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Overview
Author Clark Spence focuses on the two most important types of dredges in the state—the bucket-line dredge and the dragline dredge—and describes their financing, operation, problems, and effect on the state and environment. These dredges made it possible to work ground previously deemed untouchable because bedrock where gold collected could now be reached. But they were also highly destructive to the environment. As these huge machines floated along, they dumped debris that harmed the streams and destroyed wildlife habitat, eventually prompting state regulations and federal restoration of some of the state’s crippled waterways.
Providing a record of Idaho’s dredging history for the first time, this book is a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of Western mining, its technology, and its overall development as a major industry of the twentieth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607324751 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2016 |
| Series: | Mining the American West |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 341 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A History of Gold Dredging in Idaho
By Clark C. Spence
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2016 University Press of ColoradoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-475-1
CHAPTER 1
Early Snake River Boom
From its origins on the Continental Divide in the Teton Range in western Wyoming, the Snake River flows southward in a large arc across southern Idaho, then forms that state's western border as far north as Lewiston before it meanders westward to its eventual confluence with the Columbia in southern Washington. Since as early as the 1850s, when soldiers at the old Fort Boise made limited discoveries, gold has been found along most of the 800-mile course through the Gem State. Optimistic bands of prospectors moved south to expand operations in the 1960s, without much success, but in the 1970s many of them located workable placer ground in scattered sites, among them the Shoshone Falls region, the area near J. Matt Taylor's bridge (which became Idaho Falls), the Hagerman Valley, below the Raft River, and west of American Falls. But these were scattered small-scale, labor-intensive operations that spawned no serious influx of capital or miners as long as a major obstacle existed. It was the nature of Snake River gold itself that provided the real challenge to profitable mining.
By 1880 Snake River gold had been recognized as constituting extremely fine particles — some so small that it took 1,000 to make up the value of a penny. Others were even more minute, and the 3,000 or 4,000 particles required to make up a penny's worth of gold could not be recognized at all: invisible gold was the miners' description and micron gold was a more modern term. Early scientists believed the fine gold came from the waters of a Miocene lake, but modern geologists have determined that it came from Rocky Mountain deposits and that it originated as minute particles. Scattered the length of the stream, this "flour" or "float" gold appeared in river bar deposits, as well as in "skim bars" and "bench gravels" on the bank. A skim bar was an ancient river bar, in which the gold was found near its top, while bench gravels were higher up and gold was found in streaks anywhere between bedrock and the surface.
To many observers, the Snake River placers seemed a promising field for the gold dredge, a relatively new technology that had proved successful in New Zealand and which, after years of experimentation, was beginning to catch on in California, Montana, and other western states. The stream's current ran at a moderate rate of three miles an hour, severe flooding was rare, and the climate permitted operation for nine or ten months of the year. Best of all, according to optimistic reports, there were "oceans of gravel," which showed values of from thirty cents up to five dollars with a pan or a rocker. The belief that there was a wealth of gold in and along a great portion of the river's length was common, although few of the numerous miners since the 1860s were taking out more than day wages. In 1899 Don Maguire, a self-taught Utah mining man, estimated that the gravels contained at least $2 billion in gold. A popular Oregon writer noted a year later that "men, to-day, dredging the sandy bed and banks of the river Snake say there is fine gold enough in the drifts and bars alone to pay the national debt over and over again" — words Boise businessmen echoed enthusiastically. Since pay dirt was usually on or close to the top of the bars, deep dredging seemed unnecessary. At least that was what mining analysts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed, thus setting the stage for a brief era of gold-dredging activity along the Snake. No wonder there were so many repeated efforts to apply a more advanced technology. Unfortunately, on the Snake it was a high-interest, low-success industry.
The period prior to about 1910 was largely a time of trial-and-error experimentation, often by self-styled experts testing their own inventive machines and processes. Some mining men welcomed attempts to apply modern technology; others dragged their feet, holding fast to the old ways of doing things. The new dredging ideas on the Snake extended from around Huntington in Oregon to east of Idaho Falls and were especially prominent in the region from Weiser to perhaps Caldwell, with lesser applications in the stretch from Grand View, Bruneau, and Glenns Ferry. Momentum on the river picked up again from Minidoka through American Falls, Blackfoot, and Idaho Falls. Only a single company organized for dredging on the Snake in the Jackson Hole region of Wyoming has been noted.
