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In 1856, twenty-year-old John Carten (born McCarten), my second great granduncle, left his home in Pembroke, Maine and traveled to Australia, more than fifteen thousand miles away.  John was searching for gold and Australia was the place to be.  The search for gold never ended and John’s life was a real-life cowboy movie filled with one adventure after another.  

Cousin Kathy Barry and I have been researching John Carten for years.  We started with two biographies.  The Society of Montana Pioneers, founded to document the men and women who settled in Montana before it became a “Territory” in 1864, included John’s biography in their 1899 publication.  An even more detailed biography appeared in Michael A. Leeson’s History of Montana in 1885. 

His biographies reveal that John’s searching took him from the United States to Australia and back, all over the western part of the United States and even into Canada.  These travels, during the second half of the nineteenth century, were extraordinarily challenging and extremely dangerous.  He must have been fearless. 

Recently, we found dozens of newspaper articles detailing John’s day to day activities on the rare occasions when he stayed in one place.  Just as he covered much territory in his travels, John pursued many activities wherever he happened to be.  He never stopped.   

John truly was a pioneer.  There is no doubt he was the first person in many places as evidenced by the highpoint in his career, his discovery of silver and lead in Burke, Idaho, in 1884.  He sold what became known as the Tiger Mine for $35,000 which today would be worth close to a million dollars. 

Along the way John was a rancher, farmer, hotel and restaurant owner, stage coach station operator, saloon keeper, territorial convention delegate, real estate dealer, and, of course, always a prospector. 

We have no photographs of John, but believe he must have looked like a stereotypical cowboy.  Back then cowboys wore loose fitting cotton shirts, wool trousers, chaps, and usually a vest with pockets.  In a Montana winter, John would have needed a wool or canvas coat.  And, of course, he would have worn “cowboy” boots and hat.  I like to think he looked like this: 

But, then, he spent much of his time panning for gold and that called for a somewhat different fashion statement. 

However he looked, John was a world-class adventurer. 

When John left the United States, he, more than likely, first sailed the three thousand miles to England.  Next, he would have taken the “Clipper Route” down the eastern Atlantic to the Equator, around the Cape of Good Hope, and east to Australia.   The ship would have covered more than 13,000 miles and been at sea three to four months IF it made good time.  The voyage was very dangerous because of the ship’s exposure to high winds, waves and icebergs.   

Unfortunately, we know nothing of John’s time in Australia.  National Geographic describes the Australian gold rush as one of the biggest in history.  It started in New South Wales and attracted hundreds of thousands of “diggers” who, like John, came from all over the world.   Ultimately, the gold rushes in Australia transformed that country…the population doubled within ten years and the economy soared.   

But John did not stay.  He returned to the United States six years later.  Rather than return via the long Clipper Route around Cape Horn, he instead sailed to San Francisco.  Somehow word that John was in California reached his mother, Sophia, in Maine.  In the middle of November of 1862, Sophia posted an ad in the “Missing Friends: Irish Immigrants Advertisements” section of the Boston Pilot.  She wrote,  “Any information about (John) will be thankfully received by his afflicted mother.”    

His biography says once back in the United States, he traveled the California coast and on to the Arizona Territory.  His arrival coincides with the Colorado River Gold Rush (1862-1864) in the Arizona Territory.  This was the middle of the Civil War and prospectors only entered the Arizona Territory accompanied by California military troops.  The area was a totally unknown wilderness controlled by the Apaches.  Again,  John was fearless. 

After eight months in the Arizona Territory,  John returned to San Francisco.  From there, he took off for Boise, Idaho.  The timing is revealing.  In 1863, United States troops established Fort Boise close to the Oregon Trail, an east west wagon route and emigrant trail which connected the Missouri River Valley to Oregon.  Fort Boise was located at a point which intersected a major road serving a then booming mining area.     

The distance from San Francisco to Boise was “only” 600 miles, but there were no railroads and few passable roads.   There were only stagecoach and Pony Express routes.  We do not know if John took the stagecoach or rode his own horse.  Below is a photograph of an old stage coach trail in California.  Imagine traveling all over the west on roads such as this, some better and some worse.  Maybe beltway traffic isn’t so bad!

