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Saturday, April 27, 2013
Great Gobs of Gold Abound in Southern Oregon
The largest gold nugget ever found in Oregon was discovered on the East Fork of Althouse Creek in the Illinois Valley in 1859. Its discover, a small Irish miner by the name of Mattie Collins found the whopper in the face of the stream bank under a large stump located about twelve feet about the normal waterline. Dubbed the “Collins Nugget”, it weighed in at a whopping seventeen pounds!
After Mattie Collins found the nugget, he lived in constant fear of being killed and robbed until he hired a fellow countryman of his by the name of Dorsey to help him transport the nugget out of the Althouse. With the nugget hidden in a sack on Dorsey’s back and Collins taking up the rear armed with a double barreled shotgun, the two men trekked down the old Althouse Trail (which still exists in places to this day, and upon which this writer has walked) and spirited the hunk of yellow metal out of the district under the cover of night. Every twenty or so feet, the two men would stop and peer into the darkness, mistaking every other stump or some other object for a highwayman, until finally, certain that it was a trick of the eye, Collins would tell Dorsey to go forward. Local legend has it that after selling the big yellow marvel to the smelter at Jacksonville for $3500, that awash in wealth, Mattie Collins celebrated his discovery until he drank himself to death.
Today, the Collins Nugget would be valued at about $375,000, though a gold nugget of this size and notoriety would certainly carry a hearty premium.
Other notable large nuggets found in Southern Oregon include:
The Vaun Nugget which was discovered on Slug Bar, near Browntown, also on Althouse Creek. Weight: Approximately 40 ounces.
The Oscar Creek Nugget, discovered in 1892 by Boardman Darneille. It weighed over 18 ounces. Three additional large nuggets were discovered on Oscar Creek around the same time, weighing respectively 12 ounces, 6.25 ounces and 5.75 ounces.
The Klippel Nugget, found in 1904 on McDowell Gulch, weighing approximately 25 ounces.
The Burns Nugget, discovered on Brimstone Gulch at the Stovepipe mine near the site of Leland in 1934, weighed 34.47 ounces.
Also in 1934, Ed Prefontaine discovered a piece of quartz float on Foots Creek that contained 13.63 ounces of gold.
Several large nuggets, one weighing almost 15 pounds were also taken from Sucker Creek which is due east of Althouse.
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The crew at the famous Bunker Hill Mine on Silver Creek show off a two week clean up. The man at far right is pioneer Galice area miner, John Robertson. Photo courtesy of Sharon Crawford, who is the grand daughter of Orval Robertson, who discovered the Bunker Hill with his partner Ted McQueen in 1926.Numerous discoveries of rich gold “pockets” which Southern Oregon is famous for have dotted the mining maps of this area, not limited to the fabulous Gold Hill Pocket discovered in 1860 by Thomas Chavner and partners which some say contained over 250,000 ounces of gold, the famous Revenue Pocket (2500 ounces) discovered on Kane Creek by Enos Rhoten, the SteamBoat Pocket in the Upper Applegate drainage and the famous Briggs Strike of 1904, as well as a rich discovery by Orval Robertson and Ted McQueen at the Bunker Hill Mine on Silver Creek exceeding some 5000 ounces in 1926. One piece of nearly solid gold ore from the Bunker Hill was so heavy that when it fell from the side of the tunnel, it broke the leg of a miner named Bill Mitchell who was operating a drill. The piece of ore was only a foot long, 6 inches wide and 3 inches thick, but it contained nearly 20 pounds of free milling gold. There was so much gold in this vein of ore that Mitchell called it the “Ham and Eggs Vein”, because of the amount of ham and egg breakfasts he had been able to buy with his share of the gold.
As recently as a half decade ago, a couple of pound sized nuggets were taken from a small tributary of the Applegate River, proof that the “big ones” are still out there if you are willing to work hard to find them.
~ Kerby Jackson
Josephine County, Oregon
Female Miners in Southern Oregon?
