The Gold-Flecked Foothills of Puyallup
While major industries dominated the city’s economy, one prospector found that turning over stones in the local wilderness could yield a surprising fortune.
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.
Peter Cameron, who has been residing upon his claim in the foothills back of the back country during the last few months, has devoted his spare moments to picking up nuggets of gold along the mountain streams in this vicinity until he now has a collection of gold and silver nuggets worth at least $700. This is a profitable pastime, beyond a doubt, and demonstrates that gold hunters would do well to investigate some of the quartz ledges in this vicinity, besides on the south fork of the Puyallup.
“This is a profitable pastime, beyond a doubt, and demonstrates that gold hunters would do well to investigate some of the quartz ledges in this vicinity.”
Long before tech campuses transformed the Puget Sound landscape, the region’s economic pulse was tied to the extraction of natural resources. Today’s obsession with high-tech growth echoes the 19th-century gold fever that once drove settlers to comb the riverbeds of the Puyallup Valley.
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