The Other California Gold: Trinity County
Placer Mining, 1848-1962
Technical Service Center
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Denver, Colorado
Prepared by
Jim Bailey, Ph.D.
Historian
Project Tracking No: 07-NCAO-211
August 2008
Table of Contents
Purpose of this Historic Context Statement ..............................................................
1
Historic Source Materials and Research: An Overview ...........................................
3
Introduction: Trinity County Placer Gold .................................................................
6
Physical Setting and Geology ...................................................................................
8
Trinity Placer Gold I: Pick, Pan, Rocker, and Wheel ..............................................
10
Trinity Placer Gold II: By Any Hydraulic Means Necessary ..................................
21
Trinity Placer Gold III: “The Golden Fleet” .............................................................
41
Conclusion and Significance: Trinity County Placer Gold Mining, 1848-1962 .......
61
Evaluation, Design, and Research, National Register Criteria and Eligibility .........
65
Integrity and Criteria of Eligibility ...........................................................................
70
Research Design and Questions ................................................................................
76
Glossary of Placer Mining Terms .............................................................................
79
Bibliography ..............................................................................................................
83
i
Figure 1: Regional location of the Trinity River Restoration Project ......................
90
Figure 2: 500 year flood plain delineated along the Trinity River near
Lewiston ....................................................................................................
91
Figure 3: 500 year flood plain delineated along the Trinity River near
Douglas City .............................................................................................
92
Figure 4: 500 year flood plain delineated along the Trinity River near Helena ......
93
Table 1: Monetary Value, Mineral Production, Trinity County, 1880-1962 ...........
95
Table 2: Trinity County’s Percentage of California Gold Production,
1880-1932 ............................................................................................
97
Table 3: Placer Mining Claims Within Area of Potential Effect (APE) Map
of APE, Mine Claims by Number ...............................................................
99
Table 4: APE Sites Recorded During Trinity River Restoration Projects ................
103
ii
Photo on front cover: Estabrook Dredge on the Trinity River above Old Trinity Center.
Plate 1: A panner played a key role at a test site determining color of ore;
Typical miner – Minersville area ................................................................
11
Plate 2: A typical miners tunnel, 1906 Coffee Creek ..............................................
12
Plate 3: Downtown Lewiston and old Lewiston Bridge, 1916 ................................
16
Plate 4: Hydraulic mining at Canyon Creek near Junction City ..............................
23
Plate 5: Siphon to bring water to a hydraulic mine in Trinity County .....................
30
Plate 6: Tail end of a wooden mining flume ............................................................
31
Plate 7: Hydraulic mining in the Lewiston Area, Scenes 1 .....................................
39
Plate 8: Hydraulic mining in the Lewiston Area, Scenes 2 .....................................
40
Plate 9: Poker Bar dredge, one of the early types of dredges ..................................
42
Plate 10: Payne and Wade Dredge, the first dredge at Trinity Center .....................
43
Plate 11: A keystone drill prospecting near Trinity Center 1915-1920;
A keystone drill prospecting for gold near Trinity Center ........................
47
Plate 12: Trinity (Mary Smith) Dredge near Lewiston ............................................
50
Plate 13: Lewiston (Valdor) Dredge at Junction City ..............................................
51
Plate 14: Pacific Gold Dredge hull near Spring Town, 1915;
Pacific Gold Dredge at Coffee Creek ........................................................
52
Plate 15: Weaver Dredging Company drag-line dredge on Weaver Creek,
1937-1940 .................................................................................................
1937-1941
Plate 16: Tailings piles at the mouth of Oregon Gulch near Junction City .............
71
Plate 17: Drag-line dredge abandoned at Hayfork ...................................................
72
iii
57
Purpose of this Historic Context Statement
The nineteenth century California Gold Rush is well documented in the American
historic record, with the Sierra Nevada mines getting the bulk of attention from historians
of all specialties: social, political, cultural, economic, environmental, technological,
mining, and gender, to name a few. On the other hand, the state’s isolated northwestern
counties get little attention as to their contributions to California’s gold economy.
Counties like Siskiyou and Trinity had their own mineral extraction-fueled economies
similar to the Sierra Nevada gold-producing counties. But there are two major
differences that work against these counties: isolation from the Sierra mainstream and the
rest of California, and their smaller relative scale of production, as measured in the
monetary worth of gold (and other minerals) extracted in comparison to the rest of the
state.
Like the Sierra’s historic mining landscapes, California’s northwestern counties still
retain evidence of wealth-seeking and mineral extraction activities, especially in the form
of placer gold mines (see glossary). In Trinity County (Figure 1), the remains of this
placer gold mining activity are visually present along the Trinity River’s banks, bars, and
major tributaries in the form of mine tailings and debris piles, and in the altered physical
landscapes of large and small industrial hydraulic gold mining ventures. The remnants of
one of the Earth’s largest and most productive placer gold mines, LaGrange, is located a
few miles west of the county seat of Weaverville.
The research and interpretive focus of this historic context statement is placer gold
mining within Trinity County, specifically, mining activity that took place along a fortymile stretch of the Trinity River from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Lewiston Dam to
the town of Helena (Figures 2-4). This study area also includes major tributary
confluences, such as Oregon Gulch, the debris-filled drainage that led to LaGrange Mine.
It is here that the placer mine-pocked riparian landscape is undergoing a series of
restoration activities that have been identified by a comprehensive federal plan to
implement recovery of the Trinity River and its anadromous fish and wildlife
populations. This plan is executed through the Trinity River Restoration Program
1
(TRRP) and includes direct in-channel actions, continued watershed restoration activities,
replacement of bridges and other structures within the floodplain, and a rigorous program
to monitor and improve alluvial restoration activities. TRRP does not strive to recreate
pre-dam conditions. The goal is to create a smaller, dynamic alluvial channel exhibiting
all the characteristics of the pre-dam river, but at a smaller scale. The historic remnants
of placer gold mining activities along the study area still exist, mostly in the form of
debris and tailing piles left behind by gold dredges, as well as infrastructural relics of
industrial hydraulic mining operations of all sizes. Commercial gravel mining operations
have leveled many of these tailing piles and the TRRP plans for riparian improvements
include leveling more historic tailings and debris piles for gravel and fill.
This document is designed to serve two purposes. First, it will provide the historic
context needed to evaluate the remains of Trinity River placer mining activity for historic
significance under National Register of Historic Places (National Register) guidelines and
criteria. Second, using these guidelines and criteria, it will provide the necessary
framework and context to help the Bureau of Reclamation any historic mining properties
and sites identified in the future for potential National Register eligibility. The
framework for placer mining will not only be applicable to mining properties in Trinity
County, but also to such properties throughout California.
A few notes about the historic context statement are in order. First are monetary worth
numbers connected with county and state gold production discussed in the text and listed
in Tables 1 and 2. All numbers reflect the price of gold at the time of extraction, which
varied between $20 and $35 per fine ounce. Second, although this historic context
statement focuses on placer gold mining as opposed to lode mining (see glossary), the
monetary numbers reported to the state do not differentiate between lode and placer
production; this is an unavoidable research and interpretive limitation. Lastly,
California’s counties did not officially report their gold production numbers to the state
mineralogist’s office until 1880, so any Trinity County gold production numbers from the
first thirty-two years of the period of significance (1848-1962) must be considered
approximate based on reliable local sources.
2
Historic Source Materials and Research: An Overview
Important source materials, such as books, articles, published and unpublished studies,
and government cultural resource reports, were secured that focused on the broader scope
and generalities of California gold mining history and placer mining technology. A
general lack of attention was noticeably absent for the northwestern California counties
during the nineteenth century gold rush and subsequent boom. The Sierra Nevada mines
are the primary foci of historians centered on the state’s gold mining history; Trinity
County gets little attention. In a way, this is not surprising, for when the layman is asked
about California gold mining history, the answer is almost always going to be some topic
or theme connected with the history surrounding wealth-seeking in the Sierra Nevada
mother lodes, and the huge migration to get there.
During the course of initial research, however, a valuable source was unearthed: a
recently defended University of Oklahoma doctoral dissertation that focused on the
Trinity River.1 The dissertation provides a fountain of knowledge into the historic events
that helped shape a river’s environmental history, including (but not limited to) the
human-fueled impacts of placer gold mining and forestry. The dissertation’s
comprehensive bibliography – coupled with direction from the author – provided a
veritable road map into different kinds of available sources on river and county history.
It cannot be overemphasized how valuable a detailed and well-written source like this is.
Armed with the dissertation’s comprehensive bibliography and a preliminary collection
of questions, the author visited three specific locations on three separate trips: The
Trinity County seat of Weaverville, Chico, and Sacramento. In Weaverville, the Jake
Jackson Museum and History Center contained a wealth of unpublished sources, such as
local history papers written by amateur historians to speeches and oral history interviews
by the local descendents of gold miners and other experts in the field. Additionally, this
repository contained relevant newspaper and journal articles, as well as many
1
Richard D. Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River, California (1848-1964).” Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, Univ. of Oklahoma, 2007.
3
photographs of gold dredges, the LaGrange mining operations and maps, and other visual
aspects of Trinity County placer mining history, which were scanned by a Bureau of
Reclamation archeologist on a separate trip. Unfortunately, due to Weaverville’s isolated
location, there was no time to perform search records in county offices. Information
regarding relevant placer mine claims and production information was regularly reported
to the state mineralogist’s office, which was found during research in Sacramento.
In Chico, where the Trinity Dredging Company (TDC) was founded in 1909, special
collections at the Meriam Library at California State University Chico contain the TDC
corporate archive. Although the finding guide on the department’s website points to a
possible comprehensive collection of company documents, actual research proved less
fruitful. Not only do huge gaps exist within what is available, many sources, for example
form-letter duplicate notifications for the sale of stock, were not of much use. What was
of use, however, were the company’s tax records, which paint a complete picture of
roller-coaster profits and losses throughout TDC’s fifty year history. With these tax
records, it was easy to illustrate how the company’s profits tied in with economic
recessions and depressions. Throughout modern history, gold increases in value during
bad economic times, and as a result, so does mining activity. Conversely, with good
economic times, gold plummets in value, and mining activity decreases. Therefore, the
TDC tax records showcase not just the company’s boom and bust cycles as reflected by
national economic conditions, but they generally point to the boom and bust cycles
experienced by other Trinity County gold mining operations. Additionally, the archive
contains correspondence between TDC manager Mary Smith and mining publications
interested in her as the only woman managing an American mining company at that time.
In Sacramento, two repositories proved most valuable to the economics and engineering
themes: both branches of the California State Library (California History Room and
government documents), which housed published materials not found in Weaverville or
Chico (like detailed mining technology studies and Bureau of Mines reports), and the
California State Department of Conservation’s Division of Mines and Geology library.
It is here where bulletins and reports issued by the state mineralogist’s office contain
4
monetary numbers relating to the state’s gold production, reported by county or mining
districts, since 1880. Although these numbers do not differentiate between lode and
placer gold production, they do provide the numbers needed for comparative quantitative
analysis as to where Trinity County’s gold production stood in relation to California’s
overall gold production over a span of eight decades. Additionally, assorted state mining
documents and reports in this repository focus on Trinity County mines and mining
conditions over time, as well as list the mining claims that were worked within the study
area.
As far as future research, it would be valuable to spend a few days in Weaverville at the
Trinity County offices, to see if county records contain any pre-1880 monetary data on
gold production. Additionally, more time could be spent examining placer mine claims
reported to the state, and comparing them with any available county records. This could
verify the state’s information and, if more information is located, can enhance
understanding of the claims. It is doubtful, however, that one could ever paint a complete
picture of the embryonic era of Trinity River placer gold mining, especially the few years
before and after statehood. This was a halcyon time when early prospectors, like Major
Reading, explored the river in a transitory sense – if one area did not “pan out” for gold,
miners simply moved to another location. After all, if there are no county offices to file a
claim at, then there are no claims to research.
5
Introduction: Trinity County Placer Gold
Marginalized within the bulky chronicles of California’s gold mining history is the story
of remote Trinity County. Located in northwestern California between Redding and
Eureka, a region far removed from the more well known Sierra Nevada “gold country”
rush of history and lore, this county’s contribution to California’s gold mining history is
productive and noteworthy. While simple river bed placer mining started in 1848 with
Major Pierson B. Reading’s gold discovery on the Trinity River near Douglas City, his
finding sparked the beginning of a larger, localized industry. From 1880 to 1962, Trinity
County gold mines, placer and lode, produced just over $45.6 million, while other mines
produced another $12.8 million in minerals like silver, platinum, copper, quicksilver, and
chromite (see Table 1, pp. 52-54). Thus, for over a century, during the period of
significance from 1848 until 1962, gold was king in Trinity County, its primary revenue
resource, one since supplanted by forestry products, tourism, and recreation.2
When evaluated in a local context, these numbers support a high level of local historic
significance, because from 1880 (when county mineral production numbers were first
reported to the state) until 1962, gold mining accounted for 84 % of the county’s total
mining revenue of just under $54.3 million (Table 1). Although secondarily significant
in the state’s larger gold mining context – the total monetary value of gold recovered
during this time was exponentially higher in other areas of California like the Sierra
Nevada and in river valleys draining west out of the Sierras – gold and other mineral
revenue within the county helped create, then support, the economic infrastructure that
fostered growth in major county towns like Weaverville.
In a legal context, the State of California also assisted Trinity County gold mining
activities. Controversial debris disposal operations in the Sierra Nevada gold mines
resulted in the state’s 1884 ban on hydraulic mining debris disposal into Central Valley
watersheds. This ban, which will be discussed later, successfully halted the huge
2
J.C. O’Brien, ed., Mines and Mineral Resources of Trinity County, California (San Francisco: California
Division of Mines and Geology, County Report 4, 1965), 7, 16-17 (chart).
6
amounts of hydraulic mining waste that clogged rivers and caused widespread flooding in
the Central Valley. Although the ban did not forbid Sierra hydraulic gold mining
operations per se – only tailing waste disposal into the streams and rivers that drained
into the Sacramento and San Joaquin River valleys – it curtailed the economic livelihoods
of industrial hydraulic gold operators in the eastern Sierras. Therefore, to skirt the ban,
many Sierra hydraulic mine operators shifted their operations to the state’s isolated
northwestern counties, whose westward-flowing rivers and drainages were exempt from
the debris ban.
And while Trinity County industrial hydraulic mining reached its apex after the ban to
around 1920, it was relatively short-lived. In addition to being recognized early as
environmentally destructive, successful industrial hydraulic gold mining operations
depended on a plentiful water supply. If one was not close, it had to be brought in from a
distance – at great expense. Unlike the huge LaGrange Mine west of Weaverville,
smaller companies could not afford extensive and expensive infrastructure requirements
like building, then maintaining, hold and transport facilities like reservoirs and flumes.
Technology was another factor in hydraulic mining’s decline. The ubiquitous gold
dredge, which required no delivery of water from long distances, was more efficient in
terms of the amount of gold recovered per pound of gravel mined, and eventually
displaced hydraulic gold mining. Thus, by the late 1930s, hydraulic mining had run its
course not only in Trinity County, but in California, America, and the rest of the world.
Additionally, not only did placer gold mining along the county’s primary river, the
Trinity, help create and sustain the county’s economic base, it reflected significant
advances in mining technology over time: from pan and waterwheels, to hydraulics, and
finally to dredges. Key state and national events also helped shape local history. For
example, the aforementioned debris ban, the gold boom during the national economic
depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, the decision by the federal government to raise – and
fix – the price of gold during the 1930s, and the War Production Board’s decision to halt
gold mining in America during World War II, were all major historical events that
affected gold seekers who worked the county from the late 1840s to the early 1960s.
7
Physical Setting and Geology
As one of California’s original twenty-seven counties created by the state legislature on
February 18, 1850, Trinity County encompasses nearly 3,100 square miles of mostly
rugged, mountainous terrain with deep canyons carved by streams and rivers. It is
adjoined by Siskiyou County to the north, Tehama and Shasta Counties to the east,
Mendocino County to the south, and Humboldt County to the west. About three-fourths
of Trinity County is comprised of national forest and wilderness lands. The county’s
namesake is its primary river, the Trinity, which flows south then northwest in a long,
looping half-circle from the Scott Mountains, through the Bureau of Reclamation’s Clair
Engle and Lewiston Reservoirs (built in the early 1960s as the Trinity Division of the
Central Valley Project), before emptying into the Klamath River near Weitchpec.
Although numerous small streams drain into the Trinity, key tributaries include Coffee
Creek, East Fork, New River, North Fork of the Trinity, Weaver Creek, and Canyon
Creek. Thus, the Trinity is the Klamath River’s largest and longest tributary.3
Geologists note that Trinity County falls into two geomorphic provinces that contrast
sharply with each other in topography, geography, and mineral resources. Divided by a
giant ridge known as South Fork Mountain, the northeastern zone covers about two-thirds
of the county. Lying in what geologists call the Klamath Mountains Province, this zone
is marked by deeply dissected flat-topped ridges and glaciated peaks that rise from 6,000
above mean sea level (amsl) to almost 9,000 feet amsl. Stream and river drainages
generally flow in a westward direction. The other much smaller zone, which covers the
county’s southwestern section, lies in the Coast Range province, where elevations run no
higher than 6,800 feet amsl. Drainages here run northwest, following the physiographic
structure of the rocks. Principal rock units also differ, for while the Klamath Mountains
pre-date the Cretaceous period and are intruded by granite, the Coast Ranges are Late
Jurassic and Cretaceous unintruded by granite.4
3
Ibid., 7.
4
Ibid., 9; William B. Clark, Gold Districts of California (San Francisco: California Division of Mines and
Geology, Bulletin 193, 1970), 132.
8
Most Trinity County gold mining activity lies within the Klamath Mountains Province,
the northeastern zone. Considered the second most productive gold producing area of
California behind the Sierra Nevada, this province is geologically similar to the Sierras in
that it is underlain by a complex series of folded and faulted metamorphic rocks from the
Paleozoic and Mesozoic ages, subsequently invaded by granite batholiths from the Late
Jurassic and Early Cretaceous ages. Major rock units on the east side include the
Abrams and Salmon schists, Copley Greenstone, Balakala Rhyolite and Kennett Shale,
Bragdon Formation slate, and the younger granite rocks of the Shasta Bolly batholith.
The west side of the province contains extensive sandstone, shale, and conglomerate beds
from the Jurassic Age. Between these two “rock sequences” are beds of phyllite, chert,
limestone, and metavolcanic rocks from the Paleozoic and Triassic ages. Batholiths are
generally composed of granodiorite or quartz diorite either rounded or elongated in a
northerly direction; the largest batholiths are Wooley Creek, Ironside Mountain, and
Shasta Bolly.5
Although lode-gold deposits are located in quartz (and some granite) veins throughout the
Klamath Mountains Province – the most productive lode in Trinity County is the French
Gulch/Deadwood mining district – placer deposits have produced the most gold over
time, especially along the Klamath and Trinity Rivers and their major tributaries. Miners
prospected and collected gold not only in the gravels of stream and river channels, but in
older terrace and bench deposits adjacent to these channels. Nothing less than models of
efficiency, industrial hydraulic operations flushed the gold out of most of these terraces
and benches – and even gulches and mountainsides. As the Trinity River flows south
from the Scott and Trinity Mountain Ranges, the most historically productive placer
deposits were located on the main river channel at or near Carrville, Trinity Center,
Minersville, Lewiston, Douglas City, Junction City, Helena, and Salyer.6
5
Clark, Gold Districts of California, 132.