John did not remain long in Boise.  On 26 May 1863, gold was discovered in what soon became the Montana Territory in a place called Alder Gulch.  Incredibly, within three months, ten thousand people descended upon that area.  There were no highways, not even waterways to Alder Gulch.  Still what became known as the “Fourteen Mile City” emerged along the Gulch.  John would not have missed that! 

Again, though, he did not stay long.  He soon traveled up to the Courtenay Mines on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.  There was a gold rush in full swing there…the Cariboo Gold Rush. 

But what would become the Montana Territory very quickly drew John back.  A map from this period of time shows a much different United States.  Idaho stretched from Washington all to the way to what was then Dakota, not North and South, but just Dakota.  

Then on 26 May 1864 the Montana Territory was organized out of the Idaho Territory by an act of Congress and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln.   John spent the following winter of 1864-65 at the Hudson Bay Trading Post on the Flathead Indian Reservation.  This lovely watercolor from the Museum of Fine Arts collection in Boston was painted in the period John was there.

In the spring of 1865, there were reports of fabulous gold finds on the upper Colorado River in Montana.  In March of 1865,  John traveled in Montana to Helena via Blackfoot.  Today the trip from Blackfoot to Helena is three hours by car. He went on to Washington Gulch, Yellowstone, Big Horn and Elk Creek County. 

By 1866, John had been traveling for ten years.  He went around the world and back again only to travel all around the West. But in 1866 at the age of 30, he bought a ranch at the mouth of Gold Creek in Montana and more or less settled down!  

This Google Earth map shows the amazing distances traveled by John all between 1862 and 1866.

TO BE CONTINUED:  We have had great fun learning about John Carten.  His life will continue to unfold in subsequent posts.

CREDITS:

A huge shout-out to Kathy Barry who has been an invaluable ally in researching John Carten.  Kathy is meticulous in documenting John’s life.  Her timeline has been essential to this post.  

SOURCES: 

Leeson, Michael A. (1885). History of Montana, 1739-1885. A History Of Its Discovery And Settlement, Social And Commercial Progress, Mines And Miners, Agriculture And Stock-Growing, Schools And Societies, Indians And Indian Wars, Vigilantes, Courts Justice, Newspaper Press, Navigation, Railroads And Statistics, Histories Of Counties, Cities, Villages And Mining Camps; Also, Personal Reminiscences Of Great Historic Value; Views Of The Territory In Our Times, And Portraits Of Pioneers And Representative Men In The Professions And Trades. Chicago: Warner Beers and Company. Archived from the original on 2011-09-29. Retrieved 2018-11-06. 

Ancestry.com. Montana Pioneers Society [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004. Original data: Sanders, James U., ed. Society of Montana Pioneers. Vol. I. n.p.: Society of Montana Pioneers, 1889. 

Jones, Edward Gardner (1894). The Oregonian’s Handbook of the Pacific Northwest, The Oregonian Publishing Co. Digital Image. Indiana University, https://books.google.com/books?id=FIduAAAAMAAJ&dq=john+carten+and+tiger+mine&source=gbs_navlinks_s,2008. 

Grabill, J. C. H., photographer. (ca. 1888) “The Cow Boy” / J.C.H. Grabill, photographer, Sturgis, Dakota Ter. South Dakota, ca. 1888. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/99613920/. 

Grabill, J. C. H., photographer. (1889) “We have it Rich.” Washing and panning gold, Rockerville, Dak. Old timers, Spriggs, Lamb and Dillon at work. Rockerville South Dakota, 1889. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/99613951/. 

“The Clipper Route”, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ClipperRoute.png. 

Ancestry.com. Searching for Missing Friends: Irish Immigrant Advertisements Placed in “The Boston Pilot,” 1831-1920. Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2013. 

Warren, G. K., Freyhold, E., Bien, J., Fillmore, M. & United States War Department. (1863) Map of the territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean; ordered by Jeff’ Davis, Secretary of War to accompany the reports of the explorations for a railroad route. [Washington, D.C., War Dept] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71000831/. 

PKM, photographer (2009). “Old Santa Susana Stage Road”, California. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 unported license. 

Tofft, Peter Peterson, Painter, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Watercolors and Drawings, 1800–1875 ACCESSION NUMBER 53.2464.