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major factor in the development of the basin. The picturesque miner with pick, shovel, and pack mule, and the colorful, boisterous mining towns ended with the Black Hills gold rush, but the mining frontier left a heavy imprint on the Rocky Mountain region. Many mining centers disappeared or became ghost towns, but others, such as Helena and Denver, became leading cities of their areas. Free gold was soon skimmed from the surface of the land, but large companies, with machinery and equip- ment that could crush goldbearing ore and wash large amounts of pay dirt, continued to exploit the mineral resources of the mountains. The original gold finds were later augmen ted by the production of silver, copper, lead, coal, tungsten, zinc, chromium, petroleum, molyb- denum, and uranium. These minerals from the Missouri Basin's western zone contributed significantly to the Nation's industrial and economic development. Frontier institutions took root in the mining camps as they had elsewhere. Vigilantism was most marked on the mining frontier because of the larger relative and absolute number of criminal elements. Claim jumpers were handled in the same direct, effective manner as the cattlemen handled rustlers. The rules worked out by miners to regulate such things as disputes over claim boundaries and water use served so well that they later became the basis of State laws. One rule devised by Colorado miners, that did not become part of the State's law, declared that techni- calities should not defeat justice and called for the barring of lawyers from miner's courts. Perhaps the mining frontier had its greatest signi- ficance in the fact that it brought settlers to the Nation's more remote regions much sooner. Settlers did not cross the 20-inch rainfall line onto the High Plains until] 880, bu t ] 00,000 persons poured into Colorado following the gold finds of ]858 and ]859. By 1870, there were substantial areas of settlement in central Colorado and western Montana while the plains were still lightly populated. In that year, the two heavy mineral- producing States had a combined population of over 60,000 while the Dakotas had only 14,000. Further- more, the miners helped bring settlement to the plains by encouraging the construction of roads, railroads, telegraph lines, and strings of outposts across the plains to their communities in the mountains. ~ ~ '?i :.ior.: Landmarks On The Plains 34