6
Ibid.
9
Trinity Placer Gold I: Pick, Pan, Rocker, and Wheel
Trinity County gold mining history can be divided into three periods that overlap each
other: the first, from 1848 to the mid-1860s, concentrated on the removal of gold from
river bars by non-industrial, small-scale means using pans, rockers, flumes, undershot
waterwheels, sluice boxes, and ground sluicing (Plate 1). The second, from the mid1860s to the late 1930s, witnessed the introduction and widespread usage of industrial
hydraulic mining techniques (first developed in the early 1850s by Sierra foothill gold
miners) in applying large-scale gold recovery techniques to massive, low-grade, goldbearing gravels from river terraces, benches, and hard-to-reach mountainsides. The third,
which overlaps the second from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, saw the
rise of mechanized gold dredges deep-excavating the precious ore out of river and stream
beds.
Gold mining by lode means never approached the industrial scale that hydraulic and
dredge mining produced over time, although it is noteworthy in county history
throughout all three periods (Plate 2). Because lode mining required the deep excavation
of tunnels and shafts into mountainsides with picks and axes to extract gold-bearing
quartz from hard rock, it was more labor intensive, and much more hazardous due to
frequent mine collapses and stealthy toxic gasses, than placer gold mining by simple,
hydraulic, and dredge means.
Trinity County placer gold mining starts with the first non-Native to visit the region,
Major Pierson B. Reading. Originally arriving at Sutter’s Fort in 1843 from Iowa,
Reading, thirty explorers, and a hundred horses departed the fort in May 1845 for a
hunting and scouting trek to northern California.7 Trapping for beaver and otter, not
prospecting for gold, were Reading’s priorities. Eventually, he and his entourage crossed
into what would become Trinity County from the west via Backbone Ridge, then arrived
at a river he named Trinity. Reading chose this name because he erroneously thought
7
For the latest scholarship on John Sutter, see Albert L. Hurtado, John Sutter: A Life on the North
American Frontier (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2006.)
10
11
12
that it flowed into Trinidad Bay on the northwestern California coast near present-day
Eureka, as incorrectly drawn on Spanish navigation charts.8
Two years later, in 1847, Major John C. Fremont appointed Reading paymaster of United
States troops in Spanish California. As among one of the first government officials to
visit sawmill-builder James Marshall’s discovery of gold in early 1848 at Coloma, but
having little success finding gold on his own there, Reading wondered whether the
isolated Trinity country he had visited two years earlier might be a better prospect. In
July 1848, Reading outfitted another expedition consisting of himself, three Anglo men,
and seventy native laborers, and headed north to the Trinity. After making a smaller gold
discovery in adjoining Shasta County, he soon arrived at what would become known as
Reading Bar, near present-day Douglas City. It is here Reading struck pay dirt in large
amounts. More fruitful than his Shasta strike, over the next six weeks, he and his party
extracted $80,000 in gold dust from a stream now known as Reading Creek, a Trinity
River tributary. It did not last long, however, for when a group of embittered, anti-Indian
Oregonians migrating south took offense with Reading’s Indian laborers living and
working side-by-side with Anglos, the appalled major abandoned his claim.9
Small-scale gold mining in Trinity County increased in the wake of Reading’s strike,
right about the time the huge gold finds in the Sierra Nevada captured the imaginations of
Americans and created the largest gold rush in nineteenth century American history. But
word traveled slow in those days, and it was not until 1850 when miners who had heard
of Reading’s strike trickled into the new county. Because of the rugged lands to the east
bordering Shasta County, most of these miners arrived at the isolated Trinity River gold
fields from San Francisco via Trinidad Bay and Eureka, and worked their way east. It
was not an easy process, as the inaccurate Spanish navigation charts placed Trinidad Bay
thirty miles north of Eureka where the Klamath River enters the Pacific Ocean. By the
8
William F. Horstman, The Mining History of Trinity County (Research Paper for History 400, Brigham
Young University, May 1967), 5.
9
Ibid., 5-6. Reading never returned, and ran—and lost—as the Whig Party candidate for California
governor in 1851. He died in 1868, penniless.
13
early 1850s, most prospectors figured out that the Trinity did not empty into the Pacific,
but it was the Klamath, and that the former joined with the latter farther inland. While
many prospectors followed the wrong river, some, like Frenchman Earnest de Massey,
took all the right turns and ended up striking the Trinity River at Big Bar, a very gold-rich
area sixty miles downstream from Reading’s discovery. By the early 1850s, thousands
more followed in Massey’s wake, working the Trinity’s banks and bars with simple pans
and sluice boxes.10
The next major event in county history was the formation and settlement of the town that
eventually became the county seat, Weaverville. Officially named on July 8, 1850, barely
six months after California’s entry into statehood, the first structure, a log cabin with dirt
floors, was built by James Howe, Daniel Bennett, and a man known in local history as
“Weaver.” The three men also built a shed parallel but off from the cabin, which formed
the first street, Court Street. Since all three men wanted their name to become the new
town’s namesake, according to the local historical society, Howe, Bennett, and Weaver
drew pine needles, with Weaver drawing the short one – hence the name Weaverville.11
By 1851, Weaver and his associates, using sluice boxes, pans, and rockers, had extracted
nearly $100,000 in gold from a flume they constructed on Weaver Creek, another major
Trinity River tributary.12
Over the next ten years, a building boom fueled by the gold discoveries (and quicksilver
mining, see glossary) ensued, with settlers taking up lots on the new “Main” street by
preemption rights. As with other frontier towns, hotels, churches, schools, courts, and
saloons were among the first public buildings constructed, and the first newspaper, the
Trinity Journal, rolled off the presses on January 26, 1856. With more mining revenue
coming in between 1854 and 1860, energetic townsfolk constructed eighteen new brick
10
Ibid., 5, 7-8.
11
“Weaverville,” in (undated) Trinity County Historical Society commemorative publication Trinity
Weekly Journal, copy in Jake Jackson Museum and History Center, Weaverville, p.1-5. (Hereafter
“Weaverville,” Trinity Weekly Journal.)
12
Horstman, “The Mining History of Trinity County, California,” 11.
14
buildings that replaced many of the early, fire-prone wood structures; many of these brick
buildings remain.13
Weaverville was soon a respectable town with a plethora of services. Period observer
Isaac Cox noted that in 1858, Weaverville could boast “two drug stores, two express and
banking houses, one restaurant, six hotels, one assay office, two livery stables, seven
saloons, four blacksmith shops, five carpenter shops, one wagon shop, two watchmaker
and jewelry shops, three bakeries, two breweries and a soda factory, one dentist, six
physicians, and four law offices, two churches, Oddfellow, Masonic and Temperance
Lodges, two theatres and courthouse.”14 By 1860, Weaverville boasted nearly 1,000
residents, as well as services that rivaled other northern California boom towns.15 And
not long after, the state divided Trinity County into three smaller counties, Humboldt, Del
Norte, and Trinity, with Weaverville chosen as the county seat of rescaled Trinity
County.16
During this early boom era, gold seekers giddy with the lure of wealth worked practically
every bar along the Trinity River, as well as major river tributaries like Weaver Creek.
Fueled by this mining activity, many communities sprouted up along the river during this
time, including Trinity Center, Lewiston, Douglas City, Junction City, and Helena (Plate
3). According to local accounts, warm, favorable weather played a part in this initial
burst of activity. Mild winters in 1850-51 and 1851-52 allowed the river to flow so low
that water was found only in pools along the river, exposing previously inundated gravel
bars.17 The early usage of rocker, pan, and short, quicksilver-lined sluice flumes for
placer mining operations worked well, but only to a point.
13
“Weaverville,” Trinity Weekly Journal, p.1.
14
Isaac Cox, quoted in Horstman, “The Mining History of Trinity County, California,” 11 (fn 19).
15
“Weaverville,” Trinity Weekly Journal, p.1-2
16
“Golden Days of Trinity County,” in Ibid., p.1.
17
James Bartlett, “Trinity County, California, A Summary of its History, from May 1845 to September
1926,” unpublished, typed manuscript, located at the Jake Jackson Museum and History Center,
Weaverville, n.d., p. 3. Hereafter Bartlett, “Trinity County.”
15
16
Once wetter weather returned, and water channels flowed with more water, these simple
placer techniques faltered. Frustrated miners wondered how they could work the heavier
gold-bearing gravels in higher-flowing river channels. The undershot water wheel
method proved most fruitful, and could be considered a primitive predecessor to the
mechanized gold dredge. Using large buckets attached to the outside rims of a wheel, the
wheel, approaching forty feet in diameter, revolved using the river current (or water
diverted through a flume), with the buckets scooping up water and gravel as they passed
into the river. Once revolved to the wheel’s apex, the buckets emptied their contents into
a long sluice flume, where the heavier gold separated from lighter materials along the upflow (uphill) side of riffle bars (in this case, pieces of wood nailed to the sluice). For
about a decade, these water wheels, along with miners wing-damming rivers and streams
to create settlement pools for sluicing during low-water years, were the primary means of
placer mining along the Trinity and its major tributaries.18
Another method of placer mining frequently used during this time was ground sluicing,
an effective predecessor to hydraulic mining. This technique turned large volumes of
water over high banks or down gulches to wash previously loosened gravel down through
ground sluices, where rock and stone riffle bars trapped the heavier gold on the riffles’ up
flow side. Miners also devised an ingenious device called the “self shooter,” which
consisted of a large wooden gate in a reservoir that automatically opened as the reservoir
filled. Water then surged through the diggings, carrying dirt and gravel through the
sluices. This technique was a huge improvement over direct shoveling into sluice boxes,
except for huge boulders that needed to be wheelbarrowed away, and became popular
along the Trinity River, especially near Douglas City.19
18
Ibid., p 19-22.
19
Hal E. Goodyear, “Hydraulic Mining,” transcript of a presentation to Shasta College, December 6, 1977,
copy at Jake Jackson History and Research Center, Weaverville.
17
Although single, white males from Europe and the eastern United States comprised the
majority of Trinity River gold seekers during this time, one ethnic group that made their
presence known in the area, and in mining camps throughout California and the
American West, were the Chinese. Escaping poverty in their home country, and tempted
by the lure of wealth in America, especially in the California mother lodes, most of these
new fortune seekers to the American West, came “almost exclusively from the
southeastern [Chinese] provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, and Guangxi” according to a
leading scholar of the Chinese experience in western America, historian Liping Zhu. The
overwhelming majority came from Guangdong. He continues:
News of the discovery of gold in California reinforced the notion of North
America as a land of plenty…. California was now a land full not only of
timber and honey but of silver and gold as well. To the poverty stricken
Chinese, these tales of riches and overseas opportunities were of utmost
interest and provided the impetus for migration to the United States. 20
As a rule, Trinity County Chinese (population during this period estimated as high as
2,500) generally reworked areas of the river and its tributaries that white miners thought
they had exhausted. Preferring the pan and rocker as their main method of working the
river bars and mouths of streams, the Chinese also used the wing dam method to trap and
hold gold-bearing water and gravels during drier years along various stretches of the
river, especially along the river stretch from Big Bar to Helena. Their contributions to
early county history are significant. For nearly three decades, from the 1850s to the
1880s, the Chinese not only worked the Trinity and its tributaries, but performed service
work like cooking, gardening, and laundry in mining camps and other communities
throughout the county. The Chinese also comprised a large labor force that helped
construct roads and ditches for other mining concerns throughout Trinity County.21
20
Liping Zhu, A Chinaman’s Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Niwot, CO:
Univ. Press of Colorado, 1997), 17-18. Zhu’s landmark revisionist thesis is that the Chinese, contrary to
previous interpretations, were not an exploited minority, that they indeed lived and fared very well in the
western mining camps. A native of Shanghai and a Professor of History at Eastern Washington University
in Cheney, Zhu is the first scholar of the Chinese in the American West to gain access and translate diaries
and journals located only in China.
21
Bartlett, “Trinity County, “ p. 5.
18
The Chinese also constructed one of the county’s first houses of worship, known as a
“Joss House,” in Weaverville. Although the exact construction date of this first Taoist
temple is uncertain, some sources list 1852, while some claim 1853, the first Joss House
was an elaborate structure with many detailed carvings, banners, and tapestries shipped
directly by boat from China via San Francisco, and by mule from Colusa. The first
structure however, was plagued by fires that the Chinese always managed to control until
1873, when a massive fire that started nearby spread to the Joss House and burned it to
the ground.22 Yet the Chinese saved many of the tapestries and banners, and one year
later, in 1874, the Chinese erected a new Joss House. This structure still stands as a
designated state historic park, and is the oldest continuously used Chinese temple in
California.23
Compared to later industrial methods of placer gold mining like hydraulic and dredge, the
early, simpler, river channel placer mining procedures worked by white and Chinese
miners alike had a lesser negative impact on the county’s riparian landscape. This is not
to discount impacts; for example, in 1858 industrious Chinese miners completely diverted
the Trinity River where it flows between Northfork and Big Flat into flumes, whereupon
they mined the diverted river’s gravels six times.24 Furthermore, wet years in the early
1860s, and resulting high runoff, helped scour clean stream and river channels. Yet river
channel placers soon played themselves out – even the diligent Chinese had difficulties
extracting any more wealth – thus miners began to seek gold bearing gravels away from
river channels and onto higher terraces, benches, and mountainsides. And as placer
miners expanded from rivers, gold extraction methods became more sophisticated and
industrial in scope and, as a consequence, exponentially increased the extent of negative
environmental effects.
22
Horstman, “The Mining History of Trinity County, California,” 11.
23
See http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=21332 for more on the Weaverville Joss House.
24
Overview of the Cultural Historic Resources of Euro-American and Other Immigrant Groups in the
Shasta-Trinity National Forest (Playa Del Rey, CA: Geoscientific Systems and Consulting, March 1981),
30-32.
19
Consistent with boom and bust local economies in the American West, gold mining in
Trinity County, which had produced millions of dollars in wealth since Major Reading’s
1848 discovery, hit the skids during this time.25 Although gold-rich, the isolated county
could not compete with the huge, more accessible Sierra Nevada lodes, and many miners
left Trinity for these expansive pockets of wealth. And while dry weather contributed to
the 1850s boom, wet weather contributed to the 1860s bust. Devastating floods and high
waters in 1861-1862 wiped out every flume, bridge, and waterwheel used to mine gold
along the Trinity. Other regional and national events factored into this decline. Major
gold strikes in Idaho and Montana territories sent many Trinity miners north, while others
left to fight in the Civil War. As a result, local businesses that prospered barely a decade
earlier faltered, the population decreased, and it seemed the Trinity mining culture would,
as local historian William Horstman observed, “soon pass out of existence.”26 This
slump, however, soon passed with the introduction of large-scale industrial hydraulic
mining techniques into the county, and would flourish after the state curtailed hydraulic
mining debris disposal in the Sierras.
25
There are no Trinity County gold production and revenue numbers reported to the state from 1848 to
1879. While some sources located at the Jake Jackson History and Research Center in Weaverville
estimate that Trinity County lode and placer mining produced $125 million in gold revenue during this
period, this number cannot be independently verified, and must be considered speculation.
26
Horstman, “The Mining History of Trinity County, California,” 19.
20
Trinity Placer Gold II: By Any Hydraulic Means Necessary
The next era in Trinity County gold mining history witnessed the introduction and use of
large scale, industrial placer mining methods by hydraulic means. First developed in
California in 1852 on the Buckeye Hill claim near Nevada City by gold miners Edward
Matteson, Antoine Chabot, and Eli Miller, the basic idea was to direct water running at
extremely high pressures at gold-bearing auriferous gravels to flush out the gold. After
experimenting with various methods and configurations, they came upon the ultimate
design: a wooden intake at the end of a water ditch or flume would regulate pressure,
then would direct this pressurized water through a hundred foot canvas hose into a large,
mobile nozzle, or monitor, with an inch-and-a-half opening.27 Operators would then use
the monitor to blast and wash away enormous amounts of gold-bearing gravels into
quicksilver- and riffle-lined sluices in one of the most efficient, and environmentally
destructive, mining methods ever developed. 28 A quote from the Daily Alta California,
in typical language of the times, describes how the new method worked:
The usual cut is made from the outer edge of the base into the centre of
the hill. From a reservoir on its summit… the water is conducted by a
leading hose of strong canvas, terminating with a pipe, similar to that on a
fire engine. The column of water thus produced ranges from twenty to
one hundred feet according to the height of the hill… And such is the
immense power of the water as it escapes the pipe, that no alluvial deposit
can resist the force for an instant. The toughest clay dissolves like wax,
thus disintegrating much fine gold, a greater part which has been hitherto
been lost [by older the pan and rocker method]. Witness the operation of
the new appliance: the hydraulic apparatus is brought into contact with the
debris [emphasis theirs]…, which melts like ice under a midsummer sun,
and lo! in much less time than it requires to describe the operation, the
huge mass is released from its diluvian home and comes tumbling down
into the space below.29
27
Philip Ross May, Origins of Hydraulic Mining in California (Oakland: Holmes Book, 1970), 40-46.
28
Richard D. Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River, California, 1848-1964,” Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, Univ. of Oklahoma, 2007, 138-139.
29
Daily Alta California, June 7, 1853, reprinted in May, Origins of Hydraulic Mining in California, 46-47.
21
Word of this novel new invention spread like fire throughout the Sierra mother lode
country. Improving on the basic design, miners devised double-jointed units that allowed
lateral and vertical movement, and constructed water delivery systems that ensured a
dependable water supply. Other improvements included riveted metal penstock pipes
replacing crude canvas hoses, double-jointed “Giants” with six- to eight-inch openings
replacing the smaller, inch-and-a-half-wide monitor nozzle, and attaching massive
counterweights to the Giants that allowed a single operator, or “Piper,” to effortlessly
steer the apparatus in any direction he chose, sending millions of gallons of pressurized
water at any gravel bank or mountainside with hard-to-reach tertiary deposits (Plate 4).
Soon, hydraulic operations were commonplace not only there, but by the 1860s had
started to spread into the state’s isolated northwestern region. As long as a plentiful,
dependable water supply existed nearby, or one could be brought in from elsewhere, this
new industrial mining method thrived. More importantly, hydraulic gold mining was not
only more efficient, but safer. It reduced the labor needed to mine gravels, increased the
amount of gravel an operator could wash in a single day, and eliminated the dangers of
collapsing undercuts and toxic gasses in lode mines that killed many miners. As the
technique improved, one miner, operating a single monitor (or “Giant”), could direct a
high pressure head of 500 feet to blast away mountainsides. This single miner could
flush and move more gold-bearing gravel – in one day – than a thousand miners working
a lode claim by hand could accomplish in the same period. As Trinity River historian
Richard Adkins noted, “the hydraulic method changed everything about gold mining.” 30
In addition to technological improvements, the availability of plentiful water supplies, at
least in the Sierras, fueled this novel but efficient new system. Not surprisingly, water
consumption in the mines near Nevada City, as well as settlements, jumped considerably
with the new industrial hydraulic applications. Soon, hydraulic mining towns dotted the
Sierras, with the Yuba, Feather, Cosumnes, American, and Bear River watersheds seeing
30
Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River,” 140.