One of the first efforts to utilize yet unproven dredge equipment on the river was first announced to the public at the end of 1881, with the arrival in Boise of four Detroit businessmen en route to Starrh's Ferry on the Snake. This quartet — George C. Fletcher, T. H. Champion, E. M. Hough, and John Shiri — had obtained ground near the mouth of Goose Creek and intended to apply the new technology there. According to the Salt Lake Tribune that December, John F. Sanders of Ogden had investigated the Snake River placers beginning in 1870 and experimented with saving the fine gold and processing the black sands previously cast aside. He was convinced that machinery could be applied, and subsequently he patented the Sanders Ore Concentrator and the Sanders Patent Vacuum Dredge. In addition, he held Letters of Patent on "Composition for Dissolving the Coating of Gold Ore," in essence a simple chemical formula for breaking down the black sands. The secret was sixteen parts of potassium cyanide to one part of glacial phosphoric acid, with the solution mixed in an iron barrel (or one made of some "other proper material") with enough water to form a pulp with the sand and gravel, then agitated in the container for fifteen minutes to an hour. The result would be gold pure enough to amalgamate with mercury. (Was this a forerunner of the cyanide process?) Four companies were formed to operate between American Falls and Salmon Falls: one by investors from Detroit, another by Boston capitalists, a third with money from Detroit and Buffalo combined, and a fourth by men from Salt Lake City. It was contemplated that all machinery would be afloat and that some rigs would handle 100 tons of gravel in a ten-hour workday and others would handle twice that amount.
Finally, in the spring of 1882, according to a correspondent for the Chicago Mining Review, two dredges built under Sanders's patents conducted initial trials near the Goose Creek ferry — a mile west of the modern town of Burley. They were owned by two Detroit companies, the presidents of which were there with high hopes. Whether any of the four earlier visitors were included was not mentioned. The inventors had sold the scheme on the basis that the sands of the river contained from $500 to $2,000 worth of gold per ton. The machinery consisted of a vacuum drum for sucking the sand from the river bottom, with "innumerable shakers and washers," all set in motion by steam power. The result was clear-cut: either the dredges were a failure and saved no gold, or there was little gold to save. In this case, the sands averaged about 20 cents to the ton. The visiting corporate executives were highly indignant, "and their denunciation of the patentees were [sic] both ludicrous and amusing," according to one editor.
Twenty years later, J. L. Mallery, a seasoned mining man employed by one of the four companies, contended that "the enterprise was a fraud from its inception." The vacuum dredge was antiquated, with equipment "entirely inadequate for saving gold in any form." Moreover, the business was based on fraudulent astronomical assays, some running as high as $20,000 a ton, according to Mallery, writing after the fact. The promoter claimed that iron grains of black sand enclosed a golden interior — "minute geodes of gold, we might say." This "invisible but fascinating proposition" was backed not only by the high "tests" but by the lure of platinum, tungsten, and tin, which "also played 'peek-a-boo' among the grains of magnetite." That unfortunate venture cost the companies $80,000. Mallery does not name the promoter. Whether it was the inventor, John F. Sanders, we may never know, but whoever he was, when he left the scene he headed in the general direction of Ogden: "He, the promoter, stayed by his guns until the bristling array of failures made retreat imperative. So he decamped in the night, and was [spotted the] next morning by the stage driver [with] blankets on his back, steering south."
