CHAPTER V.The Mines.
If the influence of the cattle industry was paramount in the development of the frontier region found by the first railways, it should not be concluded that this upthrust of the southern cattle constituted the only contribution to the West of that day.

There were indeed earlier influences, the chief of which was the advent of the wild population of the placer mines.

The riches of the gold-fields hastened the building of the first transcontinental railroads and the men of the mines set their mark also indelibly upon the range.
It is no part of our business here to follow the great discoveries of 1849 in California.

* Neither shall we chronicle the once-famous rushes from California north into the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia; neither is it necessary to mention in much detail the great camps of Nevada; nor yet the short-lived stampede of 1859 to the Pike's Peak country in Colorado.

The rich placer fields of Idaho and Montana, from which enormous amounts were taken, offer typical examples of the mining communities of the Rockies.
* See Stewart Edward White: "The Forty-Niners" ("Chronicles of America").
We may never know how much history remains forever unwritten.