22
23
most of the new activity.31 At first, a typical hydraulic operation in the early 1850s
consumed an average of forty Miner’s Inches of water per day, or one cubic foot per
second. 32
But as the new technology matured and usage increased by decade’s end, Sierra hydraulic
mines were consuming nearly 300 Miner’s Inches of water daily. Problems started to
surface: all of this water consumption created massive debris piles (what remained after
the quicksilver-lined sluices recovered the gold). The debris rapidly accumulated in the
rivers and the streams near the mines, and if not directed away, miners would have no
place to work. Thus, hydraulic miners used their monitors to push the gravel through the
sluices to recover the gold then, at the same time, used these powerful monitors to flush
the debris into nearby ravines and stream beds. To mine owners, problem solved. “Once
the debris was cleared from a mine,” Adkins stressed, “it was forgotten by the mine
owners.”33
Those who lived down from the mines, however, thought otherwise. Once these rainand runoff-mixed debris flows moved downstream as massive mudflows, it accumulated,
clogged, and narrowed river channels like the Feather, caused severe damage to the beds
of navigable rivers like the Sacramento, inundated Central Valley crops and fields, and
flooded cities and towns, causing millions of dollars in crop and property damages.34
Even though this new method of industrial gold mining made it more efficient and safer
in general for miners, barely two decades after three industrious Sierra miners started to
use this method, the stage was set for an epic environmental battle, one of America’s
first, over the Sierra hydraulic mine debris issue. This heated conflict pitted powerful
31
Robert L. Kelley, “Forgotten Giant: The Hydraulic Gold Mining Industry in California,” Pacific
Historical Review 23 (November 1954), 346. Kelley does not address northwestern California hydraulic
mines.
32
The Miner’s Inch is archaic measure of water flow rate: 1 miner’s inch is equivalent to 11.22 gallons per
minute. In cubic feet per second (cfs) measurements, 1 cfs = 448 gallons per minute = 40 Miner’s Inches.
Source: http://www.srpnet.com/water/irrigation/glossary.aspx
33
Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River,” 141-142.
34
Ibid., 142.
24
agricultural and commerce concerns – and other citizens living downstream – against
equally powerful Sierra mine owners. More significantly, and as will be explained later,
the battle’s outcome did not apply to the Trinity, Klamath, and other northwestern
California rivers, where hydraulic mines thrived decades after being quelled elsewhere.
Roughly a decade after the three Nevada City miners devised their new industrial gold
mining method – and about the time the debris mudflows were starting to create serious
problems in the Central Valley – hydraulic mining caught on in Trinity County. While
local historians like William Horstman point to 1870 as the first year the technique was
introduced into the county, others, like Trinity River historian Richard Adkins, claim that
Trinity County hydraulic mining began in the early 1860s.35 To realize these new,
water-intensive placer mining ventures, local mining companies, many of whom were
underwritten by massive amounts of eastern and foreign capital, purchased enormous
tracts of tertiary gravel land, secured water rights over large areas, constructed reservoirs
and pools, then built hundreds of miles of elaborate, armed patrolled ditches and flumes
to deliver the water to their Giants.36
Thus, as it seemed that Trinity County placer gold mining would pass out of existence
after the devastating 1862 floods, it resurged with the compelling new hydraulic mining
technology. Although local historian William Horstman claims that one Isaac Woodbury
introduced the first hydraulic Giant in Trinity County, he does not detail the location of
Woodbury’s operation nor how much it produced. State mining records do not help, for
this was the pre-1880 period in which detailed Trinity County mineral production and
revenue reports were not filed to the state mineralogist’s office. In a larger context,
however, Horstman suggested that “although this new innovation stimulated [Trinity
County] mining somewhat…it didn’t reach its greatness until the 1890s.” 37
35
Horstman, “The Mining History of Trinity County, California,” 19; Adkins, “The Destruction of the
Trinity River,” 142.
36
Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River,” 143.
37
Horstman, “The Mining History of Trinity County, California,” 19. When Horstman refers to
“greatness,” he is pointing to the huge LaGrange Mine west of Weaverville, the most productive single
placer mine in American gold mining history and one of the world’s largest placer mines.
25
By the 1870s, while Trinity and other northwestern California counties were starting to
feel the Giant’s ever-increasing presence, issues with Sierra hydraulic mining debris
wreaking environmental havoc with lower-lying rivers and lands had reached a boiling
point. Productive almost to a fault, these Sierra mines, now supported with their own
elaborate infrastructures of canals, flumes, and reservoirs for this water-intensive venture,
produced more and more wealth, peaking at about 1880. Yet as this wealth increased, so
did the mine debris, with more being flushed downstream to the point that western Sierra
riverbeds started silting, their channels started narrowing – and the water started rising.
The result: devastating and destructive floods the likes of which small Central Valley
towns like Marysville and Yuba City had never seen. It was estimated that by the 1880s,
rivers flowing west out of the Sierras had so much hydraulic mining debris in their
channels that they were flowing up to twenty feet higher than normal.38
The massive flooding was not limited to cities and towns, for it also affected farm and
ranch lands. In the late 1870s, faced with crippling crop and livestock losses, disgusted
Sacramento Valley agriculturalists, along with river boat operators who could not use the
Sacramento River to Red Bluff for shipping and commerce, filed a series of complaints
and suits with the state to halt Sierra hydraulic mining operations. In response, in 1878
the California legislature created the Office of the State Engineer, and appointed former
Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) officer William Hammond Hall to the post. In 1880,
Hall issued his report. He concluded, in no specific terms, what downstream residents
already knew: that debris from Sierra hydraulic mining operations had severely damaged
the Sacramento, the San Joaquin, and other rivers, flooded towns, destroyed farmlands,
ruined navigation, and compromised river-bound commerce. He called for construction
of a series of debris dams and levees to control the waste runoff, but did not give detailed
information as to who would finance and construct such systems, and where they should
38
Marilyn Ziebarth, “California’s First Environmental Battle” California History (Fall 1984), 275-77.
26
be built.39 It was a huge problem. Estimates claimed that nearly one-and-a-half billion
cubic yards of hydraulic mining debris ended up in valley streams and rivers – even
before Hall released his report.40
As expected, alliances were formed, and at first the miners won a few key legal battles
because the state courts ruled any ban on Sierra mining would negatively affect the
state’s economy, and that Central Valley agriculturalists and others could not sue one
mining company at a time. Undeterred, these agricultural and commerce interests started
filing suits that focused on many mines working a single river, and this seemed to work.
In 1879, a state judge issued an injunction against mining companies on the Bear River,
which ordered them to stop pushing mine debris into that river. Immediately, the miners
appealed, with the state supreme court reversing the 1879 decision based on the rationale
that since the companies operated as single entities, they could not be sued as a group.41
This frustrated the farmers and other valley residents, and over the next few years of this
protracted battle they formed powerful commissions, like the Anti-Debris Commission,
to search for an effective compromise via legal means. This produced results; in 1882,
the commission filed suit in Federal court, with the critical issue being collective liability
for debris among all mining companies. In 1883, Judge Lorenzo Sawyer issued his initial
decision, one that pleased the plaintiffs:
…They all pour their mining debris into several streams, which they know
must, by the force of currents be carried down into the main river where
they commingle into an indistinguishable mass…. The final injury is a
single one and all defendants cooperate in fact in producing it. 42
39
Robert L. Kelly, Gold Vs. Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California’s Central Valley
(Glendale, CA: Arthur C. Clark, 1959) 104-105, 132-135.
40
Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River,” 151. Emphasis his.
41
Ziebarth, “California’s First Environmental Battle” 277.
42
Sawyer quote from ibid., 278.
27
One year later, after numerous detailed investigations and testimonies backed by the
Anti-Debris Commission, Sawyer issued his final decision. In it, he detailed how mine
debris from all the hydraulic mines had injured the valleys, and permanently enjoined the
defendants from discharging this debris into western Sierra rivers and streams. Although
Sawyer’s decision did not forbid hydraulic mining altogether, it forbade miners from
discharging mine waste into streams and rivers. Sierra hydraulic mines soon closed,
although Anti-Debris Commission spies busted wildcat miners still operating their Giants
in remote areas. Consequently, an economic malaise set in: stores closed, mine and
sawmill companies laid off workers, and local tax bases plummeted by millions of
dollars. Recognizing this issue, in 1893, on the heels of a major national depression, the
California legislature passed the Caminetti Act. The act created the California Debris
Commission (CDC), and allowed limited hydraulic mining in the Sierras, but only if
mine companies could prove that their waste would ultimately not affect the Sacramento
and San Joaquin watersheds. The extreme expense to construct debris dams and levees
large and strong enough to collect and hold bulky mine detritus, however, discouraged
most companies from doing so. Within a decade Sierra rivers and streams started to run
clear again, and both major Central Valley rivers were once again fully navigable.43
Although far removed from the Sierras, all of this legal activity affected northwestern
California counties whose drainages emptied westward into the Pacific, including the
Trinity. Because Trinity County rivers and streams did not flow east into the Sacramento
River valley – the county had only limited agriculture and the ACOE deemed the river
not navigable – hydraulic mining activity with no debris containment regulations
flourished after the 1884 Sawyer decision. Assisted by trade publications like the San
Francisco The Mining and Scientific Press, newspapers and other mining-related bulletins
trumpeted the fact that while Sierra hydraulic mining activity was all but dead, Trinity
County hydraulic mines were expanding, with the trend likely to continue because “there
is no agricultural or other interests there exposed to be injured by its continuance.”44
43
Ibid., 279; Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River,” 157. The CDC’s jurisdiction applied only to
Central Valley navigable rivers and their tributaries.
44
The Mining and Scientific Press, January 28, 1887.
28
Northern county boosters also invited Sierra hydraulic miners to come in and spark local
economies, due to favorable legal and unregulated environmental conditions that could
prove to be “the paradise of the hydraulic miner.”45
Hydraulic mining in Trinity County, however, differed than in the Sierras, mostly due to
different geology. Since the northwestern counties did not contain massive quantities of
Tertiary gravels ripe for scrubbing, hydraulic miners used their machinery and methods
on bench deposits that ran parallel to rivers and streams. Large-scale hydraulic mining
activities exploded along the Trinity and its tributaries, with companies using the same
techniques developed in the Sierras to flush the gold out of the gravel, then dispatch the
waste elsewhere (Plates 5-6). Although never as plentiful as the Sierra mines, many
Trinity industrial hydraulic mines were large, corporate ventures whose activities
permanently pockmarked the landscape and impacted the river. Soon, in a near-repeat of
what happened in the Sierras, massive quantities of mine tailings washed into county
rivers and streams. Adkins discusses the impacts:
High gravel benches deposited by the Trinity River for thousands of years
were reduced to gaping pits and exposed bedrock. Miners used their
nozzles to push tailings into mercury-lined sluices where placer gold
amalgamated with the mercury to assure higher recovery rates. The water,
rocks, sand, mud, silt and unknown quantities of mercury flowed into
nearby drainages, streams and the Trinity River where it remained, lodged,
or eventually washed downstream.46
Yet the largest, most well-known, and visible hydraulic mine in Trinity County did not
flush its shiny reward from river and stream benches. Located four miles west of
Weaverville in Oregon Gulch, the LaGrange Mine47 epitomized the new, foreign capital
45
San Francisco Call quoted in Adkins, “Destruction of the Trinity River,” 162.
46
Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River,” 159-60.
47
Some spellings give it as “LaGrange,” while others refer to it as the “La Grange.” For consistency’s
sake, the former will be used for the mine, the latter for the family name—which some spellings also give
as “Le Grange.”
29
30
31
backed, large-scale hydraulic gold mining ventures that dominated the county in the latter
decade of the nineteenth and the first couple decades of the twentieth centuries, before
mechanized dredge mining took hold.
It did not, however, begin this way. What would become the LaGrange Mine started as a
series of smaller claims. It started in the 1850s when one James Ward discovered large
amounts of gold-bearing gravel on Oregon Mountain and Oregon Gulch. For many
years, Ward and other miners operated this area typical of early Trinity County placer
mines, using pick and pan, rocker, and the sluice box in gold-concentrated areas. Once
these were worked out, they found it impossible to work any more of the claims because
of the low-grade, unprofitable nature of Oregon Mountain gravel. In 1873, Peter
Paulson and O.M. Loveridge purchased the claims, installed monitors, and formed the
Weaverville Ditch and Hydraulic Mining Company. Their plan was to bring in water
through a series of ditches from nearby West Weaver Creek through Oregon Mountain
gap, then use their Giants to work their claims. But the gravels could not produce
enough gold to make the venture profitable with this limited water supply, and Oregon
Gulch was far removed from a reliable and plentiful water source. In 1885, Paulson and
Loveridge, backed by local investors, organized Trinity Gold Mining Company. Their
business plan was to use these additional investments to construct more ditches and
flumes from more reliable, yet distant water sources to more aggressively work the
Oregon Gulch claims. With this fresh influx of working capital, the company constructed
two more ditches from West Weaver Creek to Oregon Gulch, known as the upper and
lower Loveridge Ditches.48
Still, there was not enough water to adequately scour the gravel, and despite efforts to
bring in more, the Oregon Gulch claims struggled until the early 1890s, when Baron
Ernest de La Grange entered the picture. Arriving to Denver from France in 1892, the
wealthy Baron searched for new American investments due to Europe’s poor economic
situation. Upon hearing of Trinity County and the profitable, non-regulated hydraulic
48
“LaGrange Mine,” Vernon Ryan oral history, October 3, 1969, transcribed by Loretta Pasevoli, copy on
file at the Jake Jackson History and Research Center, Weaverville, p.1
32
mining ventures there, in 1893 he and his Baroness left Denver for Weaverville and, once
there, for $250,000 the Baron purchased all the Oregon Mountain and Gulch claims –
plus water rights in the West Weaver and Rush Creek basins – and anointed himself
president of La Grange Hydraulic Mining Company, incorporated under the laws of the
State of Colorado and headquartered in Denver. With a hefty working capital of $5
million, he set out to solve the main problem that plagued his predecessors, the lack of
plentiful and dependable water sources and delivery systems to fuel the thirsty Giants.49
With ample working capital, the Baron contracted with MacLean Brothers of Denver to
build his elaborate water system. After much searching, they chose Deer Creek on the
Stuart’s Fork of the Trinity River, which provided plentiful runoff from the Trinity Alps.
Located northeast of the mine over six miles distant as the crow flies, the Baron put his
working capital to good use in constructing an elaborate network of ditches, siphons, a
two-mile-long tunnel under Rush Ridge, a holding reservoir, and an eight-and-a-half-mile
wood flume to carry Deer Creek water south to his new venture. Completed in 1898 for
$450,000, it took nine hours for the first water to arrive in Oregon Gulch from 26-miledistant Deer Creek. Now armed with a dependable and plentiful water source, the Baron
brought in the latest in hydraulic mining technology, perfected over the previous forty
years, to inject new life to his collection of old claims.50
The result was an extremely efficient hydraulic mine that exceeded expectations, and
forever changed Trinity County’s physical and economic landscape. An informative
manuscript called “Report on Properties of the La Grange Mining Company”, from La
Grange engineer Chester B. Allen, describes the mine’s operating methods in detail:
From the penstocks at the crest of the mountain, water is delivered to six
giants or monitors under a working head of 550 to 650 feet. Two giants
are usually employed at the same time, although it is not unusual to have
49
Horstman, “The Mining History of Trinity County, California,” 20; Susan Sheppard, “La Grange
Mine—Trinity County, California.” Student essay on file, Jake Jackson History and Research Center,
Weaverville, 2-3.
50
Horstman, “The Mining History of Trinity County, California,” 21-22.
33
three in simultaneous operation against the bank. The nozzles of the
giants vary from six to nine inches in diameter, those employed in routine
work being eight or nine inches. The water is directed against the bottom
of the bank… and the entire mass of gravel slowly disintegrates and
crushes down while every particle of gold is set free by attrition. The
gravel is driven by the giants over the bed-rock and into sluices, where the
saving of the gold is effected. The sluice-way is 2,400 feet in length and
is made up of boxes 4 x 6 feet in cross section set into bed-rock cuts….
The sluice is lined with 40 pound tee-rail [riffles] set transversely to the
flow of the water on the bottom and longitudinally on the sides…. This
arrangement has been found to be very efficient gold saver and at the same
time is the cheapest lining obtainable. No trouble is experienced from the
sending up of the boxes, while boulders weighing as high as six tons have
been sent through the entire length of the sluice-way without any
interruptions to operations. About 1500 feet from the bulkhead of the
sluices, the system forks and the tailings can be diverted to any portion of
the ground as desired…. The total average recovery is about 98 percent of
the gold contents of the gravel. During the mine operating season, twenty
eight hands are employed, including all mine, ditch, office, and
miscellaneous assistance.51
Allen’s description suggests a colossal industrial hydraulic mining operation never before
witnessed in Trinity County. Yet the LaGrange was not the only hydraulic operation in
existence, for the county (and the rest of northwestern California) became a refuge for
new hydraulic mining ventures, especially after the 1884 Sierra debris ban. In October
1898, about the time Baron Ernest’s Giants started scrubbing Oregon Mountain and
Gulch, state records listed 307 hydraulic operations or claims working the county. Out of
that number, 145 mines were fully operational, employing thousands of men – and
discharging thousands of tons of debris daily, with no regulation, into county rivers and
streams.52
And while the La Grange was the county’s largest placer mine, other large hydraulic
ventures included the Union Hill and Indian Creek mines near Douglas City, the Sykes
51
Chester B. Allen, “Report on Properties of the La Grange Mining Company.” Undated (1911?) and
unpublished manuscript on file at the Jake Jackson History and Research Center, Weaverville, pp. 18-19.
52
California State Mining Bureau, Register of Mines and Minerals: County of Trinity, California
(Sacramento: Superintendent of State Printing, 1900). The publication acknowledges that information may
have been under-reported “owing to the reluctance or indifference of the owner or superintendent in
furnishing the necessary data, or by being overlooked by the Field Assistant of the Bureau.”
34
Hydraulic Mine near Trinity Center, the McMurray and Hupp Mine near Weaverville,
and the Cie Fse Mine near Junction City. Another California mining publication from
1904, in typical fawning language of the day, applauded Trinity (and LaGrange)
operations:
Hydraulic mining is carried to its highest development in Trinity County,
as the anti-debris law does not obtain there. The famous LaGrange mine,
which is annually visited by mining men from all over the world…is
situated six [four] miles west of Weaverville and well up a mountainside,
where the problem of what to do with the tailings does not worry the
management, and the conditions for economic working are so favorable,
that gravel carrying only five cents a cubic yard can be worked at a good
profit … [LaGrange] has immense reserves of auriferous gravel….53
Yet those immense reserves of auriferous gravel, once scrubbed of gold, turned into
immense quantities of debris being flushed down Oregon Gulch to the Trinity River.
