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 ...... 57 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 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 forty- mile 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 mid- 1860s 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, gold- bearing 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 up- flow (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.

19Hal 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 rain- and 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-mile- distant 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.

50Horstman, “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 quarter- mile 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.

56Allen, “Report on Properties of the La Grange Mining Company,” 3-36 passim.

57 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 bucket- elevator 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. 70 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”).

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) Risdon- constructed 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-foot- wide 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 eleven- cubic–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-to- mid 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; Engineer- Designed 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 hand- dug 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 right- of-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 side- by-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 (1913- 1914). 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. Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1923. Bulletin No. 93.

______. Report XVIII of the State Mineralogist Covering Mining in California. San Francisco: State Mining Bureau, 1922.

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 Table 1: Monetary Value, Mineral Production, Trinity County, 1880 -1962* Year Gold** Silver Platinum Misc*** Total Monetary Gold $$ Value (TMV) % of TMV (to nearest % point) 1880 $326,693.00 $142.00 $7,595.00 $334,330.00 98 1881 $550,000.00 $1,500.00 $551,500.00 99 1882 $600,000.00 $600,000.00 100 1883 $400,000.00 $400,000.00 100 1884 $529,150.00 $334.00 $529,484.00 99 1885 $338,148.00 $10.00 $338,158.00 100 1886 $464,726.00 $219.00 $464,945.00 99 1887 $553,051.00 $924.00 $553,975.00 99 1888 $589,000.00 $500.00 $589,500.00 99 1889 $811,632.00 $640.00 $812,272.00 99 1890 $1,192,790.00 $259.00 $12,600.00 $1,205,649.00 99 1891 $1,327,787.00 $2,249.00 $1,330,036.00 93 1892 $1,446,603.00 $168.00 $1,446,771.00 99 1893 $1,122,995.00 $1,122,995.00 100 1894 $1,012,666.00 $325.00 $5,000.00 $1,017,991.00 99 1895 $1,166,745.00 $1,257.00 $137,410.00 $1,305,412.00 89 1896 $1,293,330.00 $139,035.00 $1,435,365.00 90 1897 $1,078,372.00 $259.00 $29,330.00 $1,107,961.00 97 1898 $859,255.00 $314.00 $151,200.00 $1,010,769.00 85 1899 $590,510.00 $1,083.00 $123,999.00 $715,595.00 82 1900 $571,605.00 $16,567.00 $110,517.00 $698,689.00 82 1901 $684,683.00 $2,668.00 $64,929.00 $752,280.00 91 1902 $719,992.00 $550.00 $468.00 $10,251.00 $731,261.00 98 1903 $607,728.00 $2,085.00 $200.00 $11,131.00 $621,244.00 98 1904 $574,814.00 $135.00 $275.00 $3,864.00 $579,088.00 99 1905 $690,844.00 $3,044.00 $13,917.00 $708,255.00 86 1906 $560,843.00 $2,981.00 $130.00 $6,059.00 $570,013.00 98 1907 $535,316.00 $2,399.00 $3,739.00 $541,454.00 99 1908 $602,914.00 $4,269.00 $3,804.00 $611,017.00 99 1909 $520,046.00 $2,302.00 $7,915.00 $530,263.00 98 1910 $500,851.00 $1,960.00 $5,622.00 $508,433.00 98 1911 $612,149.00 $6,777.00 $2,024.00 $620,950.00 99 1912 $723,503.00 $758.00 $9,494.00 $733,755.00 99 1913 $431,862.00 $2,119.00 $1,161.00 $435,142.00 99 1914 $743,512.00 $3,374.00 $151.00 $245.00 $747,037.00 99 1915 $441,846,00 $3,470.00 $435.00 $53,760.00 $499,511.00 88 1916 $435,493.00 $7,591.00 $5,161.00 $397,316.00 $845,651.00 51 1917 $602,048.00 $10,021.00 $3,283.00 $386,553.00 $1,001,885.00 60 1918 $444,729.00 $6,912.00 $3,136.00 $257,747.00 $707,524.00 63 1919 $538,494.00 $3,872.00 $28,833.00 $571,199.00 94 1920 $541,387.00 $3,469.00 $6,612.00 $10,637.00 $562,105.00 96 1921 $437,993.00 $1,390.00 $3,260.00 $14,239.00 $456,882.00 95 1922 $182,918.00 $2,432.00 $1,223.00 $11,364.00 $197,937.00 92 1923 $617,841.00 $5,816.00 $2,050.00 $51,467.00 $677,174.00 91 1924 $422,281.00 $10,934.00 $1,839.00 $74,290.00 $509,344.00 83 1925 $424,037.00 $7,724.00 $3,081.00 $62,447.00 $497,289.00 85 1926 $483,471.00 $13,276.00 $2,832.00 $110,420.00 $609,999.00 79 1927 $409,492.00 $12,236.00 $134,036.00 $555,764.00 74 1928 $402,694.00 $12,558.00 $115,228.00 $530,480.00 76 1929 $352,029.00 $10,629.00 $163,576.00 $526,234.00 67