Sometime later, in 1886, C. C. Hill, a Chicago mechanical engineer, described a special dredge he had designed some years before to handle the alluvial fines at an unidentified place along the Snake, where, he noted, "it has been the dream of a great many, both smart and stupid, men to get that gold." Hill had been hired by two separate companies, made up of the same capitalists, that had rights to a bank twenty-six feet high from water level and extending four miles along the river. He devised a dredging machine with eight chains of buckets, which together would cut a swathe in the same fashion "as a man would start in a hay field to mow." Each iron bucket was ten inches in diameter and shaped "very much like a tea-cup, and each was armed with a steel spike, the better to loosen the packed soil." Powered by a twelve horsepower steam engine and designed to move parallel along the river, chewing up the dirt, removing the gold, and dumping the debris into the stream, the machine had a capacity of about 1,500 tons of gravel in a ten-hour day. Hill believed the concept of the dredge was a success: "I could dredge the material well enough; I could wash it well enough; but after I had washed it I found that I could scarcely get enough to pay for the trouble." Thus ended that endeavor, as would be the case with most subsequent efforts in the same waters. At the same time, miners using time-honored rockers and sluices were at least taking out wages.
In June 1885, when three men were lost when their rowboat capsized and washed over Salmon Falls, south of the present town of Hagerman, that tragedy was witnessed by twelve men "working on a ferry-boat for a New York placer mining company," according to a contemporary newspaper. Perhaps it would not be a great stretch of the imagination to view this as a crude attempt at dredging.
A few years later, in 1890, the large "steam mining boat" Gold Seeker, owned by the Williams brothers of Payette, operated along the banks of the Snake near Nyssa. Positive reports indicated that it was doing well and managing to save the fine gold. Soon, however, its owners clashed with the Union Pacific's Shortline Railroad. The Gold Seeker had worked out a short strip between two of the Oregon Shortline's bridges but was unable to continue because of them. The brothers first petitioned the railroad company to build a "draw" section that could be raised to allow passage of the dredge. When the Union Pacific refused, arguing that the cost would be $200,000 and that the Snake was not a navigable waterway, the Williams brothers filed a lawsuit, apparently to no avail. This setback seems to have brought the enterprise to halt.
Nonetheless, Idaho newspapers continued to laud the richness of these sands and predicted a rosy future, once a cheap method of handling them and saving the precious metal had been perfected. Numerous early suction dredges and centrifugal pump machines were tried, most of which were as unrewarding as the Detroit fiasco; and a good deal of capital went into a variety of patented amalgamators, concentrators, grizzlies, and shaking tables, few of which proved very effective.
Snake River gold had received a great deal of publicity prior to the early 1890s, its production was on a small scale and relatively limited. Excitement was easily misplaced. Those in touch with the reality of the region characterized the gold particles as "so lightweight as to be illusive." As a writer in Caldwell noted, a man with a rocker might make $1.50 a day in the summer, but except for a few scattered bars between Shoshone Falls and the Oregon border, the flour gold was not encouraging. Numerous sites along the way might have been profitable if water could have been applied for sluicing or hydraulicking, but the gradual fall of the stream and the level outlying terrain made this difficult. Large-scale work with experimental equipment seemed to many to be the answer, but hopes were generally dashed as quickly as they rose. "The great excitement caused by the trial of a new machine, said to catch the invisible gold, has subsided," wrote one Idahoan in early 1894 of an unidentified and unsuccessful contraption, then he went on to deny its need. "New-fangled gold savers are of secondary consideration," he said, "for there are dozens of home-made machines that will save 90 percent of the gold, and the cost to build is a little lumber, nails and labor."
This may have been a snide oblique reference to Thornton Williams's "big floating gold-saving dredge," recently built on the Snake a few miles south of Payette. The sixty-five-foot by twenty-foot self-navigating stern-wheel flatboat was powered by a thirty horsepower marine engine and boiler, and its endless chain of forty-eight buckets, capable of holding about twenty pounds each of sand and gravel, could dig either on the river bottom or in bars on the bank. Gold was separated by a special agitator and steam rocker and recovered with quicksilver from copper plates, while tailings went off into sluices. "The gravel is worked so thoroughly that no gold escapes in the river," the owner reported. Nine months after it was completed, this example of "Steamboating for Gold," as the press called it, was still in operation — at least intermittently — but it is dubious that its three-man crew reached the owner's expectations of taking out $100 a day, and its working life seemed to have been near its end.
