One day the foreman ill charge of the workers saw golden specks glittering in the water. Picking up a handful of black gravel from the bed of the stream. he looked more closely, It was gold! By the middle of the summer a gold rush had begun. The governor of California reported to Washington that "mills are lying idle, fields of wheat are open to cattle and horses, houses vacant and farms going to waste" as men and women from all over the territory hurried to the gold fields to make themselves rich. In the next twenty years gold discoveries attracted fortune-seekers to other parts of the far West. By the late 1850s they were milling all the mountains of Nevada and Colorado. By the 1860s they had moved into Montana and Wyoming and by the 1870s they were digging in the Black Hills of the Dakota country. Thousands of miles separated these western mining settlements from the rest of the United States. Look at the map of the country at the end of the Civil War in 1865. ...