Richard D. Cotter papers, 1870-1878

Richard D. "Dick" Cotter was born in Ireland on September 17, 1842. Cotter worked as a packer for the Whitney surveying party to California from 1860 to 1864. He ascended Mount Tyndall and discovered Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Mount Cotter (now in Kings Canyon National Park) is named for him. He also participated in the Western Union Telegraph Expedition of the Yukon, British Columbia, and Alaska. It is possible Cotter originally came to Montana Territory as a soldier at Fort Shaw prior to 1870, but he was certainly in New York Gulch by April of that year, where he was a member of the New York Dancing Club. In 1875, he left New York Gulch and traveled to Washington Territory. By 1880 he was back placer mining in Cooper Gulch in Meagher County. For many years, he lived in York, Montana, an unincorporated community northeast of Helena, Montana. Cotter spent the last eight years of his life in the county hospital in Helena, where he died March 12, 1927.

New York Gulch was a mining camp in the Trout Creek mining district of Meagher County, Montana. The town site was established around 1866 and from then until 1869 the camp was in its heyday with thousands working placer claims in the area. In 1874, the camp boasted a social dancing club with its own meeting hall. The quartz deposits proved less profitable as time went on and by 1880 the number of inhabitants was forty-nine.