Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge
June 17, 2007.
We are staying at Mountain View Travel Park in Baker City, Oregon.
$24.79 FHU, shade and a nice enough RV-Park. It must be a former KOA
since they charge extra for everything, $2 extra for wifi, $2 extra
for larger sites, you get the picture.
Our drive from Baker
City to Sumpter along SR 7 took us from Baker Valley to Sumpter
deep in the Blue Mountains. Spectacular roadcuts like this were common.
Tailings left by Sumpter Valley Gold Dredges
Three gold dredges operated in the Sumpter Valley, on and off, from
1913 to 1954. Periods of dredging activity were influenced by the
fluctuating prices of gold, the Great Depression, the Second World
War, and equipment breakdowns. The dredges dug up 2,500 acres of farmland
extracting approximately $10,000,000 in gold.
Tailings left by Sumpter Valley Gold Dredges
Dredging ended when profitable land for mining became scarce-----in
other words they dug up the entire valley.
These rock piles have been exposed since dredging activity ceased
in 1954.
I am intrigued with this method of fencing that seems to be an Oregon
specialty.
Osprey nest
We watched a pair of osprey on this nest. One must have been sitting
on eggs since we did not see any chicks.
Sumpter Valley Steam train tracks & Station
These are tracks for the Sumpter Valley Steam train that operates
on weekends and holidays during the summer. We did not take the train
ride but did see it chugging through the valley with a load of tourist.
Sumpter Valley Steam Engine
Sumpter Valley
Beautiful pastures are dotted throughout Sumpter Valley.
Sandhill cranes in Sumpter Valley
In one pasture we spotted these sandhill cranes. To begin with we
thought they were some other species of crane since we had never seen
sandhill cranes with this brown coloring.
Sandhill cranes and chick in Sumpter Valley
They were indeed sandhill cranes they just weren't the color we are
used to seeing.
Look closely at the picture on the left you can see a small chick
following this adult.
While we were watching a group of calves started chasing one of the
adult cranes. It was funny to see calves chasing a crane. When the
crane tired of the game it headed to the barbed wire fence and with
one bound jumped over it then turned around to watch what happened.
Sumpter Valley Dredge State Park Oregon
Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge
Joyce wasn't the least bit interested in this old dredge but did
take pictures and allow me to spend time inspecting this huge machine
from the past.
Sumpter Valley Dredge & Sumpter Valley Railroad state park
When
we located the old gold dredge we also found the Sumpter Valley Railroad
station.
Next to each other is this monstrous dredge sitting idle and the
Station for the Sumpter Valley Railroad.
For about 100 years, the glint of gold drew many thousands of people
to this valley. Sumpter became a boom town almost overnight. There
were more than 90 businesses -newspapers, stagecoach lines, blacksmiths
hotels, brothels, saw mills, churches, assayers, banks, schools and
more including parades on the Fourth of July.
At times streets were hot and dusty. Sometimes they were chest-deep
in snow. But the bustling economy seemed to produce most of what the
4,000 residents wanted. At least it did until the town burned down
and it got too expensive to mine for what gold remained.
This dredge dug up thousands of acres of Sumpter Valley during the
19-years it operated here. It extracted about 9-tons of gold (about
one cubic yard). At current gold prices of say $350 an ounce that
would be 9-tons of gold worth, by my calculations, $100,800,000.
A gold dredge is basically a giant shovel mounted on the deck of
a boat. Instead of one bucket, this dredge had 72, each weighing a
ton (as much as my Saturn automobile). The assembly of buckets was
called the digging ladder.
This dredge was built on dry land (for about $300,000) and launched
like a boat into a hand-dug pit filled with water. The digging ladder
could scoop out 25 buckets per-minute of earth, rock and minerals
as the dredge chewed its way forward, floating on the pond it created.
The excavated material was transported up the ladder and dumped into
a series of screens inside the dredge.
Massive amounts of electricity were needed to operate a dredge. Long
before any of the surrounding farms got electricity, a 12 mile, 23,000
volt line was strung to the dredge overland from a hydroelectric power
plant.
Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge
Every rock larger than 3/4 of an inch emptied out the back of the
dredge. The 96 foot "stacker" to the rear of the dredge
was like a conveyor belt, carrying out the largest rocks and creating
the "tailings piles" we see throughout the valley.