In May 1894 Chicago capitalists Root Brothers and Dunbar announced plans to install a suction dredge on the Snake between Shoshone Falls and Blue Lake. A little later that year Tom Ball, a Pocatello railroad conductor, was trying to finance a dredge with a capacity of 1,000 tons a day, to integrate with a gold-saving machine he had invented. Early the next year, the Blue Mining Company did put in some kind of dredge twenty-five miles from Shoshone. If or how long it may have operated is unclear. Little is also known about the machinery installed at about the same time on Mann's placers near American Falls by the Roth Amalgamating Company. This consisted of a steam engine, boiler, pumps, grizzlies, and two Roth amalgamators on a flatboat, working to dredge up gold-laden black sands from the river bottom. A little later, in August 1895, the Red Star Mining Company built a sixty-foot by eighteen-foot suction dredge, "embodying the best features of five different mining processes," a few miles below Payette. Further mention of that enterprise does not appear, and it, too, likely "went up the spout," as nineteenth-century British would say of a failure. Nor do we know whether E. H. Lopez of Boise, a man with some dredging experience, succeeded in his plans to build a steam-powered dredge on the Snake near the Blackfoot bridge.
The exception to the many rigs with disappointing results was the Sweetser-Burroughs dredge, which in 1894 went into the Snake in south-central Idaho, near the later location of the town of Burley. Lewis Sweetser and the Burroughs brothers, George and Harry, were "local boys," small-time ranchers in the area who also happened to be engineers. Their machine suction dredge was remarkably successful and worked for a number of years. It accomplished something no other boat on the river managed to do — pay a dividend. The men were so pleased that they bought a five-foot bucket-line dredge, which proved to be much less successful.
One of the most innovative dredge operators on the early Snake was William W. Priestly, a pioneer irrigator in the Hagerman Valley. In 1894 Priestly had installed a brilliant pneumatic ram system using the falling water from Thousand Springs to create air pressure to lift river water up seventy-five feet to a ditch for use in the fields. No motors of any kind were used, and similar compressors were subsequently employed elsewhere in Canada and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.
In 1896 in the same area, Priestly built a gold dredge, to which he applied the same principle. In late June one bystander described the twenty-four-foot by sixty-five-foot boat as the inventor started it up, calling it a "wonderful piece of machinery":
Soon the water came thundering down the large pipe into the tank, or air separator where it escapes out a short pipe 40 feet high, and [is] thrown 150 feet into the air, falling on the sides, making a complete and beautiful geyser. Soon the rumbling noise in the air pipe gave the signal that the air was fast approaching the boat. This immense dredge has 16 mining tables 20 feet long by 3 feet wide, in another instant they were covered with water and gravel from the river ... If you Shoshone people come in contact with a "sly coon" or a cloud burst you may know Mr. Priestly has got mad and turned things loose.
By August, Priestly had doubled the size of his crew, and a month later he was also using his pneumatic pump to run a hydraulic monitor. Like most of his contemporaries with more conventional suction or bucket-line dredges, he was stymied by the inability to save the fine gold of the Snake. In the end, his boat was auctioned off for $500 at a sheriff's sale. He promptly bought it back from the buyer and retired to his irrigated fields.
Still, optimists continued to finance elaborate and often more absurd dredge machines. In early 1896 A. H. Butler completed a large barge for E. H. Lewis at Forman's Ferry, fifteen miles from Caldwell. Equipped with steam machinery "of all sizes and description" and including good boarding and lodging facilities for up to fifty workers, the dredge was described as "a veritable mining camp." If it worked, there is no record, although more than two years later a large unidentified dredge was reported operating near Caldwell. In the spring of 1896, two Emmett residents reported a good deal of activity near the Ontario ferry on the Snake and the fact that the Williams brothers of Payette were back. Two large steam-powered suction dredges were under construction, one of which was for the brothers. Machinery was already at the Ontario railroad station, ready for installation when the hulls were complete.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A History of Gold Dredging in Idaho by Clark C. Spence. Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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