Gold was first discovered in what is now known as Montana by Francois Findlay, better known as Be-net-see, a French half-breed, in 1852. He had been one of the early miners in California, having gone there from his home in the Red River country soon after Marshall’s discovery. At this time, however, he was engaged in trapping for furs and trading with the Indians. While travelling along the border of Gold Creek he was induced by certain indications to search for gold, which he found in the gravelly bed of the stream.
Intelligence of this discovery was given to a party of miners who were on their return from California to the States in 1857, and they immediately resolved to visit the creek and spend a winter there in prospecting. James and Granville Stuart and Resin Anderson, since known as prominent citizens of Montana, were of this party, and I insert here as an interesting bit of early history the narrative which Granville Stuart has since furnished of the discovery then made by them:
“We accordingly wintered on the Big Hole River just above what is known as the Backbone, in company with Robert Dempsey, Jake Meeks, Robert Hereford, Thomas Adams, John W. Powell, John M. Jacobs, and a few others. In the Spring of 1858 we went over into the Hell Gate valley, and prospected a little on Benetsee’s or Gold Creek. We got gold everywhere, in some instances as high as ten cents to the pan, but, having nothing to eat save what our rifles furnished us, and no tools to work with (Salt Lake City, nearly six hundred miles distant, being the nearest point at which they could be obtained), and as the accursed Blackfeet Indians were continually stealing our horses, we soon quit prospecting in disgust without having found anything very rich, or done anything to enable us to form a reliable estimate of the richness of the mines.
“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.