On May 26, 1863, while the great armies of the Civil War slaughtered each other with calculated fury back East, six gold prospectors camped a dozen miles west of Montana's Madison River beside a creek in a draw between the Gravelly Range and Tobacco Root Mountains, way out there in the middle of nowhere. Having escaped their own capture by Crow Indian warriors, and now headed for the gold camps at Bannack, one of those miners, Bill Fairweather, scooped a little dirt into Henry Edgar's pan hoping to find some tobacco "money" in the form of gold. It payed off and what followed was nothing short of mayhem. Within a year 10,000 - 30,000 people, depending on your source, packed into a string of nine communities along a 14-mile stretch in and around Alder Gulch and exploited one of the richest gold deposits in North America. Many got rich. Most didn't.

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