Chasing Gold in the Yakima River
A group of enterprising prospectors has constructed a specialized barge to extract gold from the sands of the Yakima River.
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.
A systematic effort is to be made to extract the light gold from the bed of the Yakima river. A dozen or fifteen men have been employed in building a peculiar looking barge at a point on the Yakima near the third railroad crossing. The boat is now completed and a steam pump is being put in position for pumping up and washing the sand and gravel from the river bed. The promoters have located the bed of the river under mining laws from the third crossing to the mouth of Mactaashit creek, a distance of 18 miles, and claim that two men can wash and extract the gold from fifty cubic yards of sand per day.
“They claim that two men can wash and extract the gold from fifty cubic yards of sand per day.”
Small-scale mining schemes were a recurring feature of 19th-century regional boosters, often promising quick wealth to distract from the slower, harder work of agriculture. Today, the stretch of the river mentioned serves as vital salmon habitat, illustrating the shift from viewing the river as an extraction site to a protected natural resource.
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