Trinity Alps & Vicinity: Including Whiskeytown, Russian Wilderness, and Castle Crags Areas. Mike White
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Название: Trinity Alps & Vicinity: Including Whiskeytown, Russian Wilderness, and Castle Crags Areas
Автор: Mike White
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Книги о Путешествиях
isbn: 9780899978109
isbn:
Human History
Three natural resources have profoundly affected the human history of the Klamath Mountains, almost to the exclusion of any other factors. They are, in chronological order, gold, timber, and water.
THE WINTU INDIANS
Gold meant very little to the Wintu Indians, who lived very well along the Trinity River and its tributaries for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years without any awareness that gold was even present. The Wintu had no use for gold, and they certainly had plenty of timber and water for their needs. As a matter of fact, they had just about everything else they needed. Deer and elk were plentiful, providing both food and clothing. Each autumn brought the return of salmon and steelhead up the river for harvest, and in most years, a bountiful crop of acorns. In the summer, berries and seeds were plentiful, along with small animals that they could snare. They built roofs for their homes of bark and rushes, and sedges and willows provided the materials for beautifully woven baskets.
Winters were bearable along the river, and the Wintu had little reason to travel very high into the mountains, except to pass through on trading expeditions to the coast or Central Valley. What need had a Wintu for gold? Would gold keep a grizzly from attacking? (Grizzlies were still here in those days.) In the end, of course, gold destroyed the Wintu completely, as the people who came to the area in the 19th century wanted the gold and the Wintu were in the way.
FROM TRAPPERS AND GOLD DIGGERS TO HOMESTEADERS AND LOGGERS
Although Jedediah Smith, and possibly other trappers before him, may have visited the area, Major Pierson B. Reading received the credit for naming the Trinity River in 1845. Actually, the river was named by mistake, as Reading thought the river emptied into the Pacific Ocean at Trinidad Bay, naming the river Trinity (the English translation of the Spanish Trinidad). Four years later, two miners who were searching for a way to the ocean discovered that the river flowed into the Klamath River, not the ocean.
Going for the Gold
There is some conjecture that Major Reading discovered gold at the same time he discovered the Trinity River. However, that would have been three years prior to John Marshall’s discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. If Reading discovered gold on his first trip to the Trinity River, he was really good at keeping a secret. The big gold rush to the Trinity River didn’t begin until late 1849 or early 1850.
By the end of 1850, the gold rush on the Trinity River and its tributaries was in full swing. Weaverville had almost as many people living there as it does now. In contrast, Trinity Centre (original spelling) had many more people than it does today. Even in 1850, many of those people were Chinese immigrants. By 1853, close to 2,000 Chinese immigrants lived and worked in the Weaverville area alone. Their labor was a boon to the local economy: They worked cheaply, and if they mined their own claims, renegade whites promptly robbed them. Most important, they paid $4 a head per month to the government for the privilege of digging, which went a long way toward supporting the public sector during the 1850s. Contrastingly, the whites paid nothing, despite the fact that they too were immigrants.
Steam engines at Dorleska Mine (see Trip 19)
Photo: Luther Linkhart
In 1854, tensions between two tongs, or Chinese gangs—one from Canton and another from Hong Kong—erupted in a skirmish instigated and egged on by whites. (So-called tong wars were commonplace in California in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) The American and European gold-seekers didn’t allow the Chinese to use guns—stray bullets might hit white bystanders—so the “Hong Kongs” and “Cantons” fought with knives, spears, and hatchets in a field near Weaverville. “Military advisers” for both sides cheered them on and bet on the outcome, with the Cantons eventually triumphing. However, many Chinese on both sides were losers, with numerous deaths (estimates from different historical sources range from 4 to 26) and many injuries. Surprisingly, there were no casualties among the “advisers.”
More people swarmed over the area in the 1850s than have been there at any time since. In less than a decade, most of the available placer gold had been mined, and the Chinese moved on to help build a section of the Transcontinental Railroad over the Sierra Nevada. Only the Weaverville Joss House, the museum, some artifacts, and miles of carefully stacked boulders the miners left along the streams remain to remind present-day visitors and residents of the extent of the 19th-century Chinese community.
The Wintu fared far worse than the Chinese. Estimated to have had a population of between 5,000 and 10,000 prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Wintu were nearly exterminated in the mid-1850s, leaving fewer than 1,000 members by 1910. Of the original nine bands of Wintu, only three remain, and there are very few reminders of their former presence within the Trinity Alps.
After the placer gold had been diminished, gold mining became big business. Capital and corporations were required to finance giant dredges, excavate deep shafts and drifts, and build miles of ditches and flumes. Such large-scale mining continued in the area through the 1930s, the most obvious example of which is the La Grange Mine. Water was transported 29 miles from lakes at the head of Stuart Fork in the early 1900s to wash away a big part of Oregon Mountain west of Weaverville. The remains were deposited down Oregon Gulch toward Junction City, the scars still visible along a portion of CA 299.
A few individual prospectors and small-scale placer miners have continued in the old way in an attempt to eke out an existence to the present day. One Mr. Jorstad, who lived in a cabin on the North Fork Trinity River, was an outstanding example until his passing in 1989. A new breed of gold miner has invaded the area more recently, using gasoline-powered Venturi dredges, wet suits, and snorkels to find gold in deep pools, areas that were out of reach to the old placer miners. Existing laws (primarily the 1872 Mining Law) and other regulations allow these miners to continue working existing claims within wilderness areas.
Ranchers
Along with the miners of the 1850s came a number of ranchers who homesteaded along the rivers, mostly in the area north of Lewiston known as Trinity Meadows, which now rests at the bottom of artificial Trinity Lake. Some of their descendants remain cowboys, still driving beef cattle to summer pasture in the Klamath Mountains.
Anton and Anna Weber, an Austrian immigrant couple, bought one of these ranches in 1922 and established Trinity Alps Resort along the Stuart Fork. The Webers are credited with naming the mountains the Trinity Alps, as they felt the mountains resembled the Alps in their native country.
Loggers and Lumbermen
The miners and early settlers, although profligate in their use, hardly made a dent in the vast supply of timber present in the mountains. However, with the coming of the railroad in the late 1800s, timber cutting began in earnest, and logging and running sawmills soon eclipsed mining as the main industry in the region.
Later improvements in transportation and mechanization increased the rate of cutting dramatically, pushing the cuts to the boundary of the former Salmon–Trinity Alps Primitive Area in many places. In spite of intense pressure on the Forest Service and Congress by timber interests, much of the wilderness was spared the loggers’ ax. Checkerboard ownership (due to land grants from the federal government as an inducement to build the Central Pacific Railroad) of some of the land within the wilderness area was supposed to have been resolved by СКАЧАТЬ