The spokesperson for the miners stood on the bridge over the Wild and Scenic Illinois River and pointed to where Josephine Creek enters a little upstream. He noted its significance as the place where white settlers first found gold in Oregon. That was in 1851.
The Earthfix article states that this triggered a gold rush in Southwest Oregon. Writers of Oregon's history will tell you that what happened here after gold was discovered is much more complex and disturbing than this statement implies:
"Within weeks [of gold's discovery] a reckless population, most of them hardened miners from California, surged over the Siskiyous or stepped off the gangplanks of ships putting in at Crescent City, Port Orford, Umpqua City, or Scottsburg. The rush was on. It meant quick riches for those who found the right pothole in bedrock filled with nuggets or the fortunate miners whose riffle boxes captured the fine particles of gold that glistened in the black sand. For the Indians of the Rogue River country it meant that all they had known and their very lives were at stake...
The miners drove the Takelma, Shasta, Chetco, Shasta Costa, Mikonotunne, Tututni, Galice Creeks and Cow Creeks from their villages. Located on old stream terraces, the Indian homes were prime locations for placer deposits." Emphasis added.Within approximately 5 years of the discovery of gold on Josephine Creek, the people who'd lived along the rivers of Southwest Oregon for many hundreds of years were either killed or extirpated from their homeland.
Earthfix quotes the representative of the local miners:
“We were the government in this area and the miners made their own rules. We could hang people. We could condemn your property -- so I could dump tailings in your living room,” he says. “Nothing could get in the way of mining in those days.”That "nothing" was in fact the native peoples who objected to the miners' destruction of their land and food sources. Some have called it genocide. But the Earthfix article let this statement pass. There is no mention of the consequences of this' authoritarian, single-mined and intolerant mindset. We have to look to other accounts of history for what happened:
"Mining debris poured down the Illinois, Rogue, South Coquille and South Umpqua Rivers. The salmon runs diminished; the eels died. Crayfish, fresh water mussels and trout choked on the flood of mud. Starvation threatened.
The mining districts--whether in the Rogue River country or the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon--caused major ecological disruption. The rush for quick wealth through mineral exploitation unraveled nature's ways and long-established human subsistence activities. Then came the "exterminators"--unprincipled men who believed only dead Indians were good Indians. They formed volunteer companies and perpetrated massacres against the Chetco Indians in 1853, the Lower Coquille Indians in 1854, and in wanton aggression against Takelma Indians camped near the Table Rock Reservation in 1855."Read the Oregon Bluebook's section on the Indian Wars.
It's not the discovery of gold in Southwest Oregon that we should be remembering on a bridge overlooking the Illinois River, or the rule of law of the miners. Instead we should remember the death of cultures and people and the damage to the rivers and this biologically rich corner of Oregon that resulted from the discovery of gold. And we should take no pride in what is a violent and racist past.
If the media just accepts the miner's account of history without challenge, the myth will be perpetuated with each the telling of their indignant stories of how they are wronged. The hope is that Earthfix and Jefferson Public Radio—in addition to reporting what each side in the current struggle to bring some regulation to mining says—will begin to tell to the real mining history of Southwest Oregon and the tragedies that ensued from the discovery of gold.
