Death and a Trace of Gold on the Fort Simcoe Trail
A Washington Territory prospecting party lost one man to an accidental gunshot and two others to drowning, and found only a disappointing show of gold.
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 party set out in June for Fort Simcoe and reached the post without difficulty. There they lost a man, J. Whitby, who accidentally shot himself and lived only two hours. They then took up the trail into the Columbia country. They found gold, but not in large quantities. At the next crossing two men named Galbraith were drowned. From that point they made but little progress in a day. The account also speaks of hard travel through the Indian country and of Col. Wright, who was reported to be keeping his word with the tribes.
“They found gold, but not in large quantities.”
The 1858 account shows how rumor of gold pulled ordinary men into dangerous country long before any claim was proven. The same tension between speculative extraction and the lives it costs still runs through debates over public lands and resource booms in Washington.
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