The shrewd Baron recognized this problem early on, and to avoid costly litigation by
down-gulch residents, he purchased a half-mile-wide “right-of-way” covering a quartermile on both sides of the gulch’s centerline and four-and-a-half miles down from the
mine to the Trinity River, including the town of Oregon Gulch at the bottom. 54 As
LaGrange miners discharged hundreds of millions of tons of debris, residents relocated
elsewhere as their town was eventually buried under massive tailing mountains and deep
waste water ponds.55 It was a first in California mining history: while massive amounts
of mud and debris from Sierra hydraulic mines clogged rivers, created floods, jeopardized
agriculture, and slowed river commerce, it never buried entire towns.
In 1899, Baron Ernest left Trinity County for France to recreate at the family’s county
estate near Itazelbrouch. Soon after, he drowned during a boating accident. His father,
Baron Alexis de La Grange, succeeded his son as company president. These were
53
E.H. Nutter, “Gold Mining in Trinity County: An Unfailing Record of Production Which Dates Back to
the Days of the Pioneer.” Pacific Coast Miner, February 27, 1904.
54
Also known as Oregon City.
55
Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River,” 171.
35
turbulent years for the family operation, with inefficiency and corruption running
rampant. A palace revolt by French shareholders resulted in the April 1905 sale of
LaGrange Gold Mining Company to eastern investors for $425,000. Now known as the
LaGrange Mining Company, the new owners inherited a dilapidated operation, and under
the astute management of Pierre Bouery (a French mining engineer hired by Baron
Alexis in 1901 and retained by the new owners), the company modernized the operation,
including the water delivery systems that had fallen into an miserable state of disrepair.
With a renovated water delivery system, and with new ownership unlikely to embrace the
lavish lifestyles enjoyed by both Barons, by 1908 the new LaGrange operation embarked
on the most profitable, productive period of its existence. Company reporting engineer
Chester B. Allen, in accounting for changes in ownership and operations, effusively
noted that the renovated LaGrange “has in its present plant and properties a mining
enterprise that is without parallel in the realms of industrial hydraulic mining.” He also
quoted the “conservative” United States Geological Survey in stating LaGrange “is the
largest hydraulic mine now in active operation. The outlook is promising… dumping
facilities are ample and not restricted by anti-debris laws.”56
One factor in this newfound productivity and profitability is that miners and their families
worked and lived well at the renovated operation. In addition to a fully furnished general
manager’s office, the new owners constructed a fully equipped boarding house and
quarters for single employees, furnished cottages for married couples and cabins for ditch
tenders, and two fully equipped and furnished sawmill camps. The new owners also built
a schoolhouse for employees’ children, stables and barns, clean-up houses, blacksmith
and machine shops, air compression and ice plants, and an electrical generating plant. A
private telephone system connected all business and residential buildings.57 LaGrange
was truly its own insular, self-contained company empire.
56
57
Allen, “Report on Properties of the La Grange Mining Company,” 3-36 passim.
Sheppard, “La Grange Mine—Trinity County, California.” 13.
36
Not long afterwards, however, this empire, and Trinity County gold mining in general,
again hit the skids. One major reason was World War I, a conflict which saw LaGrange
manager Pierre Bouery leave to fight in Europe, as did many other employees. Another
were massive landslides that destroyed much of LaGrange’s water delivery flumes and
sluice works. The losses were so large that, in 1919, LaGrange halted operations until
1927, when it was sold to another group of easterners known as LaGrange Placers
Incorporated. Although this company rebuilt the ditches and flumes, the operation never
reached the levels of productivity and profit it did under the astute business acumen of
Bouery (who never returned from France). LaGrange remained idle until 1940, when it
resumed small-scale operations until War Production Board Order L-208 in October 1942
halted all gold mining in America.58
Nonetheless, the physical and monetary output of
LaGrange is staggering. It is estimated that the mine, from the mid-1870s to 1918,
processed over 100 million cubic yards of gravel, and extracted a whopping $3,500,000
in gold. It is currently registered as a California State Historic Landmark.59
In the interim, the LaGrange monitors proved useful to the California Department of
Transportation (Caltrans) who, in the 1930s, used LaGrange employees and leased their
monitors to blast the massive right-of-way for a new leg of California Highway 299 over
Oregon Divide – straight through the old mine. The state’s rationale for using hydraulic
mining methods for highway construction was that it was cheaper and safer than using
dynamite, but it still took several years for Caltrans to cut Oregon Mountain down to size.
As a result, travelers had a much safer, more direct route from Redding and Weaverville
to Eureka and the coast. Yet in a twist of irony, in doing so, the state added thousands of
tons of debris, nearly ten million cubic yards worth, to the Trinity River.60
58
Ibid., 14; Audrey Laag, “World’s largest placer mine leaves stripped mountainside as legacy,” in
Redding Record-Searchlight, November 17, 1958, p. 7.
59
See http://ohp.parks.ca.gov/listed_resources/default.asp?num=778
60
Adkins, “The Destruction of the Trinity River,” 209. A roadside exhibit four miles west of Weaverville
alongside highway 299 explains how Caltrans used LaGrange’s monitors—one of which is on display—to
blast the highway right-of-way straight through the former mine. Today, this stretch of 299 suffers from
ground instability, slides, and other road bed problems.
37
The Caltrans example highlights the tarnished environmental legacy of hydraulic mining.
Unlike simple river channel placer mining, industrial hydraulic placer mining methods in
Trinity County created unparalleled environmental damage. Not limited to the actual
gold-bearing areas being washed away and the resulting downstream tailing wastes,
hydraulic mining concerns helped contribute to the deforestation of mountainsides as
they harvested timbers for infrastructure construction, such as creating dams for holding
reservoirs and building flumes for transport. In turn, these deforested mountainsides
could not hold rain and runoff water, and resulted in the erosion of mountainsides and
increased silt buildup in streams and rivers.61 This buildup also affected native fish. As
county rivers filled with sediment and tailing waste, steelhead and salmon runs were
severely interrupted, compromising their spawning beds. But the damage went further.
“[Mine] debris also destroyed property, and cost counties and municipalities money to
repair bridges and roads, and hurt small businesses,” Atkins noted.62
This widespread environmental damage portends the end of an era. Although smaller
scale hydraulic mining (Plates 7-8) continued in the area from 1919 until World War II,
when the American gold industry in general was hit hard by the War Production Board’s
anti-production edict, the industrial hydraulic era in Trinity County gold mining history
was essentially finished. Clanking away at its heels was another enticing new
technology: the mechanized gold dredge. This machine allowed gold miners to dig much
deeper in placer bars and benches to retrieve their precious ore, and displaced hydraulic
mining as the main means of gold extraction on a large scale not just in Trinity County,
but in California, America, and the rest of the world.
61
For more on mining and deforestation, see Christopher J. Huggard, “’Squeezing Out the Profits’: Mining
and the Environment in the U.S. West, 1945-2000,” in Richard Etulain and Ferenc Szasz, eds., The
American West in 2000: Essays in Honor of Gerald D. Nash. (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press,
2003), 105-126.
62
Ibid., 165.
38
39
40
Trinity Placer Gold III: “The Golden Fleet”
Mechanized dredge technology culminated the search by California and Trinity County
placer gold miners to gain more efficiency and profits in their operations. It is important
to note that “dredge” is a generic term used to describe a machine of various sizes that
digs into deep, gold-bearing river bed sands and gravels to retrieve large quantities for
processing; caisson, suction, stream shovel, and dragline methods all fall into this general
dredge category. If a machine had a boom with a cable-suspended single bucket, it was a
grab dredge. If the boom had a two-part bucket, it was a clamshell, and if the boom had
three or four piece scoops it was an orange-peel dredge.63
The dredge type that emerged in industrial American placer gold mining was the bucketelevator or connected bucket dredge, which used a series of continuous heavy buckets on
an elevated boom to excavate gold-bearing gravels and dirt deep from river channels
(Plates 9-10). Even though a crude dredge of similar design had been used as early as the
seventeenth century to hand-clear Dutch canals, the late eighteenth century saw the use of
steam power to drive dredges in England, and by the early nineteenth century connected
bucket dredges were clearing harbors and rivers all over the world. 64 In a placer mining
context, this kind of dredge consisted of a wood- or steel-hulled pontoon barge with a
elevated boom and bucket chain, a screening and washing plant that used mercury-lined
sluices to extract and save the gold, and one or more conveyor belts to discharge and
stack waste behind the dredge.65
Crude mechanical and steam-powered versions of the connected bucket dredge were
being used in America as early as the 1830s in the southern Appalachians and other
63
Clark Spence, “Form Gold Pans to California Dredges: The Search for Mass Production in Placer
Mining,” in Kenneth Owens, ed., Rushes for All: The California Gold Rush and the World. (Lincoln:
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2002), 297.
64
Ibid.
65
Rand E. Rohe, “Gold Dredging in the American West: Origin and Diffusion,” Pacific Historian 28
(Summer 1984), 5.
41
42
43
locales. California’s first attempt to mine placer gold by mechanical dredge means
happened in 1850 on the Yuba River nine miles east of Marysville, when an eastern
promotion organization attempted to convert the stern-wheel river boat Phenix into a
mining dredge. However, it was unsuccessful, as were other efforts to use this nascent
technology.66 Fast-forward forty-four years to Bannack, Montana where, in 1894,
enthusiastic crowds witnessed the first successful electric-powered, close-connected
bucket dredge in America. Based on a design used to build the Chicago drainage canal,
Milwaukee’s Bucyrus Company built the Fielding J. Graves based on the forty harbor
and canal dredges the company had previously constructed. Bucyrus fitted the Graves
with five-cubic-foot buckets and a fifteen-foot ladder to help it dig to a depth of fifty feet.
Water brought in from thirty-five miles away via ditch and flume powered the dredge’s
hydropower generator.67
After Montana, California stood next in line for this compelling new technology. Three
years after the Graves’ introduction, in 1897, the first close-connected bucket elevator
dredge in the state, constructed by San Francisco’s Risdon Iron and Locomotive Works,
was set in the Yuba River near Marysville. The turbulent Yuba, however, wreaked havoc
on this dredge, and it sank the same year. One year later, in 1898, the next dredge, placed
in the Feather River near Oroville, became California’s first operationally successful gold
dredge. Again built by Risdon, Couch No. 1 was based on a dredge design perfected by
successful New Zealand machines of the period, ones that had operated for years without
serious problems. A couple years later, Bucyrus introduced its first dredge to California,
and soon after dredges began digging and processing gold throughout the American
West, including Oregon, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Colorado. Yet it was in
California that the gold dredge attained the most success and development. By 1905, the
Oroville district alone had twenty-eight operating dredges out of fifty operating in the
66
Charles M. Romanowitz, “California’s Gold Dredges,” in Mineral Information Service, California
Division of Mines and Technology 23 (August 1970), 156.
67
Rohe, “Gold Dredging,” 6.
44
state, with many of the latter operating in the Yuba, Folsom, and Trinity districts. 68 A
trade publication of the period noticed this heightened activity:
In no state are there so many [gold] dredges working as in California, and
in no place in California are there more than in the Oroville district…. The
other fields in California invaded by dredges are the following: Yuba river
about 12 miles above Marysville. Bear River near Wheatland. American
River, below Folsom. Calaveras River near Jenny Lind. Sacramento
River, above Redding…. Trinity River, at Poker Bar and Trinity
Center….69
Dredging activity along the Trinity River began, according to Weaverville entrepreneur
Commodore Kise, in 1887 about three miles upriver from Lewiston. Taking two and half
years to build, in 1889 the Kise Bros. dredge, constructed in an area of the river known as
“Big Hole” by he and two brothers (with silent financial backing from a San Francisco
businessman), began churning away at river bed soils. Kise describes the operation:
Our dredge was to be operated with a steam engine by using wood for
fuel…. When our boat and all the machinery was finished and we had
assured ourselves that everything was in working order, we moved the
dredge from where it was built to the center of the stream, fired up the
boiler, brought the steam up to the necessary pressure and threw the clutch
in…. the operator brought up the first bucket of gravel, dumping it into the
cylinder, the larger boulders were carried through the cylinder to the rear
of the boat, the finer material going through the holes in the cylinder was
deposited into the sluice boxes. Everything seemed to be in working
order.70
Not long after, however, the Kise Brothers learned the huge peril of dredging. River
debris, specifically large trees, driftwood, and other river rubbish, doomed their dredge
and dashed their dreams. During a huge March 1890 winter storm, the dredge, which
was headline-connected via a series of cables across the river and fastened to trees to
68
Ibid., 8.
69
Mining and Scientific Press, April 15, 1905, 232.
Commodore C. Kise, “Dredges Along the Trinity,” typed, undated manuscript at the Jake Jackson
Research and History Center, Weaverville, p.1-4 passim. (Reprinted in Trinity Yearbook 1960, a
publication of the Trinity County Historical Society.) The Kise brothers’ names were Commodore (“Bill”),
Albert (“Bub”) and Elisha (“Bruiser”).
70
45
prevent it from drifting (later dredges had “spuds,” or pin anchors, to hold the machine in
place), began to shift and move in the high water. Floating trees snapped some of the
cables to the point that only two, connected fore and aft, kept the dredge from being
breached and washed downstream. Soon, a “very large” fir tree latched onto a cable
strung across the river, and started to collect other heavy flotsam. Eventually the cable
snapped – and with it the Kise brothers’ dreams of wealth. “The boat,” Kise noted,
“swung out to the middle of the stream, and that was the last of the Kise Bros. dredge.
All was battered to pieces and it sank as it went down the river.”71 Unfortunately, unlike
other Trinity River dredges, there are no available pictures of the Kise Bros. dredge.
In the wake of the Kise dredge folly, activity along the Trinity exploded, despite the high
associated costs with test drilling river sites and constructing dredges, which approached
hundreds of thousands of dollars (Plate 11). And although much of the money to find
these sites and build these dredges came from sources outside the remote county, the
payroll remained in-county, contributing to building the local tax base and bolstering the
economy. It is also important to note that, unlike hydraulic operations, dredges were
diverse manpower intensive ventures – operators and support staff like cooks, mechanics,
drillers, and engineers were part of the daily operation. Despite the high overhead, the
bucket-line dredge proved to be the most successful method of recovering large amounts
of gold ever developed, at a very low cost per cubic yard mined. A 1974 edition of the
Trinity County Historical Society Yearbook explains, in non-technical terms, how the
river dredge operated:
The huge machine dug a semi-circle before it, swiveling on a spud (a huge
perpendicular iron pin). The buckets chewed their way to a depth of 50 or
more feet below the surface. A dredge usually stayed within a pond of its
own making, digging ahead and filling in behind. The hardened steel
digging edges of the continuous line of buckets scraped the bedrock levels,
bringing up gravel, water and gold-bearing sands which were dumped into
a huge revolving screen. The gravel and boulders traveled across the
sloping surface inside the turning screen and dropped into a hopper where
they were picked up by a conveyor belt, carried up a stacker and deposited
behind the boat. Fine pebbles and gold-bearing sands passed through the
71
Kise, “Dredges Along the Trinity,” pp. 5-6.
46
47
holes in the revolving screen and passed over the tables where they were
washed. The gold particles dropped into a riffle where they were collected
with the aid of mercury. Have you ever heard a dredger? The big
growling, moaning, clanking, floating monsters filled the air day and night
with their weird noises. Dredges turned the land upside down. The
heaviest and biggest rocks were left on the surface in high scalloped
shaped piles, while the finer soil was buried beneath them.72
Another modern account waxes a tad more dramatic – and descriptive:
Full-blown, the bucket line dredge was awesome and spectacular: ugly,
graceless, megalosaurian. It might cost half a million dollars and be as
large as an ocean freighter. Huge, tireless, it clanked relentlessly along,
creating its own dirty pool and ripping pay dirt from bedrock fifty or even
a hundred feet below the surface…. Unsightly and grotesque in an often
scenic setting, it stank of oil and muck and filth and scum. Round the
clock, its greed seemed insatiable, its presence at once fascinating and
dreadful.73
As bucket line dredge technology perfected – and as hydraulic mining declined – its use
increased. Companies like Bucyrus and Yuba Manufacturing continued to improve upon
the New Zealand model, especially in strengthening the machinery to work the tougher,
denser California riverbed soils. Low operating costs per cubic yard mined was the
driving force behind companies that adopted and improved this technology. In addition
to the Sierra foothills, Trinity County, at the turn-of-the-century and beyond, saw many
dredges, large and small, dropping their spuds into the river and commencing operations.
High-impact river areas included the stretch between Douglas City and Helena, especially
around Junction City, and Trinity Center to Lewiston (now inundated under the Bureau of
Reclamation’s Clair Engle Lake).74
72
Florence E. Morris, “Introduction,” in Trinity County Yearbook (Weaverville: Trinity County Historical
Society, 1974), p. 3.
73
Clark Spence, “The Golden Age of Dredging: the Development of an Industry and Its Environmental
Impact,” Western Historical Quarterly 11 (October 1980), 402.
74
Morris, “Introduction,” 4-5.
48
The Trinity Yearbook 1974 paints a compelling picture of many of the major dredges that
worked the river from Trinity Center to Helena, and is the only source available where
these dredges are collected, displayed, and explained. After the Kise brothers dredge,
one of the first bucket line dredges established in the county was an (unnamed) Risdonconstructed dredge located at Poker Bar. Starting operations in 1898, the steam-powered
dredge had open connected buckets, a pan stacker, and is considered one of the first
successful dredge operations in California. Another Risdon-built open bucket steam
powered dredge was the Galvin. Launched in 1900, it was located south of Weaverville
at the mouth of East Weaver Creek near the Lorenz Mine. Its builders, the Griffin
brothers, later developed a “flying dredge” technology to jumpstart placer gold mining
operations in the jungles of New Guinea.75
After the mid-1910s, Trinity County gold dredges became bigger, heavier, more
sophisticated (Plates 12-13). Although wood was still the choice for hull construction,
steel hull dredges became more commonplace. A good example is the Pacific Dredging
Company, a.k.a. the Placer Development Company’s Pacific Gold Dredge (Plate 14). A
venture backed by the powerful Guggenheim family (a eastern financial partnership
successful in establishing and maintaining mining and smelting ventures across America)
it was an all-steel, electric-powered, close-connected bucket dredge that initially started
operations in 1915 near Coffee Creek. That location’s boulders, however, were too
heavy for the dredge’s digging capacity, and in 1916 the owners moved it to the Graves
Ranch a couple miles north of Trinity Center, where it fared better in softer soils. This
operation is a good example of community creation in a remote area, for Guggenheim
family money helped construct a camp of cottages, stores, private schools, and other
service buildings later named Stringtown. The dredge worked the river in this area until
1924, when the company moved it to Malaysia to dredge tin.76
75
Ibid., 9-11.
76
Ibid., 12-15 passim. For a good overview on the Guggenheim family, one of America’s richest families
at the time, see http://www.learningtogive.org/papers/index.asp?bpid=267
49
50
51
52
Other major electric powered close-connected county dredges included the Valdor, which
initially mined the McGilvary ranch between Junction City and Helena, then in 1922 was
moved to the George Martin Ranch above Lewiston; the Madronna, which worked the
Given Ranch above Junction City; the (unnamed) Junction City Mining Company dredge,
erected by Yuba Manufacturing in 1935, which had a steel superstructure, a pontoon hull,
and capacity to mine 250,000 cubic yards a month with its ten-cubic-yard buckets; and
the Gardella, which mined its bounty on the Paulsen Ranch downriver from Lewiston
until it burned in 1925 – some of it was used to build the Gold Bar dredge, which worked
the same spot, and part of the aforementioned Junction City Mining Company dredge.77
A pattern was thus established with Trinity River dredges: find an area where test drilling
revealed a high probability of gold bearing gravels – with ranch and other agricultural
lands adjacent to the river the preferred locations – assemble the dredge, mine the area,
check profits per cubic yard mined (eighteen cents per cubic yard was considered good),
if good, continue, if not, dismantle the dredge, move it elsewhere, and repeat the process.
