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Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. But the flood of non-Indians across Yakama land continued unabated. Angered by reports of would-be miners who were not only trespassing but stealing horses and abusing Indian women, the Yakama retaliated by killing six miners in one incident and two more in another, along with an Indian agent who was sent to investigate the earlier attacks.
The United States military responded with force in October , setting off a three-year conflict that became known as the Yakima Indian War. Indians in California and in southern Oregon, as well, tried to fight off miners invading their lands, in a familiar cycle of provocation, retribution, and retaliation. In every case, treaty rights were no match for gold fever. As each gold rush cooled off, individual prospectors moved on, searching for greener or more golden pastures.
Some of them followed the upper Columbia River into Canada, where rich deposits were found in on the gravel beds of the Fraser River in British Columbia. Thousands of miners traveled to the Fraser by way of Victoria on Vancouver Island, turning what had been a provincial outpost in British Columbia into a bustling supply center. Many other miners used Seattle or Bellingham as a jumping off point.
Still others traveled upriver on the Columbia from The Dalles, moving north from there through the Cowlitz, Yakima, Wenatchee, and Okanogan valleys. They all needed food and supplies, which several settlements jostled to supply. News of the strike came just seven months after construction had begun on the Whatcom Trail, connecting Bellingham with the Canadian border. An estimated 10, miners swarmed into Bellingham Bay, expecting that the trail would be an easier and shorter route than the alternative through Canada.
Among the local businesses to profit was Thomas G. Richards and Company of Whatcom founded, ironically enough, by three San Franciscans. The company soon outgrew its wood-framed store and replaced it with a two-story brick building -- the first brick structure in Washington Territory.
In May , the road builders reached the Nooksack River, near the Canadian border. Unfortunately, as far as Whatcom County merchants were concerned, even better gold fields had been found farther east. Local citizens raised money and hired an engineer to extend the Whatcom Trail to the new fields, but meanwhile, the Canadian government ordered that all prospectors in British Columbia obtain mining permits in Victoria.
Thereafter, the Fraser boom bypassed Puget Sound altogether. Meanwhile, the Fraser River brought a measure of prosperity to a small non-Indian settlement at The Dalles. Overland travelers loaded their wagons onto rafts or barges at The Dalles and floated downriver the rest of the way. The gold discoveries provided an impetus for travel on the river above The Dalles. By that point, a small portage railway had been built to carry passengers and freight around the rapids.
Like many others who fell victim to gold fever in the mid-nineteenth century, Emory C. Ferguson found little more than sand and gravel on a quest that took him from his home in Westchester County, New York, to California, Canada, and the Okanogan country in northeastern Washington.
Ferguson struck out for California in , at the age of After two years of fruitless prospecting, he took what was left of his stake and bought a small general store. When that failed to pan out, he sold the store, bought a steam-powered saw, and went into the lumber business. After hearing about the Fraser River strikes in , Ferguson sailed for Bellingham Bay and from there went overland on the Whatcom Trail as far as he could, and then by canoe to the diggings. When he arrived, in late autumn, snow was already covering the gravel bars on the Fraser.
He returned to Puget Sound and settled in at Fort Steilacoom for the winter. As historian Norman H. Ferguson helped the builders disassemble a small wagon, pack it piece by piece on horseback over the trail, and reassemble it in front of his store. They sent word to an army inspector, who traveled by canoe to what Ferguson was now calling Snohomish. The inspector reported that he had indeed seen a wagon that had come over the road. The army paid the contractors for their work, but shortly thereafter it abandoned both Steilacoom and Bellingham.
Then he heard rumors that gold had been found in the Okanogan Valley, in the northeastern corner of Washington Territory.
Reasoning that the Okanogan was just across the Cascade Mountains from his store, he decided that if he could find a pass through the mountains, he could convince miners to go to the new strike by way of the Snohomish River and his store instead of the Columbia.
He packed most of what was left of his merchandise on four horses and, with a friend and an Indian guide, followed the Snohomish into the mountains. Ferguson returned to Snohomish, where he had no valid claim to the land, no money, no merchandise, and no customers. He stuck it out, nonetheless, and eventually prospered, albeit modestly, as a bartender and saloon owner, postmaster, justice of the peace, probate judge, county commissioner and auditor, legislator, and superintendent of schools.
In early , an Indian trader named E. The site was well within the boundaries of a reservation set aside for the Nez Perce Indians under a treaty forced on them five years earlier by Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens. The discovery set an uncontrollable stampede of fortune hunters onto Nez Perce lands. Rather than enforce the treaty, federal officials negotiated a new one in , reducing the reservation to one-tenth its original size. Reports of gold in the region had been circulating since the late s.
Captain John Mullan, overseer of the construction of the Mullan military road between Fort Walla Walla to Fort Benton, Montana, tried to squelch the rumors out of fear that workers with gold fever would desert him and retard progress on his road. When it was completed in , the mile road was scarcely more than a pack trail. Even so, it became a main artery for travel to the Idaho mining districts. The discovery of gold in Idaho put Walla Walla on the map, at least figuratively.
By , it was the largest community in Washington Territory, with some 3, citizens. Another major beneficiary of the Idaho gold rush was the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, which combined portage railroads with a fleet of steamboats to control traffic on the Columbia River and its tributaries. The company, organized in through a merger of several smaller companies, operated a mile railroad that skirted the rapids from The Dalles to beyond Celilo Falls.
In , it built a six-mile railroad at the Cascades of the Columbia, the final obstacle to navigation between the upper and lower river. Boats traveling upriver carried prospectors, merchants, and gamblers on their upper decks; axes, picks, shovels, tents, food, whiskey, and other gear were stored on the lower decks. Boats heading downriver carried passengers and gold. The volume more than doubled the next year, after new strikes were made in the Boise Basin in southern Idaho.
It was an expensive transportation system, partly because the cargo had to be loaded and unloaded numerous times in the switch from boat to railroad and back again -- at least 10 times under the best conditions, and up to 14 times during low-water seasons.
Because there was no timber near the river east of The Dalles, wood to power the steamboats had to be carried to fueling stations.
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