As soon as the kitchen and the women's room were done, the men set to work on building corrals for the cattle and horses. In the meantime, the men slept where they would, often enough outdoors. They tried to keep small fires going to keep the animals back, but one morning, in the weak light just before full sunrise, John woke to a black bear sniffing around his head. When the bear saw John's wide eyes, saw that he was awake, it huffed at John, turned, and ran back into the woods to the west.

They built a tack shed and strung wire in the winter, but mostly they tended the cattle, busting ice off the pool from the spring and taking turns at night watching for lions that could come down from the higher elevations to pick off the corralled cattle.

It was too cold to sluice the creek, and the ground was too frozen to dig at either of the claim sites, so they let the mines be for the winter and spent their time planning ways to make a go of what they were now calling “Power Garden.” Charlie and Tom took jobs in town, trudging up and down Rattlesnake Creek in the snow and cold only as often as they had to. John and Jeff tended the stock.

By the spring of 1911, they were working the cattle and the mines steadily. They had sluiced some flake gold from the highest mine, not much, just about a hundred dollars’ worth, but a start. They then went in search of the source of the flake. They moved upstream, steadily diverting the stream and scratching at the creekbed, hoping to uncover the vein of gold or at least some nugget.

It was a good area for mining, and they had six neighbors who were mining gold with varying degrees of success. No one had yet uncovered the thick vein of ore they were hoping for, but two of the mines had produced enough to warrant two neighbors buying ball mills to process the rock for more flake gold.

A ball mill was a large, hollow ball filled with small, solid iron balls. The large ball could be turned with the aid of an engine or water, horse, ox, or even manpower. It would be filled with rock and then turned. The iron balls, which started out the size of a child's head and wore down, would tumble inside the ball, crushing the rock so that it could then be sluiced for the gold.