by Nick Neely
To and from Gold Hill, you drive along a deep, unhurried stretch of river lined with black oaks, their lobed leaves as large as hands, their limbs hung with lengths of Spanish moss that sway in the breeze like the scraggly beards of miners past. Lots of dredges here, tied across the way, opposite the dusty public road—the more difficult to steal. When I pulled over to stand waterside and gaze at the Rogue’s laconic gloss, I heard a rustling from the bank’s willow and grew tense. John emerged. “Oh,” I said, “it’s only you.” We stared at an enviable “party barge,” as he called it: an extra-large, stand-on-top dredge that, as it happened, four men worked together, ferrying across each morning in an aluminum canoe. Rain began to etch circles on the river’s dark vitrine. “It looks calm,” John said, before returning to somewhere on Earth. “But it beats the shit out of you.”
Shortly after, down a rutted blackberry- and poison oak–infested spur that traced the Rogue, I stumbled upon a turnout with a white pickup backed toward the river. A man in his sixties peered around the cab, short but broad-chested, in sunglasses and a ball cap, his T-shirt as gray as his hair. Taking me in, Ray apparently decided I wasn’t much trouble; the day before, he later told me, another miner’s truck had been broken into—thus, Ray now had a machete handy. “I’ll wave this around and yell, ‘Come on!’” Ray mused. “They’ll think I’m crazy”—true—“and won’t mess with me.” He and his thirty-nine-year-old son, Jason, had flown to Medford from North Carolina to join a friend and fellow prospector, Bob, for a few weeks submerged. Unfortunately Ray had been sidelined on the bank for sudden health reasons, which is probably why he entertained my questions: He was bored. Each time Ray spoke, the silver caps of his lower molars winked.
Soon Jason and Bob came wading in, nearly hypothermic, carefully floating the contents of their sluice box in a plastic tub down the placid side channel that led to the narrow beach and pickup. It was time to pan the results of their first, short dredging test at this locale: Ray’s job. In his yellow-and-black dry suit, Jason reminded me of a NASCAR driver (the hall of fame is in his hometown, he noted). Stocky and strong, with a russet moustache and Carolina drawl, he and his older brother had recently inherited Ray’s construction firm, Southern Pools, which also builds waterslides and tennis courts. No wonder the family dredged: They often worked underwater, scrutinizing walls for cracks and leaks. Bob, on the other hand, was a retired dentist from Bend, several hours away in Oregon’s eastern high desert. I had to stifle a quip about an “extractive” personality. With a soft, giddy laugh, and a patient way of explanation particular to the best of doctors, he wore a blue three-piece wetsuit, dubiously patched at the knees after all the time he’d spent kneeling in rivers.
Bob seemed skeptical of me; as he wrestled his neoprene and toweled off with genuine brrrs, I could tell he was sizing me up out of the corner of his eye. Here was a tall, strange “writer” who’d emerged, without warning, from the woods. But Bob warmed up, literally. The sun finally began to cast off the woolly marine layer overhead as Ray got down to business. He sifted the gravel from the dredge’s sluice into a green plastic pan, filled it with water from the Rogue, and began to “agitate,” first swirling and then rocking gently to suspend its sediments. The heavy gold, if there was any, would quickly wriggle to the bottom, to the pan’s circular crease.
With each motion, Ray let a bit more sediment wash off the pan’s edge, in tiny sips, until only black sand was left. Finally, he spread this heavy, ferrous content thin across the top of the tilted dish, illuminating “the color” underneath: an arching constellation of gold flakes and dust, and a few modest “pickers”—pieces large enough to pick up with your fingernails. By now, the goose pimples on Bob’s biceps had vanished; sunlight was flowing generously. It was an eighth of an ounce, roughly two hundred dollars’ worth, a promising outcome for a half-hour’s dive. “So you want to see some mining, huh,” Bob said, shaking my hand, and his head, as they drove off for Medford. “Okay, see you tomorrow.” I ended up staying four days.