Tailing piles like this have marred Sumpter Valley for over 50-years
and will probably mar the valley for hundreds of more years.
According to the inscription on his gravestone, Henry H. Griffin
first discovered gold in eastern Oregon.
Griffin came with other prospectors in 1861 (8-years before the transcontinental
Rail Road was completed). A few miles from Sumpter in a place they
still call Griffin Gulch, he hit pay dirt. Over 30,000 men flooded
in to stake claims. The town of Sumpter grew a short distance away.
For 20-years, miners panned and sluiced the rivers and hillsides
to bedrock. Then, a railroad built to Sumpter Valley from Baker City
brought pneumatic drills and compressors. Mining shafts were sunk
deep into the mountains following veins of gold in quartz. Development
boomed. Mills were built, that could crush 100 tons of ore per-day.
Volcanoes and earthquakes are evidence that the earth's crust is
constantly changing. Terribly strong and often violent, these forces
created the mountains of eastern Oregon. They are also responsible
for the mineral riches found here.
The shifting, thrusting earth created intense heat, which turned
rock to molten form, called magma. As it pressured its way to the
surface through older rock, the magma melted some minerals in the
rock, forming a watery metal-rich liquid. As the magma cooled, vein-like
cracks developed in the surrounding rocks. It was here in these cracks
that quartz and metals, including gold, crystallized. These deposits
are called "lode veins."
During the Ice Age, glaciers scoured away mountain tops exposing
the veins of gold. Further erosion and gravity brought the gold tumbling
down the mountain sides, eventually settling in creeks and washing
out into the Sumpter Valley.
Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge
As each bucket came over the top of the digging ladder, its material
was dumped into a large hopper. From there, everything fed into a
cylindrical screen --6 feet across by 35 feet long -- that continuously
tumbled the material. High pressure water--3,000 gallons a minute--rushed
over the screen and its contents. Gravity and water forced the material
down the length of the screen.
The material, including gold, fell out into a catch pan below, while
the larger rocks and gravel were carried to the rear of the dredge
and dumped into tailing piles by the stacker.
Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge
This is the "stacker" that carried larger rocks and gravel
out and staked this useless rock into tailing piles like the one in
this picture.
Inside, water continued to wash the finer sands, pebbles and precious
minerals from the catch pan through a series of sluice boxes. Just
about the whole back of the dredge was covered with sluices. In each
one, there's be a number of "riffles," kind of like a washboard.
The sand and gravel were washed away while the heavier gold was trapped
in the riffles.
Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge
As years passed, more efficient means of trapping the gold were developed.
They added a box-like contraption--called a jig--partly filled with
round metal balls, like B-Bs. Sand escaping from the riffles would
drop into the jigs---where the balls would pulverized the material.
Mercury added to both the riffles and the jigs would attach itself
to gold in the fine sands. This method was far more efficient at removing
gold.
Very few people had access to the gold, at least officially. Though
there are tales of embezzlement, the security of the gold became tighter
as the years went by. After separating the gold from the mercury,
it was poured into bricks for shipment to the US Treasury.
Site of the Bank of Sumpter, Oregon
Bank of Sumpter, Oregon
There it is folks --- what is left of the Sumpter Bank.
The mining camp of Sumpter, Oregon was named for Fort Sumter, South
Carolina, by five ex-Confederate soldiers who discovered gold near
the town in 1862. The Sumpter Valley Railroad reached Sumpter in 1896
and the town began to boom. At one time it was home to 3,500 people.
On August 13, 1917 the dreaded fate of may mining towns occurred,
fire raged through the town and destroyed eleven city blocks including
nine brick buildings. the fore and dwindling returns from gold mining
ended the boom. Today Sumpter is not much more than a ghost town.
Actually, there is more to the story of naming Sumpter. It was the
United States Post Office that had a hand in it finally being named
Sumpter. It seems that the ex-Confederate soldiers wanted to name
it Fort Sumter. The Post Office would not accept a name with Fort
in it if it wasn't really a fort. Then the soldiers submitted Sumter
but again the Post Office would not accept it (I can't recall what
the reason was). Finally the old Confederate soldiers submitted Sumpter
(with a P this time) and the post office accepted Sumpter. Now you
know the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.
Until next time remember how good life is.
Mike & Joyce Hendrix
