 

 to be strewed with wrecks of wagons and bodies of horses and 

 oxen. Thousands of men made camp after camp in western Utah 

 without washing out a panful of dust or breaking off a specimen 

 of quartz. Meanwhile Mormon traders, anxious to sell supplies 

 to wagon trains, established small stations along the trail. These 

 traders were often colonists sent out from Salt Lake, under strict 

 orders not to cross the mountains and not to mine for gold. Ac- 

 cording to a letter in the Sacramento Transcript of October 14, 

 1850, the hungry emigrants were often forced to sell " a horse, an 

 ox, or a mule for twelve, ten, or even two pounds of flour," and in 

 1849 matters must have been even worse. 



Placer gold was found in the winter of 1849 in a small gulch 

 near Carson Valley, and one or two men worked the deposit, with 

 poor results. The wandering Mormons abandoned their trading 

 posts, but in 1851 Colonel Reese, from Salt Lake, made a perma- 

 nent settlement. With him came, as teamster, bibulous, feather- 

 brained James Fennimore, afterward known on the Comstock as 

 " Old Virginia," who soon began placer mining in " Gold Cafion." 

 By November the Carson region contained about twenty settlers ; 

 miners, herdsmen, and nomads of every description increased the 

 whole population of western Utah to nearly one hundred. Squat- 

 ter government began, and Congress, with unconscious humor, 

 was petitioned to create a separate Territory for this handful of 

 settlers. The Utah Legislature, with equally unconscious humor, 

 endeavored to hold the region by dividing it into seven huge 

 parallelograms of counties, only one of which appears to have 

 contained any people. The judge sent to Carson County was 

 referred by the Gold CaGon miners to their local " rules, usages, 

 and customs," adopted in the main from California camps. 



Local traditions contain much that is worth passing notice. 

 Israel Mott, for instance, "built his house out of the beds of 

 abandoned emigrant wagons." " Ragtown," on the Carson, re- 

 ceived its name because of vast heaps of rubbish that marked the 

 camp where the incoming host " ran into the water waist deep to 

 drink like animals," and threw their desert-worn garments in 

 heaps on the cacti and sagebrush. The last night of 1853 there 

 was a dance " in the log house over Spafford Hall's store " at the 

 mouth of Gold Canon. Eight women were present, and this 

 number constituted " two thirds of all the white women in west- 

 ern Utah." Of white men there were about a hundred — from 

 Lucky Bill's, Fort Churchill, Twenty-six-Mile Desert, Eagle 

 Ranch, and other settlements, as well as from the placer mines. 



In 1857 the Mormon settlers were called back to Salt Lake by 

 a messenger from the Prophet. Some fifty families left claims. 