95 Year Gold** Silver Platinum Misc*** Total Monetary Gold $$ Value (TMV) % of TMV (to nearest % point) 1930 $330,003.00 $6,700.00 $100,630.00 $437,333.00 75 1931 $292,031.00 $532.00 $993.00 $14,720.00 $308,276.00 95 1932 $294,297.00 $608.00 $473.00 $12,737.00 $308,115.00 95 1933 $345,851.00 $768.00 $12,884.00 $359,503.00 96 1934 $574,681.00 $1,640.00 $74,299.00 $650,620.00 88 1935 $727,787.00 $2,506.00 $14,893.00 $745,186.00 88 1936 $708,715.00 $2,251.00 $13,143.00 $724,109.00 98 1937 $703,780.00 $2,009.00 $7,052.00 $8,539.00 $721,380.00 97 1938 $1,451,345.00 $2,992.00 $38,795.00 $1,493,132.00 97 1939 $1,488,550.00 $3,176.00 $23,225.00 $1,514,951.00 98 1940 $1,730,155.00 $4,222.00 $37,950.00 $1,772,327.00 98 1941 $1,500,870.00 $3,408.00 $52,087.00 $1,556,365.00 96 1942 $846,895.00 $2,001.00 $204,546.00 $1,053,442.00 80 1943 $31,115.00 $64.00 $291,944.00 $323,123.00 10 1944 $19,250.00 $40.00 $496,775.00 $516,065.00 4 1945 $63,840.00 $128.00 $27,592.00 $91,560.00 70 1946 $488,670.00 $1,154.00 $25,059.00 $514,883.00 95 1947 $486,675.00 $74,880.00 $561,555.00 87 1948 $277,550.00 $915.00 $32,545.00 $311,010.00 89 1949 $113,330.00 $383.00 $153,864.00 $267,577.00 42 1950 $263,585.00 $612.00 $10,283.00 $274,480.00 96 1951 $271,985.00 $748.00 $35,911.00 $308,644.00 88 1952 $237,790.00 $600.00 $60,071.00 $298,461.00 79 1953 $199,395.00 $529.00 $108,962.00 $308,886.00 64 1954 $214,210.00 $590.00 $187,764.00 $402,564.00 53 1955 $248,675.00 $686.00 $196,935.00 $446,296.00 54 1956 Gold/Silver TMV in Misc. $540,620.00 $540,620.00 1957 Gold/Silver TMV in Misc. $1,649,368.00 $1,649,368.00 1958 $51,975.00 $153.00 $2,302,637.00 $2,354,765.00 2

1959 $2,520.00 $7.00 $1,364,147.00 $1,366.674.00 >1 1960 Gold/Silver TMV in Misc. $997,898.00 $997,898.00 1961 $3,570.00 $8.00 $360,807.00 $364,565.00 >1 1962 $2,695.00 $13.00 $278,337.00 $281,045.00 >1

