If you were to visit Virginia City, Montana, today, you’d find a town that looks much like it did in May 1863. That’s when a rich placer deposit of gold was discovered in Alder Gulch, the streambed behind the town. Miners returning from gold fields in Bannack, Montana, stumbled across the gold, and despite a pledge to keep this find to themselves, word leaked out. Within three months, some 10,000 people inhabited the 14-mile streambed.
One of those people was Nelson Story. Born in Ohio in 1838, he was the youngest son of Ira Story, a Scotsman, and his wife Hanna, an Englishwoman. Growing up, Nelson farmed with his father. He later attended Ohio University, but he never graduated because his parents died.
In 1857, 20-year-old Nelson “lit out on his own,” according to his grandson, Malcolm Story, whose interviews, recorded by a Montana State University student in 1967, were featured in a 2011 Bozeman Chronicle article. Nelson taught school in Ohio briefly, then sought opportunity in the West: first in Illinois, then Nebraska, then Kansas. In 1859, he found work hauling freight. He also dabbled in gold mining near Helena, Montana, that year, but luck was not with him. So he returned to Kansas to resume driving wagons and selling goods in towns.
An 1862 timber hauling job took him to Missouri, where he met 18-year-old Ellen Trent. They married in Kansas and in the spring of 1863 set out for Bannack with 14 pack mules and ox teams loaded with goods for a store to “mine the miners.” When they arrived in June, they discovered the miners had moved to Alder Gulch. So the couple headed for Virginia City, where they set up shop: Ellen baked bread and pies to sell to the miners for $5 in gold dust each; Nelson operated the store, arranged hauling with his pack mules, and mined some Alder Gulch claims he felt had not been fully worked.
During 1864 and 1865, the store, Ellen’s pies, and Story’s gold claims all paid off. Story opened new mines in 1865, employing 50 men day and night. Sources vary, but those mines netted somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000 in gold for the couple by 1866.
According to the family, Story swapped his gold for $40,000 in paper money. He put $30,000 in a bank, sewed $10,000 in his overcoat, and took off for his next venture. Another source says Story hid his treasure in a tin box and headed back east, leaving Ellen with a preacher and his wife. Either way, Story’s objective was to make more money: He intended to cash in on the miners’ hunger for beefsteaks—slim pickings then—by bringing a herd of Texas longhorns up to Montana.
Cattle Drive
With his overcoat money, Story and two Leavenworth, Kansas, friends hired 21 drovers near Fort Worth, Texas, who rounded up some 3,000 longhorns, according to Major John Catlin, who joined the drive in Wyoming and talked about it in a 1912 interview. Cattle drives were nothing new: During the 1850s, Texans drove small herds to gold fields in California and to forts and Indian reservations in the Southwest.Story’s drive began in the spring of 1866. He crossed Texas’ Red River into Oklahoma and followed the Neosho River to the Kansas border. Eastern Kansas farmers didn’t want Texas cattle trampling crops or spreading cattle disease. The Greenwood County sheriff arrested Story, fined him $75, and told him to get his cattle out of the county, according to The Burlington Patriot.
Story turned the herd west, but he eventually drifted back toward Leavenworth. There, on July 4, he bought 15 more freight wagons, 150 oxen, goods for his Virginia City store, and 30 breech-loading Remington rifles for his crew. Leavenworth newspapers were full of “Indian uprisings” to the north. These rifles would prove important: Unlike the typical one-shot muzzleloader of the time, breechloaders were cartridge-fed, capable of firing five to seven times a minute before reloading, thus offering superior firepower.
Broken Treaty
In 1851, the United States engaged eight northern plains peoples—the Lakota (Sioux), Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara—in the Fort Laramie Treaty. The treaty acknowledged that treaty land was Indian land and defined boundaries for each tribe. Lakota territory, for example, extended from the North Platte to the Cannonball River (North Dakota) and west to the Powder River. Cheyenne and Arapaho lands lay south of the North Platte in Wyoming and Colorado. The treaty also provided that, in exchange for $50,000 annually for 50 years, the tribes make peace with one another; permit safe passage for settlers on the Oregon Trail, which ran east to west through Nebraska and Wyoming; and allow forts and roads to be built in their territories.Naturally, the treaty was broken. A Pike’s Peak gold rush sent hordes into Cheyenne country in 1858. Between 1864 and 1866, 3,500 miners and settlers followed the Bozeman Trail, a shortcut blazed off the Oregon Trail in 1863, into Montana’s gold fields. This disturbance altered Powder River buffalo movement in the Indians’ last best hunting grounds. In 1864, Colonel John Chivington’s Denver volunteers massacred Black Kettle’s peaceful Cheyenne village on Sand Creek. And in June 1866, following an 1865 expedition to punish the Indians for vengeance raids, Colonel Henry Carrington led the 18th Infantry into Fort Laramie with orders to build three more forts—Reno, Phil Kearny, and C.F. Smith—along the Bozeman Trail to protect Montana-bound settlers.