From the archives of Kerby Jackson
When one thinks of the old timers who worked the rivers, creeks, gulches and hills of Oregon in search of illusive riches, we think of the iconic old grizzled prospector. Red shirted and bearded, with a pick over his shoulder, a .45 slung low on his hip and accompanied only by his trusty mule whose back is heaped high with gear, he is the traditional icon of the gold rush era. That image is so powerful and so well known that today, it adorns anything having to do with the word “gold” and like his cousin the cowboy, everyone recognizes him just by his outline. Yet contrary to that traditional image, he wasn’t the only fella who was out there breaking his back for a few bits of color. The patience and hard work of the Chinese and their contribution to the Southern Oregon Gold Rush are legendary, but even lesser known today were the efforts of Pacific Islanders (so-called “Kanakas”), Mexicans, Free Blacks and other groups of men who came to toil in Oregon’s creeks and gulches hoping to strike it rich. And as the following article, originally published over a century ago attests, not every person working in the gold fields of Oregon was necessarily “one of the boys”.
Grants Pass, Oregon. May 1904.
The gold fields of Southern Oregon mineral zone appear to be particularly attractive to women; at least this section has its fair share of women miners, and there is no gainsaying that it has profited thereby. A visitor to the Forest Queen hydraulic mine, near Grants Pass, will find a handsome woman busily engaged about the diggings, operating a giant, retorting gold or even “bucking” the boulders on the bedrock. This woman is Mrs. Wisenbacher, but she was formerly Miss Pipes and was one of the stunning “Sadie Girls” with the popular Anna Held company in “The Little Duchess”. Last year, Mrs. Wisenbacher quit the stage and became a full “partner” with her father and brother in the operation of the Forest Queen Mine. With a woman about to assist, the season has been a successful one at the Forest Queen.
“Though I had become fascinated with the life behind the footlights,” said Mrs. Wisenbacher to a Mining Review correspondent, “I am equally so with the life of a gold digger in Southern Oregon. There are few spots anywhere prettier than that where the Forest Queen is located.”
Mrs. Wisenbacher, being a “Sadie Girl” is, of course, handsome. She would have this season been a “La Mode” girl in the same popular company, but she was induced by her father, who is a prominent Colorado and Idaho miner, to give up the stage and live a life of greater ease and freedom in the Southern Oregon Mountains.
The Mining Review correspondent also came unexpectedly upon another woman miner, a woman “piper”, if you please, in a Southern Oregon mine. She is Mrs. M.E. Moore, and this lady, like the other mentioned is a full “partner” in a placer mine. Mrs. Moore is a piper, an expert piper – not the kind the Scotch Highlanders know so much about – but a hydraulic mining piper – the operater of a hydraulic giant. Every day this woman is at her post beside the giant, long before the sun is up, and she remains there throughout her shift. None know better than she how best to swerve the big nozzle to drive an avalanche of boulders down the gulch ahead of the giant’s stream, scattering them like a handfull of bullets shot from a catapult, or how to bring that long and deep growl to the monster as its cuts and gnaws deep at the base of the towering red clay bank till a great slab of a thousand tons topples and falls with a crash from the mountainside.
Mrs. Moore has been a “partner” of her husband in the mining business for nearly twenty years. She has followed the trails through the mining regions of Colorado, Montana, Arizona, California and Oregon, prospecting, pocket-hunting, digging, always on the lookout for a color, a strike, a bonanza. She has traveled hundreds of miles on pack pony and burro, through the snow and over the burning sands. Those twenty years, spent altogether out of doors, have been days of perfect health for her. “Yes,” said she, “mining is the life for me. I love it. I love the freedom of the mountains and the ozone of the pines. There is no other life like it; none as enjoyable for me, at least.”
Ellen Jack in 1910One of the best known female prospectors was Ellen Elliot Jack of Colorado, who is pictured at the left in a photo dated about 1910. Ellen was born in England, but came to the Far West in 1872 after the tragic death of her husband and children. In addition to mining, she was also an early woman business owner. Like her male counterparts who worked the gold fields, Ellen was one tough cookie. Everywhere she went, Ellen carried a pick axe and a six gun in her belt and she knew how to use both of them. She was also said to bear a severe scar that was the result of a tomahawk wound she received during one of the Gunnison Indian Uprisings. At the time this photo was taken, she had just written a semi-autobioghraphical novel entitled “The Fate of A Fairy” which was about a woman who loses her husband and becomes a female prospector.
Another lady prospector was Ferminia Sarras, who was a major mine owner in Nevada and was widely known as the “Nevada Copper Queen”. Ferminia’s story would have been lost to history had it not been for the research of historian Sally Zanjani, the author of “A Mine of Her Own: Women Prospectors in the American West, 1850-1950?
