Gold in the Black Sand: A Mining Rush at Cape Flattery
Three Port Townsend men stake claims on sixty acres of beach and start pulling $3 to $7 a day from the sand — and predict a rush.
PORT TOWNSEND, July 1. — Special. — Over sixty acres of sand beach half way between Cape Flattery and the Ozette river has been filed on as mining claims. C. W. Flint, I. W. Downs and J. F. Pugh, of this city, have located three claims and are extensively engaged in placer mining. They employ a number of men and are averaging from $3 to $7 a day each. An invention has been patented by them to separate the gold from the black sand. The water is carried down from streams up the mountain in a flume for a distance of 1,170 feet.
The scene along the beach aptly illustrates California placer mining in '49. Though their method of extracting the metal from the sand is somewhat crude, yet the operations each day are becoming more practical and the mines seem to be in a fair way to realize a fortune. There are enough claims subject to filing, said one of the miners today, to keep up a camp of 1,000 people. Down on the Indian reservation, below the Ozette river, the sand is said to be much richer, but there is a certain amount of difficulty to be experienced with the government in effecting mining titles. However, a mining rush is anticipated and more especially as soon as the machinery now being operated proves to be thoroughly effective.
“Down on the Indian reservation, below the Ozette river, the sand is said to be much richer, but there is a certain amount of difficulty to be experienced with the government in effecting mining titles.”
The beach sands between Cape Flattery and the Ozette were Makah and Ozette territory long before anyone filed a mining claim on them. The miners' casual note that the richest sand lay 'on the Indian reservation' — and that the government would be a nuisance to deal with — is the whole story of Indigenous dispossession in a sentence.
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