Here’s what sucks: A lawn mower–sized engine, which produces an equally brain-rattling sound, sits on pontoons and pumps river water through a tapering tube named for Giovanni Venturi, an eighteenth-century Italian physicist, which creates a powerful jet. Right below the dredge, the venturi is joined to the diver’s hose (tough corrugated plastic, about fifty feet long), so that this rapid stream enters and converges with the motionless river water already inside this would-be vacuum. Because this incoming flow is so speedy, by the laws of physics it has a lower pressure: Voilà, water is drawn up the diver’s hose to fill this relative void, transforming its whole ophidian length into a vacuum strong enough to suck up the riverbed—and anything else that fits. If a diver’s hand strays near the nozzle, it’s pulled right in. Luckily this is more startling than dangerous. This is the Bernoulli principle at work, the same that dictates that air moving slightly faster over the top of a curved wing will generate lift.
On the pontoons above, the siphoned slurry comes to light and rushes over a reclined sluice box, cascading out its rear in a continuous blink of cobblestone, gravel, and silt. Tried and true technology—the forty-niners used them—a sluice is simply a trough laddered with rills and layered, now, with modern collection surfaces (green felt carpet, shaggy blue “miner’s moss”), which create miniature eddies that cause the heaviest material to fall out of suspension as it flows by. Bob’s engine was 6.5 horsepower; it burnt a gallon of gas every six hours; brand new, such a rig costs about five thousand dollars—or about four ounces of gold.
“What’s that?” I asked, of a sunken metal cage with a thirty-pound rock lodged inside. I was standing knee-deep in the Rogue in the green fishing waders I keep handy. Jason was wearing earplugs to dampen the motor’s noise, but apparently he could hear me.
“That’s our anchor,” said Jason. “It’s also the size nugget we want.”
The guys had caught wind of a formidable lump found, not long ago, at the foot of the three-foot-tall crude concrete diversion dam that we hurdled coming to and from the pickup. Reputedly, a savvy prospector had spotted this nugget while floating on his stomach and peering into the froth at the dam’s base, below the smooth spillover. “A miner’s tale,” said Jason: possibly true, probably exaggerated. But I was already itching to borrow a mask and go snorkeling.
“Most of the big stuff’s gone,” Bob told me, noting that successive gold rushes are the story of evolving technologies that make sifting out ever-smaller particles, from more-difficult-to-reach places, increasingly economical. “Occasionally someone will luck out, but it’s like winning the lottery. This fine stuff was inconsequential to those in the past, or they didn’t have the techniques. A hundred and fifty years ago, there were nuggets just lying here. Those miners would laugh at us. They just threw this kind of material away. They wanted large, gnarly pieces, and they found them—but they still had to work hard.” These days, suction dredgers go so far as to send their seemingly barren, panned-out black sand to online companies, which process it for microscopic gold and send back a check.
To begin dredging, you have to crack into the river bottom with a pry bar, excavating a chink in the “hard-pack” of its floor, an unwitting fortification. The thing to remember about gold is that it’s six times heavier than the average river material (silt, gravel, cobble), making it fairly easy to locate—almost always, it’s wormed its way to bedrock, as far down as possible—but arduous to access. During major floods, streambeds are broken apart, swept up, held aloft in a muddy turmoil. As the flood wanes, first gold succumbs to gravity and drops out; then other stones, and finally the lighter sediments, which, under the current’s pressure, fill the nooks and crannies to form an extremely compact riverbed: hard-pack. Much of geology, in this fashion, is an incomprehensibly vast game of Tetris that is both sluggish, on the order of vanishing mountains, and torrential. The pan in Ray’s hands, in fact, is a microcosmic version, a controlled flood: Lighter sediments are suspended;
ponderous gold sinks straight to the bottom. Thus a suction dredger has to dive not only through water, but also through the riverbed to reach the impenetrable stone where gold waits. All this must go. It’s bedrock or bust.
Supplied oxygen through an air compressor, hose, and (as in scuba) a mouthpiece regulator, Bob took the day’s first subaqueous shift, wavering like a blue shadow in the ceaseless Rogue as Jason and I stood by the floating dredge, ten feet away. Underwater, the diver sweeps his mammoth hose across the vertical wall of the “hole” he’s made in the riverbed, methodically slurping up the conglomerate of the hard-pack, enlarging the pit. While one hand manipulates the nozzle, the other clears rocks that might jam the hose, much like a point guard uses his free arm to protect his dribble. To help lighten the drag of the hose in the current, its midsection is tied to a rock or log upstream. Whenever possible, the diver overturns big stones, sometimes with that pry bar, because beneath you tend to find pay dirt.