The article above is thought to have been written by Dennis Stovall who was an early author living in Josephine County. Stovall is best known for his novel “Suzanne of Kerbyville” which he wrote the same year as this article. His novel, though fictional, is one of the best sources for information on the early settlement of Kerby, Oregon, as well as the mining that went on in the vicinity of that early gold rush town. Though the novel really focuses on the exploits of a young woman named Suzanne , it is mentioned that Suzanne’s father was a “pocket hunter” and there is quite a good description of his methods.
The Forest Queen Placer, mentioned in this article, was located on Louse Creek, a few miles east of Merlin, Oregon. At the time, it was owned by J.P. Pipes and T. Weisenbacher (or Wisenbacher). The property was originally known as the Lance Placer and at the time of this article it consisted of 212 acres of ground that was worked with the assistance of two miles worth of ditch, 2500 feet of pipe with a pressure of 200 feet, three giants and a Ruble Rock Elevator.
~ Kerby Jackson, Josephine County, Oregon
Oregon’s Biggest Gold Nugget: The Collins Nugget
If you trawl the internet for information on gold mining in Oregon, sooner
or later, you’ll find mention of the Armstrong Nugget. This huge lump of
placer gold was discovered near what is today the ghost town of
Susanville, Oregon in 1913 by George Armstrong. This big monster weighed
in at 80.4 ounces. Today, its gold value alone would fetch over $80,000
U.S. dollars. The Armstrong Nugget is currently on display at U.S. Bank in
Baker City in Grant County, Oregon. Most online sources claim that the Armstrong Nugget was the biggest gold
nugget ever discovered in Oregon, but it isn’t so.
In fact, here in Josephine County, on the opposite side of the state, a
number of larger gold nuggets have been discovered near what was refered
to as Sailors Diggings. One of them, pulled out of Sucker Creek, weighed
over 15 pounds. That’s a big chunk of gold, but it’s still not the biggest
nugget that Oregon ever produced.
In 1859, a little Irish fellow by the name of Mattie Collins was mining in
the high bank along the East Fork of Althouse Creek when he uncovered a
huge lump of almost pure gold that became known as the Collins Nugget.
Mattie’s find weighed in at a whopping 204 ounces (approximately 17
pounds. At today’s gold prices, the Collins Nugget would be worth over
$200,000, but typically a nugget will fetch a significantly higher price.
The Collins Nugget is the largest single hunk of gold ever pulled from the
Oregon lands, but unlike the Armstrong Nugget, it doesn’t survive today.
As was always done in those days, Mattie took his find to the smelter at
Jacksonville, sold it for $3500 and then drank himself into poverty.
~ Kerby Jackson
2012 Season is coming soon
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Cassia County Idaho Gold
Cassia County (formed from Lincoln County), on the south side of the Snake River forms much of Idaho’s southern boundary with Utah and Nevada on the west. It contains a diverse assemblage of rocks, including the oldest rocks in Idaho. Most of the people in Cassia County live in irrigated agricultural areas near Burley, Declo and Oakley. This area, on the southern edge of the Snake River Plain, is underlain by Quaternary basalt, including shield volcanoes visible today. Thick cobble gravel derived from the Albion Range in Pleistocene time underlies the Oakley valley.
Snake River
Along the gravel bars of the Snake River of Cassia County roughly 20,000 reported ounces of gold were taken from the gravel bars. Most of the placer gold here is flour gold deposited from flooding, however there is coarser and bigger placer gold to be found here as well when digging in hard packed rocky soil.
There was also a large dredge in operation on the Snake River known as the Sweetser & Burroughs Gold Mining Dredge. (pictured below)
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Black Pine
A number of lode gold mines are found in the Black Pine Mountain area in southeastern Cassia County. The largest is the Black Pine Mine, a open-pit gold mine, no longer in production. Both gold and silver were found here.
Burley
Burley is where placer deposits were worked along the snake River in Township 9 and 10 South, Range 24 and 25 East. The Lead and silver mines in Township 15 and 16 south and Range 21 east has gold showings on the ore dumps. There were miners in the old days along the banks of the Snake River using pans or rockers to extract the fine gold dust.
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