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Gourleys in Montana History homepage
Born: May 4, 1840, Diveruagh County, Ireland
Died: February 10, 1935 in Bozeman
Parents: John
and Mary (Cleland) Gourley
Married:
Never married
Biography:
An
early Montana pioneer, James was born in 1840 in Ireland and
immigrated to America in 1859. Migrating westward to Galena,
Illinois, he traveled up the Missouri River on the steamer Emilie,
arriving at Fort Benton on June 17, 1862.
In 1869-1870, James and Adam "Horn" Miller, Ed Hibbard, and Bart Henderson
prospected for gold in the Beartooth Mountains near present day Cooke
City, as well as
in present-day Yellowstone, and he and his companions named several
features in Yellowstone, including the Hoodoo Basin, and observed Grasshopper Glacier in the
Beartooth Mountains. They viewed Pilot Peak and discovered gold in
Fisher Creek, in the Cooke City area.
In 1874, then living in Bozeman, James
was part of a
146-man Yellowstone River expedition that traveled downriver and
reached Fort C. F. Smith on the Big Horn River before returning to
Bozeman.
In 1881, James and R. Rowland, both of
Bozeman,
applied to the U. S. government for a a lease in Yellowstone Park at
the "Grand Falls of the Yellowstone" for construction of a hotel,
including "right of pasturage and hay meadow."
James remained in the Bozeman area,
and was Recorder of Gallatin County in 1884, as well as Secretary of the
Bear Gulch Placer Mine near Gardiner, the same year. In 1929 he
wrote his reminiscences of the 1869-70 Yellowstone Park expedition, and in
1932, then aged 92, he recounted the
1874 Yellowstone River expedition.
Sources:
"A Reminiscence of James A. Gourley,
Prospector of 1870," Yellowstone
National Park
Archives
James A. Sanders, Society of Montana Pioneers: Constitution, Members
and Officers,
With Portraits and Maps, 1899, 144.
Tom Stout,
Montana, Its Story and Biography, Volume 1 (Chicago:
American
Historical Society, 1921), 287.
Records of applications for leases from 1872-1884, Yellowstone
National
Park Archives
Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena,
Martha Edgerton
Plassmann
Papers, MC78, Writings, 5/1
W. J. Beall Scrapbook 1867-1929, MSU Library, Bozeman
Montana Pioneers Index, housed in the Billings Parmly Library
Montana Death Index, Ancestry.Com
1900 Federal Census, Gardiner, Park County
Aubrey Haines, The Yellowstone Story: A History of Our First
National Park,
Volume 1 (University Press of Colorado, 1996)
Hubert Howe Bancroft,
History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana:
1845-1889
(San Francisco: The History Company, 1890), 623.
Contributions to the Montana Historical Society, Vol. IV, 1903.
Geyser Bob's Yellowstone Pioneers site (cites Haines)
Society of Montana Pioneers, Volume 1 (Index)
Select Peaks of Greater Yellowstone: Pilot Peak
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