Dredge sizes also increased. What would become the largest wood-hulled dredger in the
world, the Estabrook, was constructed by the Estabrook Gold Dredging Company on the
upper Trinity River. With its massive hull with wood superstructure, which took 650,000
feet of lumber to build, it measured 165 long by 70 feet wide. To do this, the company
had to build a special sawmill that could cut 64-foot-long timbers.78 With a five-footwide drive belt and twenty- to twenty-two-cubic foot buckets, claimed to be the largest
ever installed on a dredge, the Estabrook had a gravel digging capacity of 400,000 yards
per month – nearly six-and-half acres worth of ground. Fairly successful, it operated for
about a decade near Trinity Center. The heavy, dense Trinity gravels, however, wore the
machine out after only a decade, and the owner, one Mr. Estabrook, departed Trinity
County as fast as he arrived.79
77
Morris, “Introduction,” 12-21 passim. In 1939, the Gold Bar dredge was dismantled and moved to Clear
Creek near French Ranch. The following winter, the Trinity River flooded and carried the dredge’s hull
downriver to where it lodged against the Douglas City bridge. As the hull was blasted away, the bridge
was seriously damaged and had to be rebuilt (p. 20).
78
Ibid., 16.
79
Ibid., 18.
53
Perhaps the most famous dredge to operate the Trinity River was the Trinity Dredging
Company’s (TDC) wood-hulled, flume type boat. Founded in Chico in 1909 by Ed L.
Smith, in 1912 TDC constructed Trinity Dredge on the Blakemore Ranch near Lewiston,
and operated along a three-and-a-half mile section of the river. Where the valley was
wide enough, the dredge cut across the river as many as seven times. After Smith died, in
1926 his son, Ed Jr., became TDC manager, but mining was not his calling, so he sold his
stock to his sister Mary, who took over daily business operations until 1938, when two
brothers, T.D. and C.R. Harris, leased Trinity Dredge and mined the river until 1940
when they ran out of land to dredge. Mary Smith is significant in mining history as the
only gold operation in Trinity County, California, and America that was owned and
managed by a woman. Considered nothing less that an “institution” in county gold
mining history, Trinity Dredge was productive over the span of decades, making her
owners nearly $2.7 million as it operated from 1912 to 1959 – despite little income
coming in during World War II due to the War Production Board halting gold mining
across America, and the general decline of gold mining in the prosperous post-World
War II years.80
Designed to dredge only coarse gold, Trinity Dredge scooped up earth with its elevencubic–foot buckets, then dumped what it dug into a hopper that separated large stones
and boulders. The finer material that remained poured into four-foot-wide sluices, whose
quicksilver-lined riffles captured the gold as it passed. Yet it was a dangerous operation
for unexpected reasons, with management resorting to deceptive practices to protect not
only their profits, but their workers, from criminal activity:
Two to three times a month, Trinity Dredge would cease operations to
“clean up.” Because of danger of hold ups, the word would be passed
“down for repairs.” This is the time the gold would be cleaned from the
sluices. Mary Smith recalls that a stranger camped for two weeks across
80
Ibid., 26-27.
54
the river to observe cleanup times, with robbery as his apparent motive.
For some reason, he decided to rob the bank at Weaverville instead. 81
In 1958, shortly before TDC dissolved, the industrial publication Dun’s Review noticed
Mary Smith’s atypical position as president of a mining company. In a letter of interest,
the publication’s executive director asked Smith to provide detailed information for an
article they were preparing on women executives. “What are the practices and problems,”
the letter of interest asked, “involved with having women fill top-level administrative
posts? We’re asking executives like yourself – whose jobs are not in the so-called
“women’s specialties” – to help us present an accurate picture for our readers, who are
corporate managers in all industries.”82
Smith responded that the company’s dredging operations were coming to an end, due to
the Bureau of Reclamation taking over the property for the Trinity Project, and “it is
difficult to classify women as a group as so much depends on the individual.” She also
mentioned the only gender-based restriction was that she “couldn’t take a shift on the
dredge to get first hand knowledge of operations,” and that the sole liabilities to her
position were “home interests.” Smith also seemed content being company president, and
that she did not know “of any women executives in the dredging business.” 83
Although TDC’s papers are available for research at California State University-Chico,
they do not paint a complete picture of the company’s operations from 1909 to 1959;
huge gaps exist. Complete company tax records, however, show a roller coaster
operation, net income-wise (gross income minus deductions like operating expenses,
payroll, and equipment depreciation), over this period of time. In general terms, the
company’s worst year was 1917, where they posted a loss of minus-$22,078. Much of
81
Ibid.
82
M.J. Dooher to Mary Smith, March 11, 1958, copy in Box 7, Folder 3, MS 156, Trinity Company
Dredging Papers, 1909-1958, Meriam Library Special Collections, California State Univ., Chico. Hereafter
TCDP, CSU-Chico.
83
Mary Smith to M.J. Dooher, May 10, 1958, copy in Box 7, Folder 3, TDCP, CSU-Chico.
55
this can be blamed on the lack of manpower due to the war – similar to the problems
LaGrange experienced – and a depressed world gold standard. The company’s best year
was in 1929, right before the onset of the Great Depression, when TDC reported net
profits of $104,385. Generally, the depression years were good to the company (and
other local and national gold mining operations), with low-to-mid five figure net profits
from 1930 to 1940.84 Much of this was due to the 1934 increase in the price of gold from
$20.67 to $35 per fine ounce, which sparked more prospecting and dredging activity not
only in California, but all over America including Alaska.85 Additionally, part of this
increase was due to the fact that by the mid-1930s, only a third of the dredges that had
operated in the state twenty years previous were still dredging, among them Trinity
Dredge, and fewer dredges meant more profits for those still in operation, but only if
there were no restrictions (Plates 15).86
Those restrictions soon followed. Although the California – and American – gold
dredging industry experienced a steady decline during 1918-1940, (except the Great
Depression), its first death knell came on October 8, 1942, when the War Production
Board’s Limitation Order L-208 halted all gold mining in America. The board felt gold
mining was not an “essential” industry during the early years of World War II, with gold
recovery now secondary to mining ores deemed more important to the war effort like iron
and copper.87 Nevertheless, historians question the motive behind L-208, as to whether
it was a symbolic move to satiate a nation gripped by war fever, or an official action to
arrest non-essential mineral production. Western regional economic historian Gerald D.
Nash viewed L-208 as “ineffectual,” that it only “provided psychological assurance to the
warlords in Washington that the nation was totally committed to the war effort…. The
line between essential and non-essential industries was not always clear, but the action
84
Amended tax returns, Trinity Dredging Company, 1913 to 1959, in Box 18, Folders 1,2, and 3, TDCP,
CSU-Chico.
85
Spence, “The Golden Age of Dredging,” 408.
86
Rohe, “Gold Dredging in the American West,” 9. Many smaller dredge companies could not weather
the World War I years, and closed down.
87
Spence, “The Golden Age of Dredging,” 408.
56
57
appeared to signify American resolve for a full scale effort.” Nash also acknowledged
that L-208 had an adverse financial effect on many western states by severely reducing
the severance taxes on gross mine production.88
TDC tax records illustrate this negative effect . After profitable years in the late 1930s,
from 1942 to 1946 the company averaged only a little over $1,000 per year net income,
and posted losses in 1944, 1945, and 1947.89 Trinity County did not fare much better. In
1943, the county reported a measly $31,115 in revenue from gold recovery – ten percent
of total mining revenue that year (the previous low was in 1916, when gold accounted for
51 percent of the county’s total monetary revenue, and would plummet even more to 4
percent in 1944). Contrast this to 1941, when the county reported gold mining revenue of
$1.5 million, accounting for 96 percent of the total monetary value of all county minerals
and ores mined.90
The seventeen years following World War II’s end did not bring relief. After the federal
government rescinded L-208 in 1945, some activity resumed, but much of this centered
on huge corporate dredges digging away deep in the American River near Sacramento.
Although annual Trinity County gold revenues rebounded during this time to the low-tomid six figures, and to high percentages of total mined monetary value, by 1959, the
same year TDC reported $3,000 in the red and filed dissolution papers,91 the end was
nigh. County gold mining revenue became so insignificant the state listed what little gold
revenues that were reported in the “miscellaneous” category – along with granite, copper,
88
Gerald D. Nash, World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy, (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,
1990), 26-27.
89
Amended tax returns, Trinity Dredging Company, 1913 to 1959, in Box 18, Folders 1,2, and 3, TDCP,
CSU-Chico.
90
J.C. O’Brien, ed., Mines and Mineral Resources of Trinity County, California (San Francisco:
California Division of Mines and Geology, County Report 4, 1965), 16-17 (chart). See Table 1 in the
Appendix for a breakdown on gold percentages of total monetary value mined over time.
91
From 1948 to 1959, Trinity Dredging Company posted yearly profits as high as $2,481, to as low as 52
cents a year later. In the company’s last four years, from 1956 to 1959, they reported $3,503 in losses,
which reflects a dwindling national trend in gold mining that would not rebound until the 1990s. Amended
tax returns, Trinity Dredging Company, 1913 to 1959, in Box 18, Folders 1,2, and 3, TDCP, CSU-Chico.
58
chromic iron, and other ores and minerals – for the first time since 1880. By the early
1960s, gold revenue accounted for less than one percent of the county’s total mining
revenue.92 And by the late 1960s, about when the backwater from the Bureau of
Reclamation’s Trinity Dam inundated the same lands Trinity Dredge had worked since
1912, all dredging in California went silent, the lands being thoroughly worked out.93
With the final shutdown of the dredges, large-scale gold mining petered not only in
Trinity County, but in California and across America until the 1990s. In the county,
tourism-based recreational activities like hunting, boating, and sport fishing, on the rise
since the 1920s (due to more automobiles and an improving highway system), and
forestry products, on the rise since World War II (due to more Federally-sponsored
housing programs like the Federal Housing Authority and the G.I. Bill), supplanted
mining as the county’s economic mainstay. This major economic transformation of
Trinity County reflected larger historic trends evolving in America from the 1920s, and
nowhere was this shift more evident than in the American West and California, with the
region’s (and state’s) vast forest reserves, public and wilderness lands and waterways,
better highways, and the suburban housing boom near major western population centers.
Yet the importance of the California gold dredge stretched across hemispheres, and
became global in scope in a new role as significant export technology. As the national
economy shifted and more California (and western) dredges shut down, mining concerns
around the world clamored to bring machines in to mine low-grade metals. Dredge
“brokers” heralded the cost advantages of disassembling, shipping, and re-assembling a
used dredge, as opposed to building a new one on-site, from scratch, despite expensive
shipping costs. This intrigued foreign mining interests, and soon locales all over the
world were using the California dredge on their placers. Bucyrus dredges chugged away
in Kuala Lumpur and Nigeria; New York Engineering dredges clanked away in Korea
and Siberia; Yuba Manufacturing dredges churned away in the Philippines and South
92
Ibid.
93
Spence, “The Golden Age of Dredging,” 408. The bureau and its contractors used many of the tailings
produced by the Trinity Dredge to build Trinity Dam, at nearly 500 feet one of America’s tallest earthfill
dams, and after construction built a campground adjacent to the lake named “Mary Smith.”
59
America. By 1932, twenty-two California dredges were digging in Soviet Union placer
fields, including a Bucyrus-built monster that stood taller than a six-story building and
required seventy-five barges to ship. “The California-type dredge, known all over the
world, is so efficient that it is being used on every continent where large quantities of
low-grade metals are found,” an observer noted in 1931.94 So while on a general decline
in California and America, the tough California dredge gained immense popularity
elsewhere around the world.
And like hydraulic mining, dredges received their fair share of environmental criticism
regarding the eyesores they left behind. Most of this criticism revolved around the
massive mounds of tailings left behind by a dredger’s stacker. In 1947, Inside USA
writer John Gunther described dredge piles as “…the kind of furrow that an enormous
obscene un-housebroken worm might leave – an encrusted seam of broken earth, with
mud and rocks lying across a winding trail like excrement.” 95 Other dredging critics
complained that the machines created stream pollution through fuel and oil leaks, that
debris left behind threatened to flood and despoil downstream farmlands during wet
years, and that water pollution from dredges threatened sport fishing. Indeed, much of
the criticism of dredges echoed what Central Valley farmers levied against Sierra mining
concerns before the hydraulic mine waste disposal ban. Yet up until the environmentally
conscious 1970s, most westerners, as mining historian Clark Spence noted, “evidenced
only limited and lackadaisical concern for the environmental impact of gold dredging…
So long as tailings could be landlocked, complaints were minimal.” Spence is also quick
to warn contemporaries not to judge the negative environmental impacts of dredge
mining by modern standards. “Whatever the standards of Americans in the 1970s,” he
warned, “contemporaries of the dredging scene in the golden years of the early twentieth
century applied the standards of their own era and were seldom bothered with the impact
on the environment.” 96
94
Quote from Spence, “The Golden Age of Dredging,” 409.
95
John Gunther quote from Ibid., 410.
96
Ibid., 414.
60
Conclusion and Significance: Trinity County Placer Gold Mining, 1848-1962
During the period of significance from 1848 to 1962, Trinity County placer gold mining
not only helped develop and sustain the local economy, it also enhanced California’s
economy. This was especially apparent during the peak seventy year period from 1845 to
1915 when gold was literally king. This was the era in which California’s economy
relied on mining and (limited) agriculture, before the cultural, service, and industrial
economies, including Hollywood, tourism, and large-scale industrial agricultural and
extractive production – for example forest products and oil – displaced mining. Although
placer gold extraction by dredges continued in the state until the late 1960s, its heyday
soon passed. Nonetheless, gold’s irrefutable allure drove dredging companies to keep
searching for the precious metal, until all possible placer deposits were turned upside
down and exhausted. Yet even leftover dredge waste had some worth. Housing
construction companies, fueled by the Postwar building boom, graded and smoothed
tailing deposits for new suburban housing tracts, especially east of Sacramento near
Folsom.
It is also important to understand that gold mining is what is known as a “depression”
industry. Production is partly dependent upon the national economy: when times are
tough, gold production prospers because wages and materials are lower; when times are
prosperous, gold production plummets because wages and materials are higher, especially
if the price of gold is fixed – as it had been since 1934 – for this cuts into profits. This is
evident in the recorded gold production revenue data for Trinity County: during the two
worst depression decades in post-1880 American history, the 1890s and the 1930s,
county gold production peaked at its highest levels – over a million dollars in annual
revenue from 1890 to 1897, and nearly this much annually from the mid-1930s to 1941
when, in that year alone, the county recorded $1.5 million in gold revenue right before
America’s entry into World War II. Conversely, the county recorded its lowest levels of
gold production during two prosperous times in America: the latter years of World War
II, the mid-to-late 1950s and the early 1960s. Therefore, Trinity County gold mining
revenues were fairly accurate indicators of national economic conditions over time.
61
Trinity County placer gold mining also provides a convenient window in examining how
placer gold extraction technology transformed over time. Although this change was
evident in the Sierra mother lode country, which consistently led the state in total gold
monetary worth mined, the county offers a similar, but more manageable perspective of
how simple pan and rocker placer mining was replaced by hydraulic means which, in
turn, and with some overlap, was replaced by the dredge. Human history is defined and
driven by technological change, and placer gold extraction in Trinity County is a good
example. As early miners exhausted their shallow river placers and benches with picks,
pans, rockers, waterwheels, and ground sluicing, they turned to hydraulic techniques
already being used successfully in the Sierras. When the state passed the anti-debris ban
that placed heavy restrictions on Sierra hydraulic mining and waste disposal, its usage
exploded in Trinity County, and peaked from 1890 to 1897 when the county produced
over $10 million in gold revenue; this accounted for 89 to 99 percent of the county’s
annual mineral revenues during the same period.
While hydraulic mining tended to be profitable in the amount of gold yielded per cubic
yard mined, its success depended on the procurement and exploitation of a plentiful water
supply to feed the mountainside-melting Giants. While some of these water supplies
were close enough to require only minimal capital investment and labor to build their
delivery systems, some others, like the elaborate schematic devised and constructed by
LaGrange, involved miles of expensive ditches, tunnels, and flumes to bring water to the
mines. And like simple river bed placer mining, the vagaries of climate resulting in wet
and dry years affected hydraulic productivity. Unlike the early Trinity County hydraulic
miners, who pulled their water from streams close by, younger Baron La Grange was
smart when he chose a water supply close to high peak runoffs that, even in drier years,
was relatively dependable. What doomed the first LaGrange enterprise, however, was
the failure to adequately maintain a system that, while logical in purpose and efficient in
design, stretched nearly twenty-six miles. Something this long that traversed rugged
terrain prone to harsh and extreme conditions demanded frequent preventative
maintenance – something the caviar- and champagne-consuming Barons disregarded.
62
Early environmental issues also loomed. As their Giants hosed away gravels, the Trinity
hydraulic mining culture seemed to be constantly on guard, wondering if the state would
impose another anti-debris ban similar to the one set in the Sierras. While the smaller,
less numerous Trinity County hydraulic mines did not produce as near as much debris as
the Sierra mines, what they did produce, especially the LaGrange, filled gulches, clogged
stream beds, narrowed river channels, affected anadromous fish passages, and buried an
entire town. What happened there was similar to the Sierra mines, but on a much smaller
scale, which defines Trinity County gold mining history in general.
Overlapping the hydraulic period of Trinity County placer gold mining, but exceeding it
in length, was the omnipresent dredge. Dredge technology allowed gold miners to churn
deeper not only in rivers and streams already exhausted in the early pick, shovel, and pan
days, but in adjoining low-lying areas of larger streams and rivers. After all, it seemed
logical that gold-bearing gravels had been deposited deeper in river beds over the
millennia. It was simply a question of how to mine these deep deposits, and the gold
dredge provided the answer. Another benefit to the dredge was that although costly to
construct and operate, unlike hydraulic mining it did not depend on dependable water
supplies to extract the gold. Once operational, a self-powered steam or electric dredge
was an independent, (mostly) year-round enterprise whose worth was measured by profits
per cubic yard mined, and once one area was worked, the dredge pulled its spud and
moved onto another. And while more labor intensive than hydraulic mining, the trades
and skills needed to operate a dredge were more diverse: mechanics, operators, cooks,
drillers, mining engineers, to name a few, contributed to its operation. Moreover,
dredging operations created a sense of community in the county’s remote areas, through
the construction of towns like Stringtown.
And while locally productive, in a broader context it is not surprising that Trinity County
gold mining has not received its fair share of attention in the robust annals of California
gold mining history. After all, the $46.5 million in gold revenue the county produced
from 1880 to 1962 (see Table 1. pp. 52-54) amounted to a little more than half of what
the state produced in 1852 alone: 3,921,631 ounces of gold worth $81,294,700 –
63
California’s all-time single year record. Even the total revenue of all metals and ores
mined in Trinity County during the same eighty-two-year period, $54.3 million, did not
approach the gold hand-mined out of California in 1852 by pick, axe, pan, and rocker.