Totals $45,600,812.00 $213,944.00 $42,654.00 $12,537,601.00 $54,280,785.00 84

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* Year Trinity County Gold Production California Gold Trinity Gold TMV as % Total Monetary Value (TMV) Production TMV of California Gold TMV 1880 $326,693 $20,030,761 1.6 1881 $550,000 $19,223,155 2.8 1882 $600,000 $17,146,416 3.4 1883 $400,000 $24,316,873 1.6 1884 $529,150 $13,600,000 3.9 1885 $338,148 $12,661,044 2.7 1886 $464,726 $14,716,506 3.7 1887 $553,051 $13,588,614 4.0 1888 $589,000 $12,750,000 4.6 1889 $811,632 $11,212,913 7.2 1890 $1,192,790 $12,309,793 9.6 1891 $1,327,787 $12,728,869 10.4 1892 $1,446,603 $12,571,900 11.5 1893 $1,122,995 $12,422,811 9.0 1894 $1,012,666 $13,923,281 7.2 1895 $1,166,745 $15,334,317 7.6 1896 $1,293,330 $17,181,592 7.5 1897 $1,078,372 $15,871,401 6.7 1898 $859,255 $15,906,478 5.4 1899 $590,510 $15,336,031 3.8 1900 $571,605 $15,863,355 3.6 1901 $684,683 $16,989,044 4.0 1902 $719,992 $16,910,320 4.3 1903 $607,728 $16,471,264 3.7 1904 $574,814 $19,109,600 3.0 1905 $690,844 $19,197,043 3.6 1906 $560,843 $18,732,452 3.0 1907 $535,316 $16,727,928 3.2 1908 $602,914 $18,761,559 3.2 1909 $520,046 $20,237,837 2.5 1910 $500,851 $19,715,440 2.5 1911 $612,149 $19,738,908 3.1 1912 $723,503 $19,713,478 3.6 1913 $431,862 $20,406,958 2.1 1914 $743,512 $20,653,496 3.6 1915 $441,846 $22,446,296 2.0 1916 $435,493 $21,410,741 2.0 1917 $602,048 $20,087,504 3.0 1918 $444,729 $16,529,162 2.7 1919 $538,494 $16,695,955 3.2 1920 $541,387 $14,311,043 3.8 1921 $437,993 $15,704,822 2.8 1922 $182,918 $14,670,346 1.2 1923 $617,841 $13,379,013 4.6 1924 $422,281 $13,150,375 3.2 1925 $424,037 $13,065,330 3.2 1926 $483,471 $11,923,481 3.6 1927 $409,492 $11,671,018 3.5 1928 $402,694 $10,785,315 3.7 1929 $352,029 $8,526,703 4.1 1930 $330,003 $9,451,162 3.4

97 Year Trinity County Gold Production California Gold Trinity Gold TMV as % Total Monetary Value (TMV) Production TMV of California Gold TMV 1931 $292,031 $10,814,162 2.7 1932 $294,297 $11,765,726 2.5

Totals $32,987,199 $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, Location Owner Geology Notes # Group (all Mount Diablo Meridian) Gold 96 Atomic Mining Company Sec. 1, T 22N R Francis Smith River Gravel Small suction dredge in 10W et. al., June 1946, Capacity Weaverville estimated at 15 cu yds/hour 101 Bergen Placer (Boston no. Sec. 23, T 33N, R G.H Bergin, Gravel bank Hydraulic mine, includes 5, Compagnie Francise, 10W, Sec. 12, 13, et. al., overlies 600 acres of patented Graf, hays, Joe Sturdivant, 24, T 33N, R 11W Weaverville homblende land mined with 2 giants Keno, Laws) schist 1946 109 Chapman & Fisher Sec 19, 20, 29, 30, Earl Johnson Red soil Hydraulic mine, claims (Gribble, Raab) T 33 N, R 10W and Frank overlying bed of located 1871 Chapman, gravel and Junction City bedrock of soft shale. Fine gold with some platinum 124 Golden Gravels Sec. 33, 34, T n/a n/a Dragline dredge operated 34N, R 11W on Trinity River near Helena 1938-39. since moved

