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| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 1878 | 2 |
| 1883 | 1 |
| 1893 | 3 |
| 1894 | 3 |
| 1895 | 1 |
| 1903 | 1 |
| 1909 | 4 |
15 stories matching sluic
- The Gold That Wasn't There: How Speculators Tried to Mine Their Way Into a Public School Section
A Tacoma hardware merchant swore a state school tract was rich placer ground. The state bored over a thousand feet of shafting, found less than a cent of gold per yard, and still had to fight to keep its own land.
- The City Moves Dirt: Tacoma’s Infrastructure Expansion
Crews begin work on a significant new sluicing line to clear debris from the U.P. tunnel, doubling down on civil works to connect the city grid.
- The Great Sluicing Failure
A municipal engineering project designed to clear the Union Pacific tunnel construction site ends in a clogged pipe and embarrassing failure.
- A High-Speed Rescue on the Streets of Oroville
When a runaway horse endangered a child in the heart of town, a man bypassed the mob to execute a daring automotive rescue.
- Twenty-Five-Year-Old Stakes in the Monte Cristo Wilderness
Joe Pearsell, the prospector who opened the Monte Cristo mines, describes finding faded red survey stakes and 1850s sluice boxes in a country so savage he thinks it will only be tamed by tourists once the railroad arrives.
- The desperate engineering of a Snohomish log drive
With a drought halting logging operations, crews in Snohomish turned to a clever, labor-intensive dam-sluicing method to force logs to tide water.
- Devastating Floods Paralyze the Pacific Northwest
Massive flooding across the Fraser Valley and regional rivers has severed communications, washed away farms, and cut off rail travel.
- Seattle's Government Canal Dam Collapses
Severe flooding in the Fremont and Green Lake districts cuts off transport as infrastructure fails.
- The Gold in Swauk Creek — and the Railroad That Wanted the Ground Under It
Miners in Kittitas County had quietly pulled a fortune in placer gold from Swauk Creek for over a decade. When the Northern Pacific moved to patent the land, they finally went public with the numbers.
- A Railroad Cut Off This Tacoma Mill. Now the City May Give It a New Way In.
The North Shore Lumber Company wants to rebuild its burned plant beyond Old Town, but Northern Pacific condemnation left it without waterfront access. A permit to sluice logs over Alder Street could bring 100 jobs and a 100,000-foot-a-day mill back to the gulch.
- The Underground Fire Beneath Jackson Street
Firemen battle a persistent blaze burning within the tide-flat ashes beneath the electric light works.
- Virginia Bill’s Riverbed Gold Rush
An enterprising miner plans to use a steamer’s machinery to pull gold from the Okanogan River, boasting a massive payout before winter arrives.
- Striking Gold in the Black Sand of the Beach
A Tacoma visitor reports a machine at Ocosta that pulls a dollar of gold from every ton of beach sand — and a local banker has already bought it.
- Sultan River Prospectors Build a Half-Mile Flume
Deep in the Snohomish backcountry, a group of determined prospectors labors to divert the Sultan River in hopes of striking it rich.
- The Great Ditch: How Snohomish Settlers Tamed the Marsh
Before the land was dry, a few determined pioneers took shovels and grit to the wetlands behind Snohomish to carve a new path for trade and transit.
Also about this, in other words
- Railroad Giant Stumbles in Palouse
A landmark court ruling strips the Northern Pacific of its right-of-way through Palouse City.
- The 1895 Plan to Straighten the Sammamish River
A petition from H. K. Kelsey and forty others asked King County to drain, deepen and straighten Squak Slough, reclaiming 3,000 acres of overflowed land.