Of the beginnings of the Idaho camps there have trickled back into record only brief, inconsequent, and partial stories.

The miners who surged this way and that all through the Sierras, the upper Cascades, north into the Selkirks, and thence back again into the Rockies were a turbulent mob.
Having overrun all our mountain ranges, following the earlier trails of the traders and trappers, they now recoiled upon themselves and rolled back eastward to meet the advancing civilization of the westbound rails, caring nothing for history and less for the civilized society in which they formerly had lived.

This story of bedlam broken loose, of men gone crazed, by the sudden subversion of all known values and all standards of life, was at first something which had no historian and can be recorded only by way of hearsay stories which do not always tally as to the truth.
The mad treasure-hunters of the California mines, restless, insubordinate, incapable of restraint, possessed of the belief that there might be gold elsewhere than in California, and having heard reports of strikes to the north, went hurrying out into the mountains of Oregon and Washington, in a wild stampede, all eager again to engage in the glorious gamble where by one lucky stroke of the pick a man might be set free of the old limitations of human existence.
So the flood of gold-seekers--passing north into the Fraser River country, south again into Oregon and Washington, and across the great desert plains into Nevada and Idaho--made new centers of lurid activity, such as Oro Fino, Florence, and Carson.

Then it was that Walla Walla and Lewiston, outfitting points on the western side of the range, found place upon the maps of the land, such as they were.
Before these adventurers, now eastbound and no longer facing west, there arose the vast and formidable mountain ranges which in their time had daunted even the calm minds of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

But the prospectors and the pack-trains alike penetrated the Salmon River Range.