Furthermore, between 1880 and 1932, Trinity County’s gold production accounted for a
paltry four percent of California’s total gold mining revenue (see Table 2, pp. 54-55.)
Thus, although Trinity County placer gold mining is locally significant in establishing
and supporting the remote county’s economic base for over a century, only the LaGrange,
as certainly America’s – and possibly the world’s – largest placer gold mine, is the sole
historic Trinity County placer mining site that could rate historic significance beyond
local or state level.97 No single placer mining operation in county history approached the
amount of gold that mine produced in such a relatively brief period of time, nor did any
other single mine impact and alter county landscapes as thoroughly and methodically as
LaGrange accomplished during its heyday.
97
If Trinity Dam and Clair Engle Lake had not inundated the lands worked by Trinity Dredging Company,
a case of state (or national) significance under National Register Criterion B could be argued based on the
fact it was the only gold mining company in California (and America) managed by a woman—in an era
when males dominated upper management and CEO positions within all extractive industries.
64
Evaluation, Design, and Research
National Register Criteria and Eligibility
National Register Bulletin #42, Guidelines for Identifying, Evaluating, and Registering
Historic Mining Properties, provides a contextual framework and the criteria to evaluate
the historic significance of American mining sites and landscapes.98 The bulletin lists a
typology of identifiable mining property types: Extraction, based on mining exploration
and exploitation; Beneficiation, where mined ores are processed by various metallurgical
processes to increase their monetary values; Refining, where smelters convert metals into
a state of purity suitable for industrial, manufacturing, or commercial uses; EngineerDesigned Complexes, the “ideal” mining situation where all mining operations, from
extraction to refinement, took place on one site – more common in iron and copper
mining, many complexes had a self-contained company infrastructure that included
housing, power houses, transportation systems, stores, and other support facilities; and
Mining Landscapes, which represent the most dramatic visual images of mining that
evoke a sense of time, place, and the historic patterns associated with human activities
that modified the earth’s natural features. The remnants of LaGrange, Union Hill, and
other Trinity County hydraulic mines, as well as the extensive tailing piles produced by
dredging activities along the Trinity River study area, are good examples of extraction
and historic mining landscapes, and fit well within these specific property types.
Building upon the National Register guidelines for evaluating historic mining properties,
the methodology behind a localized study on mining sites in (adjoining) western Shasta
County by Blossom Hamusek-McGann and Trudy Vaughn provides a useful
supplement.99 Although some of the National Register’s property typology is repeated
and/or enhanced in this study, the authors provide additional research insights and
evaluation guidelines for similar and different property types. Their main contribution,
98
Excerpted from Bruce Noble, Jr., and Robert Spude, Guidelines For Identifying, Evaluating, and
Registering Historic Mining Properties (Washington, D.C.: US Department of the Interior, National Park
Service, National Register Bulletin #42, 1992, revised 1997).
99
Excerpted from Blossom Hamusek-McGann and Trudy Vaughn , Historical Context and Research
Design for Mining Sites in the Central Portions of Western Shasta County, California, draft copy on file at
the US Bureau of Land management Redding Field Office, Redding, CA, 1999 (DRAFT), 30-39.
65
however, is how they help identify and evaluate different categories of mine waste
tailings, based on a detailed study of historic New Zealand placer mining properties. This
approach can prove useful under National Register Criterion D.
According to Hamusek-McGann and Vaughn, historic mining properties in western
Shasta County fall into five types: industrial, domestic and residential, transportation,
hydraulic, and mining landscape. The first one can be divided into two sub-categories:
mine exploration, the initial search and discovery of suitable mining ventures, and mine
exploitation, the development and physical extraction of raw, mineral-bearing materials
from areas explored and deemed fit for exploitation. Exploration sites can include handdug prospect pits excavated by a single miner, hand- or machine-excavated trenches, and
adits and shafts excavated or blasted into hard rock. While there are no cut-and-dry
criteria, the first two would be associated more with placer mining, while the third almost
exclusively belongs to lode mining, since this method requires the deep tunneling and
excavation of mine shafts into the earth to work gold-bearing rock.
Mine exploration and mine exploitation property types would fit best within the Trinity
River study area. It is here that the riparian and surrounding landscapes are pock-marked
with the physical remnants of placer mining ventures (simple, hydraulic, and dredge, as
defined in the context statement) associated with the development and exploitation of
gold from mineral-rich gravels and ores. Physical remains encountered at placer mine
sites might include tailings (of different shapes and sizes), piles, ponds, retaining walls or
channels of timber and/or rock, sluice boxes, long toms, waterwheels, monitors or other
apparatuses associated with hydraulic mining, support structures and machinery, and
dredges and their support systems.
Domestic and residential property types center on self-sufficient support communities
that sprung up next to, or close to, industrial and mine development/exploitation sites.
This property type might include remnants of residences, offices, bunkhouses, showers,
laundry and mess, and service buildings (barns, garages, ice houses, etc.) In more
remote placer mining locations, of which there were many within Trinity County, this
66
might consist of more transitory structures like tents or small cabins that provided the
bare minimum adequate for mine exploration and/or exploitation. Perhaps the most
applicable domestic and residential example within the study area are the few physical
remains associated with the LaGrange Mine west of Weaverville, such as overgrown
building foundations. Most of the hydraulic mine’s physical setting was wiped out in the
1930s when Caltrans constructed highway 299 through the Oregon Divide.
Transportation property types would include abandoned roads, trails, and tram and rail
systems used to transport supplies in and raw materials out of the study area. Like Shasta
County, the Trinity County mining landscape is dotted with the remnants of some of
these transportation systems, mostly overgrown former roads and trails, along with flume
and canal remnants. Hydraulic property types would include resources associated with
water delivery to hydraulic mining ventures, such as holding reservoirs or ponds, dams,
flumes, large and small channels, laterals, ditches, trestles, and tunnels.
The mining landscape is the most visual and stark representation of past mining eras and
may include large-scale topographic features originating from mining activities. This
property type can include rock waste dumps from mines (placer and lode), mine tailings,
and open pits as well as denuded countryside and secondary vegetation growth patterns
on the remnants of mine waste dumps and hydraulic mining features. Land forms
created by mining, such as tailings and other debris piles, can provide clues to past
activities, and can help illustrate the technological history of the mining landscape being
evaluated.
Because one of the study’s central themes is how placer gold mining technology shifted
over time and improved operational efficiency, the distinctive debris and tailing pile
configurations left by placer mining operations – some of which, especially those
produced by dredges, can extend for several miles in length alongside a river or
streambed – can yield valuable information as to the specific kind of technology and
placer mining technique used, especially under Criterion D. Hamusek-McGann and
67
Vaughn point to a study of shallow placer mining in New Zealand,100 which contains an
impressive list of twelve different placer debris tailing types:
Type 1, Herringbone: if neatly stacked, are regarded as the most visually
interesting form. This method of stacking offered the least resistance to the sluice
water flow. Herringbone tailings are generally associated with gold sluice or low
pressure hydraulic sluice workings, and can be very extensive and represent a
huge investment of human effort.
Type 2, Blow Down: Tailings of this type result from a system called ‘blow
down” sluicing that was used for working wide stretches of poor alluvial ground.
It consists of very shallow configuration consisting of a series of parallel low
stone rows extending down a terrace scarp.
Type 3, Parallel: A very simple form of tailings, this consists of parallel rows of
hand-stacked cobbles and boulders that usually extend at right angles to a stream
or river.
Type 4, Curved: These tailings are simply another form of the parallel type, and
if expanded, could take on the form of “fan” tailings. In curved tailings, the rows
of stacked stones are curved, but remain parallel to each other.
Type 5, Box: Another variation of the parallel type, differing in that the rows of
stacked cobbles and contained in a “box” formed by unworked ground or a row of
stacked tailings across the lower and typically the upper end of the workings.
Box tailings are generally shallow and are found in terrain similar to the parallel
type.
Type 6, Fan: These are cross between parallel and herringbone tailings. Fans are
formed as result of ground or hydraulic sluicing, and were created by miners hand
stacking the cobbles and boulders in rows converging on a single point in the
tailrace.
Type 7, Amorphous: Amorphous tailings are sluice tailings with no coherent
patterning and are often described as “hummocky” tailings because of their
100
Neville Ritchie, “Archaeological Interpretations of Alluvial Gold Mining Sites, Central Otago, New
Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of Archeology 3 (51-70). Discussed in Hamusek-McGann and Vaughn,
35-39.
68
chaotic and disorganized appearance. Thus, they can be difficult to interpret, and
are often found on riverside terraces and or on ground with minimal fall.
Type 8, Small Claim or Pothole: Like amorphous tailings, pothole tailings occur
as hummocky circular and oblong mounds across the landscape. Unlike
amorphous tailings, however, pothole tailings are almost always found in stream
beds or river flat locations. They are the remnants of small claims worked by pick
and rocker, and are often obliterated by later, large scale mining ventures.
Type 9, Paddocking: This term is used to describe a method of working a small
area of alluvium by the excavation of the whole mass, leaving behind a large,
square pit up to 15 by 15 feet in size. Paddocking ventures are found as
excavated depressions on hillsides, river banks, and terrace margins within
outwash deposits.
Type 10, Sluice Scars, Faces, or Scarps: This type consists of scars or gullies
excavated into fine sediment or gravel river terraces during the course of ground
or hydraulic sluice operations, and can be difficult to differentiate from natural
erosion.
Type 11, Hydraulic Elevator Holes and Tailings: This type results from the
working of sluice claims where there was insufficient fall (ground being worked
was too deep to allow tailings disposal.) In order to work the alluvium for gold
below water level, a hydraulic elevator used water to transport the gravels to the
ground surface. Elevating sites are distinguished by a deep hole, filled with
water, surrounded by low rounded tailing mounds dumped after the gold was
recovered. This type differs from the previous in that they have entirely been
deposited by water, and not by hand.
Type 12, Dredge: Perhaps the most evident within the Trinity study area, dredge
tailings were mechanically formed rather than by hand stacking, and are located
along river banks and adjacent flats. Many factors determine dredge tailing
patterns including (but not limited to) whether the dredge had headline tethers
versus spud anchor, the depth and character of gravels, and the number and length
of stackers. Additionally, bucket and dragline dredges produce distinctive tailings
(Plates 16 and 17); small bucket line dredges had smaller tailings elevators, so the
69
70
71
resulting tailings tended to form rows with a low, mounded appearance. After
World War I – consistent with thematic technological patterns in the study area –
dredges became bigger, with elevators able to stack tailings in very high piles
behind the dredge. These tailings were deposited in gently curving bands as the
dredge swung along a working face. Dragline dredges, a later innovation,
differed in their tailing patterns and were characterized by a series of closely
clustered mounds.
Integrity and Criteria of Eligibility
To be eligible for listing to the National Register, mining properties must first convey
their quality of significance in American history, architecture, engineering, or culture,
through their integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and
association. Integrity is the ability of a property to convey significance. Additionally,
mining properties must meet one or more of the four National Register criteria:
Criterion A: be associated with events that have made a significant contribution to
the broad patterns of our history; or
Criterion B: be associated with the lives of a person or persons significant in our
past; or
Criterion C: embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of
construction, or that represent the work of a master, or that possess high artistic
values, or that represent a significant or distinguishable entity whose components
may lack individual distinction; or
Criterion D: have yielded, or are likely to yield, information important in
prehistory or history.
A historic mining property must demonstrate its significance under one or more criteria
by illustrating all, or most of, the seven aspects of integrity. Because historic mining
properties are most often abandoned and in poor physical condition, integrity evaluations
require special care. Mining properties cannot be judged in the same fashion as that of a
historic building. The seven integrity qualities for mining properties apply as follows:
72
Location: This means that the mine remains in its original location. Although a
place where mining once occurred is not necessarily movable, components
needed to mine can be moved. Since relocation of mine equipment was a
common practice, this relocated equipment can retain integrity under certain
conditions. For example, 100-year-old mining equipment may have been moved
to a newer mine that first went into operation 70 years ago. Although the
equipment is not in its original location, it still may contribute to the property’s
significance because it has been in place over fifty years. Historic mining
machinery moved for purpose of display in a museum, park, or other interpretive
site completely away from its original location, however, has lost all integrity of
location (National Register Bulletin #42, 1992, revised 1997:19-20).
Design: Mines evolve through time with the introduction of new machinery or
technology, or the expansion of the operation. Unaltered mines and plants are
rare. The contemporary evaluation of a mine’s design integrity should not only be
based on its conformance to original construction plans, but also on its ability to
illustrate the property’s evolution through time. All mines follow an engineering
flow chart – ore from the mine to the mill to the refinery – that is essential in
understanding the integrity of design. The lack of a minor feature in this flow
system would not detract from its integrity, but the cumulative number of missing
components should be taken into consideration. When considering cumulative
loss of features, buildings and machinery, as well as the designed landscape, the
moved earth, and debris piles, must be included.
Setting: Historic mines were industrial complexes that combined a multitude of
functions. Industrial features typical to the gaze of the contemporary observer
may not be pleasing to the eye. For example, the Trinity study area contains
many unsightly tailing piles left by dredging activity, and although mostly
overgrown, it is obvious from the scarred landscapes where LaGrange and other
smaller hydraulic mines (like Union Hill) once operated. The appearance created
by these unattractive remnants of industrial activity, however, represent important
aspects of setting that can contribute to integrity of a mining property. Modern
73
day intrusions can negatively impact integrity of setting, such as new mining
ventures attempting to rework a historic mine or the conversion of historic mining
towns into gambling and resort destinations.
Materials: retaining integrity of materials requires evidence that original materials
exist for the mining feature or that sympathetic materials have been used during
the course of previous repair or restoration of a mining properties. For example,
materials used would be readily available and expected to be temporary in nature;
therefore, locally found woods would most likely have been used and often
unpainted or otherwise treated. Previous restoration efforts should have used
untreated wood with the expectation that it would eventually need to be replaced.
Workmanship: To the largest extent possible, mining properties should retain
evidence of original workmanship. In a placer mining context, this would
include preservation of such features as dredges, hydraulic monitors and their
delivery infrastructure, and river and stream apparatuses like waterwheels.
Feeling: As abandoned industrial properties are generally located in isolated
areas, the abandoned sites of historic mining activity often evoke a strong sense of
feeling when viewed by contemporary observers. The image of abandonment
has attracted more popular attention than an active industrial operation. The
feeling of a deserted historic mine can help reflect the character of the boom and
bust cycles of mining. And much like setting, the encroachment of modern
development can diminish the integrity of feeling of a mining property.
Association: Integrity of association will exist in cases where mine structures,
machinery, and other visible features remain to convey a strong sense of
connectedness between mining properties and a contemporary observer’s ability
to discern the historical activity which occurred at the location. The integrity of
association will frequently hinge not so much on the condition of the extant
buildings and machinery, but on the degree to which the overall mining system
remains intact and visible. If evidence of a complete system remains intact,
deterioration of the system’s individual aspects may not eliminate the resource’s
overall integrity.
74
Another factor to consider is that a mining property may have integrity as a system (or
site or district) even though its individual components have deteriorated over time.
Passage of time, harsh environmental exposures, abandonment, vandalism, and neglect
can coalesce to cause deterioration of individual mining property components. This
includes building collapses, machinery being dismantled or destroyed (common with
hydraulic and dredge operations within the Trinity study area), and steel from rail tracks
and tramways being salvaged. However, a property may still have paths, roads, rail rightof-ways, large debris/tailings piles, standing head frames, trash heaps, and other
fragments of industrial activity. Although these individual components may lack
distinction, viewed as a collective whole they may be able to convey an image of a
historically significant mining operation – the whole of the property might be greater than
the sum of its parts.
Of the four National Register criteria, historic placer gold mining properties and
landscapes within the Trinity River study area might fall, if eligible, under Criteria A , C,
or D. Criterion B would not generally apply because Trinity County placer gold mining,
with its period of significance from 1848 to 1962, is not associated with a historically
significant person. Criterion A has applicable areas of thematic significance that can help
guide the evaluation process, including: Agriculture, Business, Commerce, Community
Planning and Development, Conservation, Economics, Education, Engineering, Ethnic
Heritage, Exploration and Settlement, Invention, Industry, Labor, Law, Literature,
Military, Politics/Government, Science, and Social History. The themes of engineering,
economics, and exploration and settlement are the most applicable because these themes
help frame the historic context statement’s research design. Trinity County placer gold
mining provides a window to examine the shifts and advancements in placer gold
extraction technology over time, from simple pans and rockers to industrial hydraulic to
mechanical dredge technology. Trinity County placer gold mining helped create and
sustain the local economy for over a century, and contributed, albeit in a minor sense, to
the state’s economy during this period. Trinity County placer gold exploration and
exploitation played a role in the region’s discovery and settlement and industrial
development, and can be associated with the latter stages of California’s nineteenth
75
century gold rush, especially in the wake of the 1884 ban on Sierra Nevada hydraulic
mine waste disposal methods.
Under Criterion C, mining properties may be significant for their Architecture and/or
Engineering. It would be difficult to determine eligibility for Trinity County placer
mining sites due to the fact that almost no engineering technology – save for a monitor or
two from what is left of the LaGrange Mine currently used for roadside interpretive
purposes and assorted mining artifacts on display at the local history museum – exist
intact to this day. Additionally, all dredges, which represented the apex of industrial
placer gold extraction technology, that worked the river during the last six decades of the
period of significance were either dismantled and moved or destroyed, making integrity
and issue.
Criterion D might prove more valuable, for the remains of mining activities could have
the potential to provide important historical information. Visible remains that could
contain historic information include tailings piles or dumps, surviving machinery and
mine apparatuses, and remnants of water delivery systems for hydraulic mines like
channels, ditches, flumes, trestles, tunnels, and holding ponds. Less visible remains such
as privy pits, trash dumps, prospect pits, collapsed head frames, building foundations,
overgrown roads and trails, machine pads, anchor pins, tramway tower pads, and cables
could also provide important historic information.
Research Design and Questions
Devising a working research design for the Trinity placer gold historic context statement
proved challenging. Very little physical evidence, save for large tailing piles from dredge
activities, and landscape scarring from hydraulic mining activities, exist in the study area.
Since the purpose of the task was to research and write a historic context statement that
would help place riverside placer gold mining activities in some kind of evaluative
context, research questions were formulated based on themes listed in National Register
Bulletin #42, and supplemented by Hamusek-McGann and Vaughn (1999).
76
The initial question posed centered on what thematic categories listed in Bulletin #42
might prove most useful in the evaluation of Trinity River placer gold history under the
National Register criteria. After all, other than mine tailing debris piles and scarred,
overgrown landscapes, very little remains of this placer mining activity; all dredges are
gone, dredge tailings mounds and debris piles are being reduced and recycled into gravel
and fill, and all physical artifacts and remains of hydraulic mining ventures are lost to
various scattered interpretive sites or consumed by environmental decay. To do this,
three interconnected themes were chosen, ones that would help evaluators get a grasp of
the larger contextual picture, especially under National Register Criterion A: exploration
and settlement, economics, and engineering.
