Panning for Gold

I went to a party last night to celebrate an engagement, and wound up engaged myself. The host brought out a small vile of water with a few flakes of gold in it. He said he'd bought a couple of pans and just went in to the river up in Idaho City. He  asked a few folks along the stream how to do it, and in about an hour and a half he had about 30 dollars worth. Not a bad wage.

I have lived here for thirteen years and known for some time that mining was Idaho's first industry. I wanted to know a little more about my prospects, so I started looking in to it. I first visited the Idaho Mining Association's website to get some historical perspective, and here is what I found out.

In the year eighteen hundred and sixty, A small group of prospectors set out to discover Gold. And they did. A man named Wilbur Basset entered the Nez Perce Indian Reservation and searched in vain for a month. Old Wilbur found it in a place called Canal Gulch, which is east of Lewiston and south of what is now the Dworshak Reservoir. Basset's find sparked a mass migration, and helped make the great state of Idaho what it is today. People came from from points west, like San Francisco, Sacramento and Vancouver to try to get in on the bounty, making Idaho one of only two territories to be settled from west to east. Montana is the other one (parts of Wyoming, too). Six months after Basset's strike, there were over 1600 claims filed. Hundreds of people a day sluiced into Pierce City (named after E.D. Pierce, the leader of Basset's party) via the Columbia and Snake Rivers to try their hands at finding the color.

In 1862 gold was found in the Florence Basin and soon they were pulling over $600,000 (today''s dollars) worth of gold a day from the Salmon River Country. Over 10,000 people flooded the area that summer. A year later, in 1863, Idaho became a territory of the United States and Idaho City, North and East of Boise, had a population to rival Portland of over 6,200. At the time Lewiston had become the capital because of all the supporting businesses that sprang up under tents. By that time many of the prospectors had picked all the low hanging fruit and latecomers spread out in search of more. Some found silver ledges along Jordan Creek, and other creeks near what is now Silver City in the Owyhee Mountains. Today it's just a historical tourist attraction.

That same year Boise City was founded, and became the territorial capital two years later. Almost 20 years later new machinery and the steam engine were being used to crush rock in stamp mills, and air powered drills replaced the human powered hammer and chisel for blasting. In 1882 men made charcoal, 180,000 bushels worth, to smelt the ore they were pulling from the hills. And it wasn't just gold either. Lead and silver were abundant as well. 

In 1885  Noah Kellog found silver in the Coeur d'Alene river, which today is the largest producer of the shiny metal in the world. Just to give you an idea of how much metal has been pulled out of the ground - in 1985 the mines in that district produced their one billionth ounce of silver. That's ten million ounces a year of silver! There might be a few dollars in that. And that's just one district. They say in Idaho city that the strike there was bigger than the California find in 1849. Looking at all the left overs from the dredges along the highway up there - I believe it. The pile of gravel and river rock along Highway 21 are really a small sample of what you can find if you take some of the Forest Service's dirt roads into the hills.

This is only a brief glimpse of what happened here in the late 19th century. More than I care to write about. But, if you want to know more, about it its pretty easy to do these days. I'm hoping to go up the Boise River and try it myself. My friends from the party last night have got the gold fever, so we'll have to see what pans out.