Gold Creek: Where Montana's Gold Rush Began

In eighteen fifty-eight, brothers James and Granville Stuart and their partner Reese Anderson found gold in the gravels of this creek. It was one of the earliest gold discoveries in what would become Montana, though the area was then still called eastern Idaho Territory.

A French-Canadian trapper named Francois Finlay had actually spotted color here six years earlier, in eighteen fifty-two, but he kept the find to himself. The Stuarts changed that. By eighteen sixty-two a mining camp had risen at what was then called Gold Creek. The rush that followed spread across the territory, eventually drawing tens of thousands of miners and pushing Montana toward territorial status in eighteen sixty-four. The creek itself is quiet now, but a historical marker stands near the spot where the Stuarts made the pan that started it all.