Under exploration and settlement, the main questions were: who first discovered gold on
the Trinity River, and when? Did this result in a gold rush similar to what was happening
in California at about the same time, or was it less of a rush, and why? What was the
scope of early era Trinity River gold mining activities, and how did these activities lead
to the formation of towns like Weaverville? How did the 1884 ban on Sierra Nevada
hydraulic mine waste disposal affect Trinity County’s gold mining history? Finally, how
many state-listed placer mining sites exist within the study area?
Questions centered on the second thematic category, economics, were: to what extent did
Trinity County gold mining activities help create, then sustain, the local economy? How
much gold did Trinity County produce during the period of significance (1848 to 1962)?
How did Trinity County production numbers compare to other gold mines in California
operating during the same time? What was the percentage of Trinity County’s monetary
gold production compared to the rest of California? Do the monetary numbers of Trinity
County placer gold mining hold significance beyond the local level? Do these numbers
correlate with national economic spike and skid cycles? Lastly, what factors caused the
decline of Trinity County placer gold mining?
77
The third thematic category, engineering, posed important questions: how and why did
Trinity County placer gold mining technology evolve over time from simple to industrial
methods? What advancements in placer mining technology best illustrate this shift?
Can these advances be broken down into specific technological types, and do they
overlap? What were the environmental consequences of the various types of gold placer
mining? Can the development and advancement of Trinity County placer gold mining
engineering be connected with innovations and events happening not just in California,
but in America and the rest of the world?
What seemed like a collection of divergent questions dovetailed well with each other.
During the course of research, however, economics and engineering stood out to become
the glue that binds this historic context statement together into one organic whole. The
reason is that the first theme, exploration and settlement, applies almost exclusively to
nineteenth century Trinity County; the county’s placer gold mining history extends well
into the twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the isolated county was
already settled, and population numbers would not vary much over the next sixty years.
Economics and engineering were the thematic threads that remained constant throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These two themes not only provided the majority
of research materials that helped frame and build the context statement, but helped
answer many initial research questions.
78
Glossary of Placer Mining Terms
Alluvial: Used to describe materials deposited by a river, stream, or running water
Amalgamation: A process used to separate gold from ore. The ore is crushed in a
mercury-water solution and subjected to violent agitation. This motion breaks up the
mercury into minute particles, which adhere to the gold. Later, when the gold has
partially separated from the mercury, the remaining mass is heated in a retort. The
mercury leaves in the form of a vapor, which is condensed and used again. The gold is
now almost pure and is cast into bars
Assay Office: A laboratory for examining ores, usually gold and silver, in order to
determine monetary value
Bar: Pertaining to rivers, and generally know as a bank of sand, gravel, or rock. The
word was used as the last part of any camp that happened to spring up along a river bar,
such as Mormon Bar, Goodyear Bar, Bidwell Bar, etc. Placer miners usually worked
bars at times of low water
Bucket Dredge: A dredge having two pontoons, between which passes a chain of
digging buckets
Concentrator: A plant where ore is separated into values (concentrations) and rejects
(tails), or an appliance in the plant, such as a flotation cell, jig, electromagnet, or shaking
table. Also called a mill, reduction works, or cleaning plant
Cradle: See Rocker
Diggings: Applicable to all mineral deposits and mining camps, but as used in the United
States applied strictly to placer mining
Doodlebug: A much smaller, more mobile dredge designed to work tight, confined areas
Dredge: A large raft or barge mounted with either a chain of buckets or suction pumps
and other appliances, to elevate and wash alluvial deposits and gravel for gold, silver, tin,
platinum, diamonds, etc.
Dust: A term used to describe minute particles of placer gold. This “dust” was used as
money. In many camps, a dollar in dust was the amount that could be held between the
thumb and forefinger, also called a “pinch”
Elevator: An endless belt or chain conveyor with cleats, scoops, or buckets designed to
raise materials
Flotation: A mineral separation method in which a froth, created with reagents and
water, floats some finely crushed minerals while others sink
79
Flume: An open trough or channel, made of wood or other material, used to transport
water from a distance
Giant: The nozzle of a pipe used to convey water for hydraulic mining, to pressurize and
increase the water’s force. See Monitor
Glory Hole: A large, open pit from which ore is or has been extracted
Grizzly: An iron grating that catches oversize stones and boulders passing through the
sluices and throws them aside
Headline: a cable or series of cables used to tether a dredge to a large fixed object. Later
abandoned in favor of the Spud
Hydraulic Mining: A mining method in which a bank of gold-bearing earth or gravel is
washed away by a powerful stream of water and carried into riffle-lined sluices, where
gold separates from the earth and gravel by its specific gravity. The leftover debris was
then pushed into streams and creeks. Widely acknowledged as the most environmentally
destructive of the placer mining methods
Lode Mining (as opposed to Placer): Mining of a mineral deposit in solid rock, usually
through the excavation and reinforcement of deep shafts within the Earth. One of the
most dangerous methods of mining
Long Tom: An inclined trough (or sluice box) in which gold-bearing earth and gravels
are crudely washed. Long toms are longer than rockers
Mill: Any means of reducing ores other than smelting, or a place or machine used to
crush ore and rock
Monitor: A hydraulic mining contrivance consisting of a nozzle and holder, used to
project high-pressure water on unconsolidated gravels and sands to break them down,
wash, and transport elsewhere as waste
Oregon Tom: A type of long tom that saves more of the very fine gold than a regular
long tom
Panning: A crude method of extracting gold from streambeds. A saucer-shaped pan is
partially filled with gravel and dipped in water. The pan is then moved gently in a
circular motion to wash out the lighter gravel. The gold, being heavier, sinks to the
bottom and remains
Piper: A hydraulic miner that operates a giant
80
Placer Claim: A mining claim that has been located over a mineral deposit. These
placer deposits were built up over the ages through the erosion process, which is why
most claims were located along rivers, creeks and dry streambeds
Placer Mining: The process of gathering precious metals from the claim. This was
accomplished by several different methods, of which the best known and most commonly
used were panning, hydraulics, dredging and variations of sluicing. Because of the
importance of water in all of these process, the placer claim was usually located on or
near as possible to a stream. In many instances rich placer claims were located high and
dry, and water was brought in by flume and ditch to facilitate the process
Plates: Mercury-covered copper or metal plates used to amalgamate free gold
Poke: A crude leather pouch equipped with a drawstring. The miners used them to store
or carry gold dust and nuggets
Quicksilver: a.k.a. Mercury
Reservoir: An artificially built, dammed, or excavated place designed to hold a body of
water
Riffles: Grooves or slats in the bottom of an inclined trough or sluice designed to catch
the gold contained in sands and gravels
Rocker: Or “cradle,” a crude gold extraction machine used mainly by the Chinese in
working placers claims. It consisted of a sieve-bottomed hopper mounted on a rocker.
Water and earth were fed into the hopper as the machine rocked. The rocking motion
washed the earth through the sieve onto a slanting apron, while ridges lining the bottom
of the apron trapped the heavier gold and allowed the lighter gravel and earth to wash out
Saving Table: Tables that consisted of two-to-three-foot-wide narrow sluices set sideby-side on grades from 1-1/8 to 1-1/2 inches per foot. These tables extend from beneath
the trommel and then are turned at right angles to the rear of the dredge where they
empty into tail sluices that carry and deposit waste materials at the rear of the dredge
Sluicing: This method of extracting gold from placer claims consisted of a long inclined
series of troughs (sluice boxes) with riffles or slats transversely fixed across the bottom.
Miners fed water into the upper end, which carried the gold-bearing earth over the riffles
and out, allowing the heavier gold to settle and trap by the riffles on their upstream side.
Mercury was sometimes placed behind the riffles to help catch the gold
Sniper: A person who prospects over old “diggings” looking for gold. Most early
Chinese miners could be considered snipers
Spud: A large vertical pin used to anchor a dredge, as opposed to a headline
81
Stacker: A large conveyor, mounted on a long steel boom, designed to transport tailings
beyond the stern of a gold dredge
Tailings: leftover waste from processed gold-bearing ore or gravels
Trommel: A revolving cylindrical screen used in grading coarsely crushed ore. Material
to be screened is delivered inside the trommel at one end, with finer material dropping
through the holes. The coarser material is delivered at the other end
Undercurrent: A short sluice much wider than the main sluice set on a steeper grade at
right angles to the main sluice. It is designed to save fine gold that does not easily settle
82
Bibliography
Books
Caughey, John Walton. Gold Is the Cornerstone. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1948.
Greenland, Powell. Hydraulic Mining in California : A Tarnished Legacy. Spokane, WA:
Arthur H. Clark Co., 2001.
Gudde, Erwin G. California Gold Camps: A Geographical and Historical Dictionary of
Camps, Towns, and Localities Where Gold Was Found and Mined, Wayside Stations and
Trading Centers. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975.
Holliday, J.S. Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California. Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1999.
_________. The World Rushed In. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
Huggard, Christopher J. “’Squeezing Out the Profits’: Mining and the Environment in
the U.S. West, 1945-2000,” in Richard Etulain and Ferenc Szasz, eds., The American
West in 2000: Essays in Honor of Gerald D. Nash. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico
Press, 2003.
Kelley, Robert. Gold vs. Grain, The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California’s
Central Valley: A Chapter in the Decline in the Concept of Laissez-Faire. Glendale, CA.:
Arthur H. Clark Co., 1959.
May, Philip Ross. Origins of Hydraulic Mining in California. Oakland: Holmes Book
Co., 1970.
Nash, Gerald D. World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy. Lincoln: Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1990.
Paul, Rodman W. California Gold : The Beginning of Mining in the Far West.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947.
Spence, Clark C. “From Gold Pans to California Dredges: The Search for Mass
Production in Placer Mining,” in Kenneth Owens, ed., Riches for All: The California
Gold Rush and the World. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Wagner, Jack R. Gold Mines of California. San Diego: Howell-North Books, 1970.
Zhu, Liping. A Chinaman’s Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining
Frontier. Niwot, CO: Univ. Press of Colorado, 1997.
83
Articles
Brerton, Roslyn. “Mining Techniques in the California Goldfields During the 1850s.”
Pacific Historian (Fall 1976): 286-301.
Bullough, William J. “Entrepreneurs and Urbanism on the California Mining Frontier,
Frederick Walter and Weaverville, 1852-1868.” California History 70 (Summer 1991).
Dodds, Gordon B., “The Stream-Flow Controversy: A Conservation Turning Point.” The
Journal of American History. 56 (Jan. 1969).
Kelly, Robert. “Forgotten Giant: The Hydraulic Gold Mining Industry in California.”
Pacific Historical Review 23 (November 1954).
________. “The Mining Debris Controversy in the Sacramento Valley.” Pacific
Historical Review 25 (November 1956).
Kise, Commodore. “Dredges Along the Trinity,” in Trinity Yearbook. Weaverville:
Trinity County Historical Society, 1960.
Lydon, Philip A. “History and Mining in the Southeast Quarter of the Minersville
Quadrangle, Trinity, California,” in Trinity Yearbook. Weaverville: Trinity County
Historical Society, 1962.
May, Howard. “Re-floating the Fairview Placers Dredge,” in Trinity Yearbook.
Weaverville: Trinity County Historical Society, 2001.
Morris, Florence, ed. “Featuring a Picture Story of the Bucket Line Dredges of Trinity
County, A Picture Gallery, and Other Stories of Interest,” in Trinity Yearbook.
Weaverville: Trinity County Historical Society, 1974.
Pisani, Donald J. “The Origins of Western Water Law: Case Studies From Two Mining
Districts.” California History 70 (Fall 1991).
Rohe, Rand. “Gold Dredging in the American West: Origin and Diffusion.” Pacific
Historian (Summer 1984).
Romanowitz, Charles. “California’s Gold Dredges.” Mineral Information Service,
California Division of Mines and Geology 23 (August 1970).
Sawin, H. A. “Gold Dredging in California.” Mining Congress Journal 32 (August
1946).
Sibley, Robert. ‘Gold-dredging Practice in California.” The Engineering and Mining
Journal 85 (May 30, 1908).
84
Spence, Clark C. “The Golden Age of Dredging: The Development of an Industry and
Its Environmental Impact.” Western Historical Quarterly 11 (October 1980).
Ziebarth, Marilyn. “California’s First Environmental Battle.” California History (Fall
1984): 274-279. (Reprint of article in California Lawyer, August 1984).
Government-Federal
Kelly, John, and H. John McAleer. An Archeological Survey, Assessment, and
Recommendations for the Ohio Flat Mining District (CA-Tri-943), Trinity County,
California. Redding: United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land
Management, and Sacramento: State of California Department of Parks and Recreation,
1986.
Lindgren, Waldemar. “The Tertiary Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California.” USGS
Professional Paper 73. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1911.
United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation. Cultural Resources
Reports Prepared for Section 106 Compliance for the Trinity River Main Stem Fishery
Restoration Cultural Resources Programmatic Agreement 2002 to 2006. Sacramento:
USDOI Bureau of Reclamation, Mid-Pacific Region, December 2006.
Government-State
State of California, Division of Mines and Geology. Mines and Mineral Resources of
Trinity County, California. Sacramento: California Division of Mines and Geology,
1964. County Report 4.
__________. Gold Districts of California. Sacramento: California Division of Mines
and Geology, 1970. Bulletin No. 193.
State of California, Department of Natural Resources, Division of Mines. California
Mineral Production and Directory of Mineral Producers for 1932. Sacramento:
California State Printing Office, 1933. Bulletin No. 109.
__________. California Journal of Mines and Geology, Quarterly Chapter of State
Mineralogist’s Report XXXVII. Sacramento: California State Printing Office, January
1941.
State of California, State Mining Bureau. 10th Annual Report of the State Mineralogist.
Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1890.
__________. 11th Report of the State Mineralogist. Sacramento: California State
Printing Office, 1892.
85
__________. Register of Mines and Minerals, County of Trinity. San Francisco: State
Mining Bureau, 1898.
__________. Gold Dredging in California. Sacramento: California State Printing
Office, 1905. Bulletin No. 36.
__________. Gold Dredging in California. Sacramento: California State Printing
Office, 1910. Bulletin No. 57.
__________. Report XIV of the State Mineralogist on Portions of California (19131914). Sacramento: California State Printing Office, July 1915.
__________. Report XVII of the State Mineralogist, Mining in California During 1920.
San Francisco: State Mining Bureau, 1921.
__________. Gold Placers in California. Sacramento: California State Printing Office,
1923. Bulletin No. 92.
__________. California Mineral Production for 1922.
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Reports
Allen, Chester. “Report on Properties of the La Grange Mining Company.” Undated and
unpublished manuscript #16, Jake Jackson History Center, Weaverville.
Hamusek-McGann, Blossom, and Trudy Vaughn. Historical Context and Research
Design for Mining Sites in the Central Portions of Western Shasta County, California.
Draft manuscript on file at the Bureau of Land Management Redding Field Office, 1999.
Overview of the Cultural Historic Resources of Euro-American and Other Immigrant
Groups in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Playa Del Rey, CA: Geoscientific Systems
and Consulting, March 1981.
“Provisional Overall Economic Development Program, Trinity County, California.”
Trinity County Recreation and Development Association, November 1962.
State Resources: Trinity County. Oakland: Pacific Press, 1891.
86
Newspapers
Pacific Coast Miner
Redding Record-Searchlight
San Francisco Chronicle
Trinity Weekly Journal
Interviews/Presentations/Speeches
Gilzean, Warren. “Hydraulic Mining.” Conducted by Hal Goodyear, January 2, 1971.
Goodyear, Hal. Conducted by James Bailey, August 15, 2007.
Goodyear, Hal. “Hydraulic Mining.” Undated Speech, copy in Jake Jackson History
Center, Weaverville.
“Management of the Trinity River Project by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation,” speech
by Billy E. Martin, Regional Director, Mid-Pacific Region, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation,
Weaverville and Lewiston, California, September 4, 1974.
Ryan, Vernon. “LaGrange Mine.” Oral History Transcription. Jake Jackson History
Center, Weaverville, California, October 3, 1969. Document File: LaGrange, Document
#27.
Unpublished Papers/Theses/Dissertations
Adkins, Richard D. “The Destruction of the Trinity River, California (1848-1964).”
Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Oklahoma, 2007.
Bartlett, James W. “Trinity County, California, A Summary of its History, from May
1845 to September 1926.” Copy with Jake Jackson History Center, Weaverville.
Hamon, Wendell. “A Historical Sketch of Gold Dredging in California.” Research paper
for History 193B, San Jose State College, 1955.
Horstman, William F. “The Mining History of Trinity County, California.” Research
paper for History 400, Brigham Young Univ., May 10, 1967.
Kise, C. C. “Dredges Along the Trinity.” Jake Jackson History Center, Weaverville,
California, nd. Document File: Mining. Document #76
87
Purdy, Sarah Elizabeth. “Analysis of Dredge Tailings Pile Patterns: Applications for
Historical Archeological Research.” Unpublished M.A. Thesis, Oregon State Univ.,
2007.
Sheppard, Susan. “La Grange Mine – Trinity County, California.” Research Paper,
January 12, 1967, copy in Jake Jackson History Center, Weaverville.
Manuscript Collections
Trinity Dredging Company Papers, 1909-1959. MSS 156, Meriam Library Special
Collections, California State Univ., Chico, CA.