99 Map Name of Claim, Mine, Location Owner Geology Notes # Group (all Mount Diablo Meridian) 125 Goldfield Consolidated Sec. 1, 2, T 33N R Goldfield River terraces, Hydraulic mine, 1938- (Bethel Jacobs, Dump, 11W, Sec. 35, 36, Consolidated gold close to 1950 Evans and Bartlett, Gilzean T 34N, R 11W Mines bedrock and in Brothers, Hocker, Jacobs, Company, bedrock No CA Mines Company, San Francisco crevices O’Shay, Patterson and Low Bar, Red Hill, Sunrise) 126 Good Friday (Post and Sec. 19, 20, T n/a Gravel 60-70 Hydraulic mine on bench Wilson) 33N, R 10W 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 132 Indian Creek Dredge Sec. 5, 8, T 32 N Uphill Gravel over Dragline and washing (Bennett Dredge) R 9W Mining hard shale plant, on edge of study Company, bedrock area Sacramento 134 Junction City Dredge Sec. 12, T 33N, R Junction City River gravel Bucketline dredge (Junction City Mining 11W; Sec. 7, 18, T Mining over hard operated 1936-1948, Company, Hager and 33N, R 10 W; Sec. Company, serpentine when purchased by Hager 35, T 34N, R 11W San Francisco bedrock. Gold Fairview Placers and with some moved to Minersville platinum 136 La Grange (Clary and Sec. 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, La Grange Tertiary gravel Although out of study McCarthy, Mount 15, 16, 18, T 33N Placer Mines, deposit in a area, significant as Morensis, Railroad and R 10 W Weaverville fault block, America’s largest Mount Morensis, Trinity Weaverville hydraulic mine worked Gold and Mining basin 1851-1918, produced $8 Company, Ward) M in gold; monitors used in 1930s by Caltrans to cut right-of-way of new Highway 299 over Oregon mountain 137 Lewiston Placers Sec. 20, T 33N, R n/a River terrace Hydraulic mine 8W gravel over slate bedrock 146 Oregon Gulch Dredging Sec 7, 8, 9, T 33N, Byron See also La Grange, Co R 10W Stookey, Sturdivant Weaverville 151 Placer Exploration Sec. 19, 29, T 33N n/a River gravel Three dragline dredges Company R 10W; Sec. along Trinity river, see 1,2,12 T 32 N R also Sunshine Dredging 10W; Sec. 32, T Co and Viking Dredge 36N, R 7W 157 Sheridan Sec. 19, T 33N R JJ Morgan Gravel on low Placer mine on Trinity 10W and TC terrace with 30 river 2 miles S of Muegge, ft of overburden Junction city. Gravel Junction City mined by bulldozer, carried on belt conveyor

100 Map Name of Claim, Mine, Location Owner Geology Notes # Group (all Mount Diablo Meridian) to stationary washing plant, overburden removed by hydraulic giants. Operation handicapped by shortage of water from Simpson’s Gulch 159 Steiner Flat 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 Sturdivant 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

Sunshine Company Sec. 2, 12, T 32N RR Moore Gravel over Dragline dredge and R 10W and Ray shale bedrock washing plant, 1940-41. Nienaber, See also Placer Douglas City 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. 164 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 1939- 1940. Taken over by Placer Exploration Company March 1941 Sand and Gravel 198 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, Location Owner Geology Notes # Group (all Mount Diablo Meridian) sand and gravel for use as road base and bituminous aggregate in the Trinity Project 202 Trinity Sand and Gravel n/a Sec. 12, T Extensive deposit of 32N, R 10W 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. 203 Richards 1 n/a Sec. 19, T Abandoned pit in 33N R 10W tailings deposit along Trinity River, Lewiston. Contractor processed 26, 348 tons of sand and gravel for road base in the TP 204 Richards 2 n/a Sec. 23, T Abandoned pit in dredge 33N R 9W 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 206 Transocean Engineers n/a Sec. 5, T 33N Abandoned pit in tailings R 8W 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 Stone, Broken and Crushed 212 Transocean Engineers n/a Sec. 18, T Abandoned quarry about 33N, R 8W 1 mile N of Lewiston in Copley greenstone. Provided 15,120 tons of rip-rap for use in Trinity Project Limestone 230 Limekiln Gulch n/a Sec.21,28,29,32, Some stone on Brown T 33N, R 9W Mountain quarried and burned in local kiln; pre- 1906

102 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.

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