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.
The Richard D. Cotter papers document life in the mining camp of New York Gulch, Meagher County, Montana Territory, as well as travel in the U. S. West during the 1870s. The collection consists of a photocopy of the original diary, dating from November 14, 1875, to February 25, 1876, with entries pertaining primarily to a journey Cotter took through Idaho and Washington territories after leaving New York Gulch. A partial typed transcript, completed by hand, of the same document is also included. The collection also includes a copy of a book recording the membership and financial transactions of the New York Dancing Club with entries from May 29, 1874, through March 15, 1878. Photocopies of two legal documents recording the sale of a mining claim to Cotter from D. W. Culberson in 1870 and the sale of the dancing club building by Harvey Spencer in 1874 complete the collection.
This collection is open for research.
Photocopies of an original diary and a transcription of the diary kept by by Richard D. Cotter, a record book pertaining to a dance club he joined, and two legal documents concerning him and the dance club were donated to Montana State University by Merrill G. Burlingame in 1967. Burlingame had copied some of the material after borrowing it from Dennis and Jeri Gundersdon of Helena, Montana.
The location of all the originals represented in this collection is presently unknown.
This collection was processed 2013 March 14
[Creator Name], [Date of Creation], [Brief Description of Object], Folder [#], Box [#], [Collection Name], [Collection #], Montana State University (MSU) Library, Bozeman, MT