"May Live and Die a Miner": The 1864 Clarksville Diary of James W. Virtue

Abstract

Gary Dielman, editor "May Live and Die a Miner" The 1864Clarksville DiaryofJames W.Virtue For decades, the Oregon Trail led explorers, mountain men, and emigrants through eastern Oregon until finally, in 1861, the discov ery of gold provided the catalyst forwhites to settle inBaker Valley. In the history of Baker County, the Oregon Trail and gold mining are linked dramatically on Flagstaff Hill at the eastern edge of Baker Valley, where visitors to the National Oregon Trail Interpretive Center discover that the hilltop is also occupied by the historic FlagstaffMine.1 Beginning with Wilson Price Hunt's trail-breaking journey across thewestern land scape as part of theAstor expedition of 1811,nineteenth-century travelers on the Oregon Trail wound down the ridge five miles southeast of the present-day interpretive center; crossed the arid, sagebrush-covered Vir tue Flat; passed under Flagstaff Hill; and descended into the valley with out being aware of the economic potential held in the surrounding land scape. During thewinter of 1861-1862, however, thatwas about to change. Itwas a cut-off from theOregon Trail that led to the firstdiscovery of gold in eastern Oregon. In 1845, an ill-fated emigrant wagon train guided by Stephen Meek unwisely departed from the Oregon Trail near present day Vale, Oregon, and headed west in an attempt to take an unproven shortcut to theWillamette Valley. The immigrants collected some "pretty stones" ? later identified as gold ? in a blue bucket somewhere not too far into their journey, giving rise to the story of the Lost Blue Bucket Mine. Sixteen years later, inOctober 1861, as Henry Griffin and others were on theirway back to Portland from an unsuccessful expedition in search of the lostmine, Griffin struck gold just a fewmiles south of Baker City. As word of Griffin's discovery spread, miners and others flocked to eastern Oregon by the thousands. In summer 1862, a tent city called Au burn, with a population of over four thousand, sprang up south ofGriffins gold strike.On September 22,1862, responding quickly to the needs of the OHQ vol. 105, no. 1 ? 2004 Oregon Historical Society Unless otherwisenoted,all imagescourtesy BakerCounty Library fe /ames W V?riwein 1869, while hewas sheriff ofBakerCounty new settlers, the Oregon legislature carved off a sizable piece of eastern Oregon and called itBaker County, with Auburn as its seat. Miners re sponded to the promise of riches by staking countless claims inwhat would become Baker, Grant, and northern Malheur counties. Over the next forty years, as mining shifted from primarily placer operations to hardrock mining, towns sprouted and then quickly withered as gold played out or Dielman, "May Live and Die aMiner" 63 Clarksville was located in southern Baker County about three miles above the confluence of Clarks Creek and Burnt River. The creek and town derived their names from a miner named Clark who, in 1862, accidentally shot himself near the creek. A member of Clark's party discovered gold while camped therewaiting for his recovery. became too difficult to mine, leaving the area dotted with ghost towns such as Amelia, Bourne, Clarksville, Copperfield, Cornucopia, Eagleton, Eldorado, Geiser, Granite, Greenhorn, Hanover, Homestead, Lawton, Malheur City, Parkersville, Robinsonville, S?nger, Sparta, and Susanville. The gold had been discovered in a belt 120miles long and 50 miles wide, stretching from the Snake River in the northeast to JohnDay in the south west. Baker County mines would eventually yield "more than 3.4 million ounces of gold and about the same amount of silver,which is about 60 percent of the total amount of these precious metals produced by all the mines inOregon."2 Hundreds ofmiles of tunnels would be bored through 64 OHQ vol. 105, no. 1 rock ? 36miles in theCornucopia Mine alone ? and hundreds ofmiles of ditches would be dug to divert water to dry placer mines, including the Auburn Ditch in the Elkhorn Mountains, Sparta Ditch in theWallowa Mountains, and the 125-mile-long Eldorado Ditch in southern Baker and northern Malheur counties. Aftertheboom of theCaliforniagold rushof 1848-1849 faded,fickle miners jumped from one boom-and-bust gold center to another. In the early 1850s, the forty-niners moved on to greener pastures in northern California and...