The Gold Rush at Nez Perces
A local captain reports on the booming prospects for thousands of miners seeking quartz gold in the Blue Mountains.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Captain C. H. Armstrong, recently returned from the Nez Perces mines, reports that approximately 300 miners are currently working in the area, with 1,800 claims recorded. The region is rich with gold, and miners are finding success digging through red loam and quartz gravel to reach bed rock. Snow remains deep on the mountains, but prospectors are arriving in droves, and the town of Walla Walla is swarming like a beehive to support the influx of workers heading toward the new diggings.
“Every miner is perfectly satisfied; it is impossible to find a discontented one.”
This 1861 account marks the beginning of a gold rush that would fundamentally reshape the regional economy and hasten the dispossession of Indigenous land. Today, the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) continue their fight for treaty rights and stewardship over the lands that were transformed during this era of rapid resource extraction.
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