88
Figures
89
90
91
92
93
Tables
94
Year
1880
1881
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
Table 1: Monetary Value, Mineral Production, Trinity County, 1880 -1962*
Gold**
Silver
Platinum
Misc***
Total Monetary
Gold $$
Value (TMV)
% of TMV
(to nearest % point)
$326,693.00
$142.00
$7,595.00
$334,330.00
98
$550,000.00 $1,500.00
$551,500.00
99
$600,000.00
$600,000.00
100
$400,000.00
$400,000.00
100
$529,150.00
$334.00
$529,484.00
99
$338,148.00
$10.00
$338,158.00
100
$464,726.00
$219.00
$464,945.00
99
$553,051.00
$924.00
$553,975.00
99
$589,000.00
$500.00
$589,500.00
99
$811,632.00
$640.00
$812,272.00
99
$1,192,790.00
$259.00
$12,600.00 $1,205,649.00
99
$1,327,787.00 $2,249.00
$1,330,036.00
93
$1,446,603.00
$168.00
$1,446,771.00
99
$1,122,995.00
$1,122,995.00
100
$1,012,666.00
$325.00
$5,000.00 $1,017,991.00
99
$1,166,745.00 $1,257.00
$137,410.00 $1,305,412.00
89
$1,293,330.00
$139,035.00 $1,435,365.00
90
$1,078,372.00
$259.00
$29,330.00 $1,107,961.00
97
$859,255.00
$314.00
$151,200.00 $1,010,769.00
85
$590,510.00 $1,083.00
$123,999.00
$715,595.00
82
$571,605.00 $16,567.00
$110,517.00
$698,689.00
82
$684,683.00 $2,668.00
$64,929.00
$752,280.00
91
$719,992.00
$550.00
$468.00
$10,251.00
$731,261.00
98
$607,728.00 $2,085.00
$200.00
$11,131.00
$621,244.00
98
$574,814.00
$135.00
$275.00
$3,864.00
$579,088.00
99
$690,844.00 $3,044.00
$13,917.00
$708,255.00
86
$560,843.00 $2,981.00
$130.00
$6,059.00
$570,013.00
98
$535,316.00 $2,399.00
$3,739.00
$541,454.00
99
$602,914.00 $4,269.00
$3,804.00
$611,017.00
99
$520,046.00 $2,302.00
$7,915.00
$530,263.00
98
$500,851.00 $1,960.00
$5,622.00
$508,433.00
98
$612,149.00 $6,777.00
$2,024.00
$620,950.00
99
$723,503.00
$758.00
$9,494.00
$733,755.00
99
$431,862.00 $2,119.00
$1,161.00
$435,142.00
99
$743,512.00 $3,374.00
$151.00
$245.00
$747,037.00
99
$441,846,00 $3,470.00
$435.00
$53,760.00
$499,511.00
88
$435,493.00 $7,591.00 $5,161.00
$397,316.00
$845,651.00
51
$602,048.00 $10,021.00 $3,283.00
$386,553.00 $1,001,885.00
60
$444,729.00 $6,912.00 $3,136.00
$257,747.00
$707,524.00
63
$538,494.00 $3,872.00
$28,833.00
$571,199.00
94
$541,387.00 $3,469.00 $6,612.00
$10,637.00
$562,105.00
96
$437,993.00 $1,390.00 $3,260.00
$14,239.00
$456,882.00
95
$182,918.00 $2,432.00 $1,223.00
$11,364.00
$197,937.00
92
$617,841.00 $5,816.00 $2,050.00
$51,467.00
$677,174.00
91
$422,281.00 $10,934.00 $1,839.00
$74,290.00
$509,344.00
83
$424,037.00 $7,724.00 $3,081.00
$62,447.00
$497,289.00
85
$483,471.00 $13,276.00 $2,832.00
$110,420.00
$609,999.00
79
$409,492.00 $12,236.00
$134,036.00
$555,764.00
74
$402,694.00 $12,558.00
$115,228.00
$530,480.00
76
$352,029.00 $10,629.00
$163,576.00
$526,234.00
67
95
Year
Gold**
Silver
Platinum
Misc***
Total Monetary
Value (TMV)
Gold $$
% of TMV
(to nearest % point)
75
95
95
96
88
88
98
97
97
98
98
96
80
10
4
70
95
87
89
42
96
88
79
64
53
54
$330,003.00 $6,700.00
1930
$292,031.00
$532.00
1931
$294,297.00
$608.00
1932
$345,851.00
$768.00
1933
$574,681.00 $1,640.00
1934
$727,787.00 $2,506.00
1935
$708,715.00 $2,251.00
1936
$703,780.00 $2,009.00
1937
1938 $1,451,345.00 $2,992.00
1939 $1,488,550.00 $3,176.00
1940 $1,730,155.00 $4,222.00
1941 $1,500,870.00 $3,408.00
$846,895.00 $2,001.00
1942
$31,115.00
$64.00
1943
$19,250.00
$40.00
1944
$63,840.00
$128.00
1945
$488,670.00 $1,154.00
1946
$486,675.00
1947
$277,550.00
$915.00
1948
$113,330.00
$383.00
1949
$263,585.00
$612.00
1950
$271,985.00
$748.00
1951
$237,790.00
$600.00
1952
$199,395.00
$529.00
1953
$214,210.00
$590.00
1954
$248,675.00
$686.00
1955
1956 Gold/Silver TMV in Misc.
1957 Gold/Silver TMV in Misc.
$51,975.00
$153.00
1958
$100,630.00
$14,720.00
$12,737.00
$12,884.00
$74,299.00
$14,893.00
$13,143.00
$7,052.00
$8,539.00
$38,795.00
$23,225.00
$37,950.00
$52,087.00
$204,546.00
$291,944.00
$496,775.00
$27,592.00
$25,059.00
$74,880.00
$32,545.00
$153,864.00
$10,283.00
$35,911.00
$60,071.00
$108,962.00
$187,764.00
$196,935.00
$540,620.00
$1,649,368.00
$2,302,637.00
$437,333.00
$308,276.00
$308,115.00
$359,503.00
$650,620.00
$745,186.00
$724,109.00
$721,380.00
$1,493,132.00
$1,514,951.00
$1,772,327.00
$1,556,365.00
$1,053,442.00
$323,123.00
$516,065.00
$91,560.00
$514,883.00
$561,555.00
$311,010.00
$267,577.00
$274,480.00
$308,644.00
$298,461.00
$308,886.00
$402,564.00
$446,296.00
$540,620.00
$1,649,368.00
$2,354,765.00
$2,520.00
$7.00
1959
1960 Gold/Silver TMV in Misc.
$3,570.00
$8.00
1961
$2,695.00
$13.00
1962
$1,364,147.00
$997,898.00
$360,807.00
$278,337.00
$1,366.674.00
$997,898.00
$364,565.00
$281,045.00
>1
>1
Totals $45,600,812.00 $213,944.00 $42,654.00 $12,537,601.00 $54,280,785.00
84
$993.00
$473.00
2
>1
Source: State of California, Division of Mines and Geology, Mines and Mineral Resources of Trinity
County, County Report 4 (San Francisco, 1965): 16-17.
*No data reported before 1880
**State data does not differentiate between placer/dredge, hydraulic, and lode gold mining
***Misc. includes copper, quicksilver, granite, chromic iron, coal, manganese, lead, asbestos, mineral
water, and gemstones
96
Table 2: Trinity County’s Percentage of California Gold Production, 1880-1932*
Trinity County Gold Production
California Gold
Trinity Gold TMV as %
of California Gold TMV
Total Monetary Value (TMV)
Production TMV
$326,693
$20,030,761
1.6
1880
$550,000
$19,223,155
2.8
1881
$600,000
$17,146,416
3.4
1882
$400,000
$24,316,873
1.6
1883
$529,150
$13,600,000
3.9
1884
$338,148
$12,661,044
2.7
1885
$464,726
$14,716,506
3.7
1886
$553,051
$13,588,614
4.0
1887
$589,000
$12,750,000
4.6
1888
$811,632
$11,212,913
7.2
1889
$1,192,790
$12,309,793
9.6
1890
$1,327,787
$12,728,869
10.4
1891
$1,446,603
$12,571,900
11.5
1892
$1,122,995
$12,422,811
9.0
1893
$1,012,666
$13,923,281
7.2
1894
$1,166,745
$15,334,317
7.6
1895
$1,293,330
$17,181,592
7.5
1896
$1,078,372
$15,871,401
6.7
1897
$859,255
$15,906,478
5.4
1898
$590,510
$15,336,031
3.8
1899
$571,605
$15,863,355
3.6
1900
$684,683
$16,989,044
4.0
1901
$719,992
$16,910,320
4.3
1902
$607,728
$16,471,264
3.7
1903
$574,814
$19,109,600
3.0
1904
$690,844
$19,197,043
3.6
1905
$560,843
$18,732,452
3.0
1906
$535,316
$16,727,928
3.2
1907
$602,914
$18,761,559
3.2
1908
$520,046
$20,237,837
2.5
1909
$500,851
$19,715,440
2.5
1910
$612,149
$19,738,908
3.1
1911
$723,503
$19,713,478
3.6
1912
$431,862
$20,406,958
2.1
1913
$743,512
$20,653,496
3.6
1914
$441,846
$22,446,296
2.0
1915
$435,493
$21,410,741
2.0
1916
$602,048
$20,087,504
3.0
1917
$444,729
$16,529,162
2.7
1918
$538,494
$16,695,955
3.2
1919
$541,387
$14,311,043
3.8
1920
$437,993
$15,704,822
2.8
1921
$182,918
$14,670,346
1.2
1922
$617,841
$13,379,013
4.6
1923
$422,281
$13,150,375
3.2
1924
$424,037
$13,065,330
3.2
1925
$483,471
$11,923,481
3.6
1926
$409,492
$11,671,018
3.5
1927
$402,694
$10,785,315
3.7
1928
$352,029
$8,526,703
4.1
1929
$330,003
$9,451,162
3.4
1930
Year
97
Year
1931
1932
Totals
Trinity County Gold Production
Total Monetary Value (TMV)
$292,031
$294,297
California Gold
Production TMV
$10,814,162
$11,765,726
$32,987,199
Trinity Gold TMV as %
of California Gold TMV
2.7
2.5
$824, 526,310
4%
Sources: (For California Gold Data 1880-1922): State of California, State Mining Bureau, California
Mineral Production for 1922, Bulletin #93 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1923), 50.
(For California Gold Data 1923-1932): State of California, Division of Mines, California Mineral
Production and Directory of Mineral Producers for 1932, Bulletin #109 (Sacramento: State Printing
Office, 1933), 14.
*No data reported for Trinity County before 1880; no state data located for 1933 on.
98
Table 3: Placer Mining Claims Within the Study Area,
Map of Study Area, Mine Claims by Number
Source: J.C. O’ Brien, Mines and Mineral Resources of Trinity County, California, County Report 4 (San
Francisco: California Division of Mines and Geology, 1965)
Map
#
Name of Claim, Mine,
Group
Location
(all Mount Diablo
Meridian)
Atomic Mining Company
Sec. 1, T 22N R
10W
101
Bergen Placer (Boston no.
5, Compagnie Francise,
Graf, hays, Joe Sturdivant,
Keno, Laws)
Chapman & Fisher
(Gribble, Raab)
Sec. 23, T 33N, R
10W, Sec. 12, 13,
24, T 33N, R 11W
Golden Gravels
Sec. 33, 34, T
34N, R 11W
124
Geology
Gold
Francis Smith River Gravel
et. al.,
Weaverville
96
109
Owner
Sec 19, 20, 29, 30,
T 33 N, R 10W
Notes
Small suction dredge in
June 1946, Capacity
estimated at 15 cu
yds/hour
G.H Bergin, Gravel bank
Hydraulic mine, includes
et. al.,
overlies
600 acres of patented
Weaverville homblende
land mined with 2 giants
schist
1946
Earl Johnson Red soil
Hydraulic mine, claims
and Frank
overlying bed of located 1871
Chapman,
gravel and
Junction City bedrock of soft
shale. Fine gold
with some
platinum
n/a
n/a
Dragline dredge operated
on Trinity River near
Helena 1938-39. since
moved
99
Map
#
125
126
Name of Claim, Mine,
Group
Location
Owner
(all Mount Diablo
Meridian)
Goldfield Consolidated
Sec. 1, 2, T 33N R Goldfield
(Bethel Jacobs, Dump,
11W, Sec. 35, 36, Consolidated
Evans and Bartlett, Gilzean T 34N, R 11W
Mines
Brothers, Hocker, Jacobs,
Company,
No CA Mines Company,
San Francisco
O’Shay, Patterson and
Low Bar, Red Hill,
Sunrise)
Good Friday (Post and
Sec. 19, 20, T
n/a
Wilson)
33N, R 10W
132
Indian Creek Dredge
(Bennett Dredge)
Sec. 5, 8, T 32 N
R 9W
Uphill
Mining
Company,
Sacramento
Junction City
Mining
Company,
San Francisco
134
Junction City Dredge
(Junction City Mining
Company, Hager and
Hager
Sec. 12, T 33N, R
11W; Sec. 7, 18, T
33N, R 10 W; Sec.
35, T 34N, R 11W
136
La Grange (Clary and
McCarthy, Mount
Morensis, Railroad and
Mount Morensis, Trinity
Gold and Mining
Company, Ward)
137
Lewiston Placers
Sec. 20, T 33N, R n/a
8W
146
Oregon Gulch Dredging
Co
151
Placer Exploration
Company
157
Sheridan
Sec 7, 8, 9, T 33N, Byron
R 10W
Stookey,
Weaverville
Sec. 19, 29, T 33N n/a
R 10W; Sec.
1,2,12 T 32 N R
10W; Sec. 32, T
36N, R 7W
Sec. 19, T 33N R JJ Morgan
10W
and TC
Muegge,
Junction City
Geology
River terraces,
gold close to
bedrock and in
bedrock
crevices
Hydraulic mine, 19381950
Gravel 60-70
Hydraulic mine on bench
feet high above above Trinity River 2
slate bedrock
miles S of Junction City.
Worked with 2 giants
with water brought from
adjoining gulches in
short supply, see also
Bergin Placer
Gravel over
Dragline and washing
hard shale
plant, on edge of study
bedrock
area
River gravel
over hard
serpentine
bedrock. Gold
with some
platinum
Sec. 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, La Grange
Tertiary gravel
15, 16, 18, T 33N Placer Mines, deposit in a
R 10 W
Weaverville fault block,
Weaverville
basin
100
Notes
River terrace
gravel over slate
bedrock
Bucketline dredge
operated 1936-1948,
when purchased by
Fairview Placers and
moved to Minersville
Although out of study
area, significant as
America’s largest
hydraulic mine worked
1851-1918, produced $8
M in gold; monitors used
in 1930s by Caltrans to
cut right-of-way of new
Highway 299 over
Oregon mountain
Hydraulic mine
See also La Grange,
Sturdivant
River gravel
Three dragline dredges
along Trinity river, see
also Sunshine Dredging
Co and Viking Dredge
Gravel on low Placer mine on Trinity
terrace with 30 river 2 miles S of
ft of overburden Junction city. Gravel
mined by bulldozer,
carried on belt conveyor
Map
#
159
Name of Claim, Mine,
Group
Steiner Flat
Sturdivant
Sunshine Company
164
198
Location
(all Mount Diablo
Meridian)
Owner
Geology
Notes
to stationary washing
plant, overburden
removed by hydraulic
giants. Operation
handicapped by shortage
of water from Simpson’s
Gulch
Sec. 35, 36, T
n/a
Gravel bank 30 Hydraulic mine 2 miles
33N, R 10W
feet high above N of Douglas City near
slate bedrock
junction of Trinity River
and Dutton Creek. Water
brought from Dutton
Creek through 2 mile
long ditch
Sec. 7,8,9, T 33N, B Stookey, et. Gravel bank 15 Hydraulic mine 1.5 E of
R 10W
al.,
to 35 feet high Junction City. See also
Weaverville above slate
La Grange and Oregon
bedrock, some Gulch Dredging
coarse gold
Company
Sec. 2, 12, T 32N
R 10W
RR Moore
Gravel over
and Ray
shale bedrock
Nienaber,
Douglas City
Dragline dredge and
washing plant, 1940-41.
See also Placer
Exploration and Viking
Dredge
Trinity Dredging Company Sec. 5,6,7,8, T
Mary Smith, Gravel 30 feet Bucket-line dredge
33N R 8W
Lewiston
deep with large operated on Trinity River
boulders and
4 miles N of Lewiston,
cemented grave; most of area dredged
bedrock hard
now covered by
and tilted
Lewiston Lake.
Union Hill
Sec. 6, T 32N, R Edwin Regan, River terrace
175 feet above Trinity
9W
et. al.,
gravel
River about 1 mile E of
Weaverville
Douglas City. First
worked 1862, again
1906-14. Leased during
early 1920s. See
McMurray and Hupp
Viking Dredge
Sec. 2, 12, T 32N, Viking
Dragline dredge with 2
R 10W
Dredging
cu yd bucket operated on
Company,
TR bars near mouth of
Chico
Redding Creek 19391940. Taken over by
Placer Exploration
Company March 1941
Sand and Gravel
Brown
n/a
Sec. 24, T
Inactive pit in dredge
33N R 9W
tailings approx. 2 miles
W of Lewiston.
Contractor excavated and
crushed 95,349 tons of
101
Map
#
Name of Claim, Mine,
Group
Location
(all Mount Diablo
Meridian)
Owner
202
Trinity Sand and Gravel
n/a
Sec. 12, T
32N, R 10W
203
Richards 1
n/a
Sec. 19, T
33N R 10W
204
Richards 2
n/a
Sec. 23, T
33N R 9W
206
Transocean Engineers
n/a
Sec. 5, T 33N
R 8W
212
Transocean Engineers
n/a
230 Limekiln Gulch
n/a
Stone, Broken and Crushed
Sec. 18, T
33N, R 8W
Limestone
Sec.21,28,29,32,
T 33N, R 9W
102
Geology
Notes
sand and gravel for use
as road base and
bituminous aggregate in
the Trinity Project
Extensive deposit of
hydraulic tailings along
Reading Creek near
Douglas City. Actively
worked by Trinity Sand
and Gravel Co. and
worked intermittently
prior to 1960 by various
contractors to supply
approximately 5,000 tons
of concrete aggregate for
the Trinity Project.
Abandoned pit in
tailings deposit along
Trinity River, Lewiston.
Contractor processed 26,
348 tons of sand and
gravel for road base in
the TP
Abandoned pit in dredge
tailings along Trinity
River 2 miles W of
Lewiston. Provided
19,962 tons of backfill
sand, 6,750 tons of gravel
road surface, and 3,252
tons of road cover coat
for the Trinity Project
Abandoned pit in tailings
along Trinity River 2.5
miles N of Lewiston.
Contractor processed
39,029 tons of sand and
gravel for use as road
base in the Trinity
Project
Abandoned quarry about
1 mile N of Lewiston in
Copley greenstone.
Provided 15,120 tons of
rip-rap for use in Trinity
Project
Some stone on Brown
Mountain quarried and
burned in local kiln; pre1906
Table 4: Sites Recorded During Trinity River Restoration Projects in Study Area
Site
Location
Description
Eligibility
CA-TRI-4
Rush Creek, 2002
Stone tools and midden
Eligible, no consensus
originally recorded by Treganza
(1952)
Dredge Tailings
Hocker Flat, 2004
Dredger tailing complex
Not Eligible 2004
Cable and
Hocker Flat, 2004
Cable/Cast Iron Block
Unevaluated
Block
05-TRRP-01
Conner Creek, 2005
Dredge tailings and ponds
Not Eligible
05-TRRP-02
Valdor Gulch, 2005
Coopers Bar dredge tailings and
Not Eligible
drainage channel
06-TRRP-01
Indian Creek, 2006
Union Hill Hydraulic Mine
Eligible, Criteria A and D
06-TRRP-02
Indian Creek, 2006
WC-TR confluence tailings
Not Eligible
06-TRRP-03
Indian Creek, 2006
Texas Bar tailings
Not Eligible
06-TRRP-04
Indian Creek, 2006
Dredge engine and winch
Not Eligible
06-TRRP-05
Indian Creek, 2006
Trinity Canal
Not Eligible
06-TRRP-06
Indian Creek, 2006
Conveyance Ditch
Eligible, associated with
06-TRRP-01
06-TRRP-07
Indian Creek, 2006
Ferry Bar Hydraulic Mining
Not Eligible
Landscape
07-TRRP-01
Bucktail Bar, 2007
Dredge tailings
Not Eligible
07-TRRP-02
Gold Bar, 2007
Drag line and Bucket line
Not Eligible
tailings
07-TRRP-03
Gold Bar, 2007
Placer mining area-ground sluice
Not Eligible
Source: Cultural Resources Reports Prepared for Section 106 Compliance for the Trinity River Main Stem
Fishery Restoration Cultural Resources Programmatic Agreement, 2002 to 2006. Sacramento: USDOI
Bureau of Reclamation, Mid-Pacific Region, December 2006.
103