“Bob’s definitely moving a rock!” Jason once yelled in my direction over the motor’s roar. “See how much more he’s breathing!” Big bubbles rose like jellyfish to the surface and revolved aimlessly, lazily, toward the Pacific before they released the former contents of Bob’s heaving lungs. His pickup had a winch for moving large boulders, but there was no need here. These stones were reasonable. Elsewhere they can be the size of a pickup. Down below, you also “pop the cracks” in the bedrock with a chisel, breaking up the stubborn aggregate of gravel wedged in these natural rills, where gold hides. Another time I watched as Jason battled one of these stiff sunken seams. Only the tip of his crowbar stirred the surface, in violent jerks. It was as if he were trying to plant a strange flag, or poke a hole in the Rogue and drain us all away.
The diver depends on the vigilance of his above-water partner, “the tender,” who carries a metal pole. The tender is like a shepherd with his crook, who looks on wisely while the sheepdog, underwater, does the real work. But as Bob explained, if you somehow get pinned underwater (by the rock you’re undermining), and you don’t have someone above to rescue you or call for help, your only hope is that the gas feeding your air compressor runs out soon, sparing you the torture of having to wait hours to drown. The tender’s main job, otherwise, is to make sure the hose doesn’t clog, which it tends to do right at the venturi’s attachment. When the outflow sputters, the tender becomes a plumber and plunges with his rod. Ram, ram, ram. Stones rattle out.
This is the story, in fragments, of what’s known as Oregon. All sorts of hues and forms: Ochre red. Serpentine green. Once, a stone with white quartz ridges, making it look like a mammoth’s tooth. Caddis fly larvae in their tiny bead-like tunnel-homes, built of dark sparkling gravel, in which the bugs metamorphose before they float to the surface and fly. Behind the dredge, the rocks collect in humps that, in a shallow river like the Rogue, over time thankfully provide the tender (and his interviewer) a perch out of the cold water. Periodically Jason and Bob swept these piles flat with their gloved hands, both to clean up and make room for more tailings. “Back home, we get good money for this kind of landscaping rock,” said Jason. “But it’s everywhere out here.” A geologist could really wile away, or even catalog, these hours. I just marveled at the colors.
In 1851, two mule packers readying camp about fifteen miles south of Gold Hill led their animals to drink from a clear, nose-tingling stream. Looking past those tired hooves, the men glimpsed “color” in the water’s gravel, that fateful harbinger of riches or ruination. This was five miles west of Medford before Medford was a twinkle in the eye, on a tributary of Jackson Creek, which drains to the Rogue. Miners soon welled north from California, many of them Oregonian settlers who, only three years earlier, had dropped their plows in the Willamette Valley and forded the Rogue when cries of “Eureka!” were heard from the Sierra Nevada foothills. Now, quickly, a Table Rock City was nailed together. It was shortly renamed Jacksonville, in honor of its gold-bearing creek, and became the seat of a new Jackson County. It was the largest town north of San Francisco.
Gold Hill, meanwhile, is named for the illustrious pocket that was turned out here above the Rogue in 1860, a year after Oregon joined the Union. One of the two richest lodes in state history, this white quartz vein is said to have been twenty-two feet long, ten feet deep, less than a yard wide, and so intricately laced with the precious element that much of it couldn’t be broken up with a sledgehammer, because gold is so malleable. Another miner’s tale, but something close to the truth: Seven hundred thousand dollars of gold was reportedly extracted—at $20.67 an ounce. That’s forty million dollars, at today’s prices. The partners of the Gold Hill mine felt so magnanimous as to present a specimen from their fabulous vein to the Washington Monument, then under construction. A piece of the Rogue hills remains buried in that marble obelisk, a symbol of Oregon’s arrival, worth, and inclusion in the nation.
