LILLQUIST, Chapter III, pt 3

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Chapter III, pt. 2        Table of Contents        Chapter IV, pt. 1

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THE GOLD MINING ADVANCE

      The discovery of gold at Fort Colville brought a rush of miners across the Big Bend before the end of 1856.  The Yakima Indians resented the trespassing of prospectors on their land and murdered a party of miners traveling to the Colville mines.  Thus began a series of events that led to the Yakima War, bringing the military into eastern Washington.  Colonel George Wright commanded the forces that defeated the Indians and brought the region under control in 1858.

      In the two years following the discovery of gold at Colville, prospectors found new deposits of the precious metal in southern British Columbia.  The bonanza occurred in 1857 on the Frazer River, bringing a greater rush of miners into the Inland Empire in 1858. 38  Miners came from California along with new prospectors from all walks of life and all areas of the globe.  Soldiers working on the United States-Canadian boundary
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38  Trimble, p. 25

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discovered gold in the fall of 1859 on the Similkameen River in northern Okanogan County. 39  This find was made on Indian reservation lands and the miners had to move out.  The backwash of miners from Colville and Similkameen moved into the Clearwater area of Idaho in 1860.  Here a group led by Captain E. D. Pierce made a rich strike and the rush was on in Idaho. 40  This move extended to the Boise Basin in southern Idaho and into Montana in the next few years.

      The mining rush back and forth across the Inland Empire was a great stimulus to the development of transportation because of the need to furnish supplies to the gold field settlements.  River transportation from Portland became a chief means of supplying the Idaho and Montana gold fields.  An army of packers and freighters attempted to supply the needs from river ports to the interior.  The supplies to the Cariboo and Fraser region came in by one of two routes.  The first was from Bellingham up the Fraser River and then overland to the gold fields.  The second was from Wallula over the old Fur Brigade Trail across the Big Bend and up the Okanogan Valley to the Cariboo country.  This route was called the Cariboo Trail.  The middle crossing of the Grand Coulee served as an important pass for this trail, which had two main approaches to the Big Bend country.  The first and most important approach was along the Columbia north
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39  Loretta Louis, "Ruby City: The Life and Death of a Mining Town,"  Okanogan County Heritage, I (June, 1963), 3.

40  Trimble, pp. 64-65.

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from Wallula to the present site of Pasco, then overland to Warden and east of Moses Lake to Soap Lake, then up the Grand Coulee to Coulee City, and then north across the plateau to Bridgeport. 41

      The second overland approach was outlined by Alexander Anderson in his Hand-Book and Map to the Gold Region of Frazer's and Thompson's Rivers published in 1858:

From the Priest's Rapids the Indian trail is followed up some twenty-five miles, when it strikes off the river, and enters the Grande Coulee, an extraordinary ravine, the origin of which has been much speculation.  The bottom of this ravine is very smooth, and affords excellent traveling; good encampments are found at regular intervals.  After following it for about sixty miles, the trail strikes off for the Columbia, at a point of a few miles beyond a small lake, called by the voyageurs, La Lac a l' Eau Bleue.  Striking off from the point mentioned, in a direction about N.N.W., the trail reaches the Columbia a few miles above Fort Okinagan, which post is called twenty-five miles from the Grande Coulee. 42

      Anderson listed the distance from Priest Rapids to Fort Okanogan as 110 miles.  The total distance to the Thompson River is listed as 380 miles and took 19 days to travel. 43  Anderson's estimate of distance from Priest Rapids to Fort Okanogan appears to be fairly accurate as the highway mileage between those two points is listed at 125 miles.

      Ben Snipes was one of the first cattlemen to use the Cariboo Trail as he drove cattle northward to provide beef for
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41  This information was obtained from a map entitled Washington Highways and presented by the Washington State Highway Commission, Public Information Director, Department of Highways, Olympia, Washington, 1968.

42  Alexander C. Anderson, Hand-Book and Map to the Gold Region of Frazer's and Thompson's Rivers (San Francisco: J. J. Le Count, 1858), pp. 13-14.

43  Ibid.

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the miners in the period from 1856 to 1868. 44  Joel Palmer was the first to take wagons over the Cariboo Trail when he took an ox train of nine wagons from Wallula to the Cariboo in the summer of 1858. 45  As the good mining camps faded out and business declined for the packers and freighters, it was not unusual for men like these to become stockmen and farmers along the main roads to the mining camps.  Agricultural products found a market with the bigger freight lines that operated following the improvement of roads, bridges, and ferries.
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44  Bruce A. Wilson, "Cow Country," Okanogan County Heritage, I  (June, 1963), 27.

45  Brown, p. 30.

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Chapter III, pt. 2        Table of Contents        Chapter IV, pt. 1

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