These forts infuriated the Indians. Bands of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho congregated on the Tongue River, intent on driving the whites from their country. They focused on attacking soldiers and trail travelers and raiding the forts’ livestock herds, hoping to lure a larger force into a well-laid ambush.
Story’s drovers first encountered Indians in early October, about 10 miles south of Fort Reno. During a hit-and-run raid, a few cattle were stampeded but later recovered. The attack, according to Catlin, was stymied by the cowboys’ breechloaders. A second raid took place the following day. One cowboy was killed, and Story allegedly strapped on his twin .36 caliber Navy revolvers, mounted bareback, and rode out to protect his herd. Two cowboys joined him to pursue the Indians, but the trio recognized they were being led into a trap, and they turned back toward their camp. Near camp, Story saw one of his men nearly surrounded by Indians and summoned his other drovers to help. The cowboys mounted, chased the Indians about 15 miles in a running fight, and returned late with most of their cattle.
On October 7, Carrington ordered Story’s drive stopped three miles south of partially completed Fort Phil Kearny. Carrington also informed Story he could not continue north because the Army required a party of at least 50 for safety, and he had no soldiers to escort them. For the next two weeks, Story and his crew “just had to sit there and twiddle our thumbs,” Catlin said. One night, a herder was killed, with so many arrows in him “he looked like a rotary hairbrush.”
Story, believing the Army would take his herd on the cheap—most of their livestock had been run off by Indian raids—had to act. He wanted to continue. So he put the decision to a vote: All but one cowboy (George Dow) voted to go on. They slipped the herd out after dark on October 21. Carrington was furious. He had Dow arrested, but he dispatched 15 soldiers to bring the party up to proper strength. Two days later, he released Dow, who rejoined the drive.
Making it Through
Story moved his cattle at night and rested during the day. He was attacked twice more but drove the Indians away. Story entered Montana in December and crossed the Yellowstone River into the Gallatin Valley, completing what is believed to be one of the longest cattle drives in history.On December 9, some of Story’s herd and freight wagons arrived in Virginia City, where beef was going for 10 times Story’s costs.
Back at Fort Phil Kearny, on December 21, the Indians sprang their big trap. They attacked a woodcutting wagon train of 90 soldiers five miles from the fort. Carrington ordered a relief column, led by Captain William J. Fetterman, to go to their aid. Fearing a trap, Carrington’s clear orders forbade Fetterman from pursuing the Indians beyond Lodge Trail Ridge. But Fetterman ignored this, chased 10 decoys, led by Oglala Lakota Crazy Horse, away from the wagon train. Beyond the ridge, all of Fetterman’s 81 men were killed.
This disaster ended the government’s effort to defend the Bozeman Trail. In 1868, Oglala Lakota headman Red Cloud signed a peace treaty that returned Indian sovereignty to the Powder River country—the only time the United States conceded to Indian wishes. The Bozeman Trail forts were abandoned, burned by Indians.
Nelson’s Story Legacy
Story soon moved to Bozeman and invested in other businesses—flour mills, banks, real estate—becoming the town’s largest employer. His three-story mansion was often mistaken as the courthouse. He donated land that became Montana State University, and he helped Bozeman grow before getting into politics, becoming the city’s mayor and later lieutenant governor of Montana.Yet Story was no saint. He was accused of defrauding the Crow reservation with less than honest annuity dealings. He had a temper, and he was said to have pistol- or cane-whipped those who angered him.
Perhaps Catlin best summed up the man, “He was always splendidly mounted and would ride like the wind. He would say, ‘Come on boys,’ and ride away. Of course, we’d follow him, we’d have followed him to hell. … There were a good many times when Nelson Story had me guessing. The Indians soon got to know him. Also they feared him. They knew he would go through with whatever he undertook.”