This first boom busted by the early 1860s, but another would arrive before the turn of the century in the form of hydraulic mining, wherein teams of men, some of them Chinese, hosed entire hillsides into flumes using “dictators” or “giants,” as their cannon-sized nozzles were dubbed. Those alchemized the Rogue, so to speak, rendering it pure brown, choking downstream wetlands with silt and dramatically reshaping the landscape. But on the whole, Oregon’s gold production was modest aside other western booms. Those golden days served mainly to jump-start more vital, lasting business.
But history tends to bubble to the surface. Directly across the Rogue from Bob, Ray, and Jason’s operation was the Gold Nugget Wayside, a pull-off and picnic ground on a road that runs toward Crater Lake. Beneath twisting, tawny, smooth-trunked madrones, an interpretive sign endeavors to explain “The Lure of Gold.” Naturally, along this bank another small dredge was tied, hidden among the verdant aquatic grasses, with a tiny Jolly Roger raised above it like a flag over a miniature golf hole. Its owners were fair-weather dredgers for sure, appearing only on warm afternoons, when there was sunshine aplenty to rejuvenate the skin, and soul. They were either locals, or they weren’t having much luck. “You can always tell when a dredger is getting a little bit of gold,” Bob said, “because he works a lot longer and harder.”
Our nearest neighbors—James and Henry from Chico, California—were anchored behind a boulder one hundred yards upstream. James was a rather sizable fellow with a walrus mustache. Like most fluvial miners, he was a seasonal laborer: During the winter, he delivered fertilizer in tanker trucks to Central Valley rice growers, and during the summer, he dredged. In his neoprene hood and sleeveless wetsuit—sleeveless!—he looked like a mallet-wielding superhero. Or a headsman. His machine was a rumbling two-engine beast that put Bob’s to shame: not quite a “party barge,” but aspiring. To meet Oregon’s regulations, he had added an attachment to his nozzle reducing its diameter from six to four inches. But who knows what remained attached underwater.
I saw this duo at work just once, my last day on the river. As Big James readied to dive in behind his boulder, he contorted his elephantine hose over his right shoulder like a lumberjack hauling a log. Man, did that thing suck. It absolutely mowed. Henry played the role of hopeless sidekick. No good at diving, he tended the dredge in a death metal T-shirt and a faded-rose The Ohio State University cap, from which his long silver-and-black ponytail flowed. After a few hours, they took a long break to sun in lounge chairs, savor potato chips, and drink Shasta soda, while James’s 150-pound wolf-husky mix sat calmly at their sandaled feet with gelid eyes. Said James, “We’re getting into it a little bit.”
Our other neighbors, Pete, a tall muscular cop with a strong, stubbled jaw, and Matt, a thin, live-wire carpenter, were from Wisconsin. Their accents proved it. They were still learning the mining business, but had pushed ambitiously into the river’s alacritous middle, hoping to be duly rewarded. Sounded, however, as if they had just been thrashing in sand. By their own estimation, their three-week excursion had been a bust; now they worried about what they would tell their wi
ves after the long drive home. But each morning, Matt dutifully waded in behind the diversion dam to their spot with his wetsuit peeled to his waist, a steaming coffee in his hand, a cigarette in his lips, and his empty neoprene sleeves trailing reluctantly in the still water. It was Matt’s truck that had been broken into, so he’d propped up a sign, scrawled on cardboard, on his dashboard: I’ve purchased a Game Tracker camera, so if you’re reading this, I already have your picture.
Dredging is exhausting work; you have to fight the current, the hose held in its sway, and those tumbling stones. But it was the chill that was driving these guys from the Rogue. Flowing water relentlessly sloughs heat from the body. Sinewy Matt, for one, was having real trouble staying down for long. And after a two-hour session, Bob would stagger forth, his face off-white, puckered, and creased through his hood’s oval window. He’d doff his weight belt onto tailings, those worn geologic bones—splash. “I worked around those two rocks,” he reported to Jason after one typical effort, his teeth chattering. “But there are three or four more I left for you. There’s good pack underneath. My goal was to stay in two hours and move those rocks—which I did.”