Digital Bob Archive

7 February 1980

JUNE 15, 1882-Running water is the great need of the placer miner. The snows of winter are now melting and water is flowing in all of the streams, gulches and ravines that feed Gold Creek. The mining season is in full swing, from Last Chance Basin to the head of Silver Bow Basin and on the hillsides above. There is activity in Icy Gulch, Black Bear Creek, Spring Gulch, Lurvey Creek, Steep Gulch, Hardscrabble Gulch, Ground Hog Gulch, and all of the other sidehill waterways as well as on Gold Creek itself.

The largest single project in the valley is being carried on by the Dix Gulch Company, consisting of John Dix, Neil McCloud, Hugh Campbell and James Thompson. They are building a flume and ditch to carry water from the head of Gold Creek to Summit Gulch, where they own four claims. The ditch will be a mile and a quarter long when finished. Several shorter ditches are also under construction, usually by three or four claim owners who have banded together to obtain the necessary water.

Some of the placer ground is paying very well, with an average of $20 to $40 a day to the man being reported from many of the claims. Joe Juneau and Dick Harris, who made the original discovery of gold in Silver Bow Basin, are reported to have cleaned up 95 ounces of gold in nine days, using five men. They are working the claims in Quartz Gulch which they staked in October, 1880.

While most of the activity in the valley is on the placer ground, the lodes are not being entirely neglected. Last fall Howard Franklin bought from George Pilz the arastra Pilz had built on his millsite at the foot of Ice Gulch. The price was $75, to be paid after the first clean-up. This spring Franklin took the arastra apart and moved it, rock by rock, to his own site on the Savage lode claim. At least two other arastras are under construction.

William I. Webster and M. F. Lockwood, operating as Webster, Lockwood & Co., have purchased and shipped to Juneau a five stamp mill which is to be erected at the first falls on Gold Creek. They have also shipped in several pack horses, the first in the camp, to transport the machinery to the mill site. John Treadwell has also purchased a five stamp mill for his Paris lode property on Douglas Island, and there is something of a race to see which mill will be first in operation.