Chasing the Mother Lode in the Cascades
A prospector shares his frustrated search for the source of placer gold in the northern Cascades.
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.
The placer gold found in the northern part of the state of Washington, on the banks of the Columbia River, is very fine scale gold. The pay dirt is only six inches in thickness. Following the South Fork of the Salmon River, the character of the country rock for the first fifteen miles is dolomite. Then comes a dyke of mica slate with large veins of quartz. Here was to be the mother lode, but each one proved to be barren. I climbed the highest peak, 8,000 feet high, to see what kind of rock is there. On the east side of that mountain, called Snow Mountain by prospectors, lay tilted over on its side a rock nearly a mile in thickness that was once a placer field, now turned into stone. The forming of new channels drained this large scope of country, and what was left is now our mountains.
“The highest peaks of that divide hold the remnants of a once mighty placer field; those mountain tops were once a valley, and before that a mighty flood passed through it.”
This account captures the relentless, often futile gold fever that drove early exploration of the North Cascades. It serves as a reminder of the physical extraction that shaped the landscape before many of these areas became protected wilderness.
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