The Mountain Gold Miner of Snohomish County
While Seattle’s elite gossip about national politics, C. B. Battack is running a bustling quartz mine in the mountains of Snohomish County with his whole family.
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 many friends of Mr. Battack will be pleased to hear that he is engaged in a profitable business, being proprietor of a quartz mine in Snohomish county, Washington Territory. The mining settlement is about eight miles distant from the Snohomish river and is known as 'Washington.' Mr. Battack employs about one hundred men. On the premises, all the work of crushing and refining the ore is being done. His daughter, Miss Battack, is bookkeeper for the company and his son, Edward, has been an expert assayer and essentially aids his father in the matter of testing the ore. Mrs. Battack's health was never better, and the entire family seems to enjoy their home in the mountains.
“Mrs. Battack's health was never better, and the entire family seems to enjoy their home in the mountains.”
This snippet from 1885 captures the pioneer spirit of Washington's extraction economy, where family-run operations defined local prosperity. Today, the 'Washington' mining settlement has vanished, and the region has shifted from raw resource extraction to the high-tech and logistical economy of the modern I-5 corridor, yet the narrative of family-owned enterprise remains a core part of the state's identity.
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