The Idaho Republican. [volume] (Blackfoot, Idaho) 1904-1932, 1920-09-15

and to picture, If possible the great
| possibilities in the beet industry, in
road building, and the treatment of
the black sands in Snake river. |
! cannot tell you just what will happen
and your picture of the future may
be just as good as any other persons.
In speaking of this other industry !
haYe to go back farther than the
ear 1908.
Sugar Beets and Gold Mines
In the boom days of California
a cubic yard of gravel might yield
thousands of dollars in gold nuggets
and gold dust 1t was so rich that
they washed it out by the panning
method, the most wasteful of all gold
mining operations. When gravel
yielded only a few hundred dollars
per cubic yard the miner lost inter-
est in it and went looking fer some
thing richer. But other men came
along and built what is called sluice
boxes to handle great quantities of
gravel by cheaper method and any,
thing that paid a few hundred dol
lars per cubic yard yielded fortunes
to them. Further on, men concen-
trated their efforts to devise means
of handling gravel that yielded only
So yard and they got it down to
where they could handle vast quaint
tiles at a very low cost, so low that
hesitate to name the price. Thru
their sluicing operations men found
that rich gravel deposits laid so deep
in the ground that they could not
handle it by the ordinary sluicing OPP
GRAFTON which required stream of
water to flow thru the mine and have
a clear dump at the lower erd.
Inventors built giant lion man
to shovel the gravel up out of the
low places, out of the water, and into
the sluice boxes. This invention was
called dredge. The dredges have
been improved and enlarged until
they handle tremendous amounts of
gravel in day. l believe the larg-
est dredge in the world is at Trinity
Center Calf, and it shovels up
10000 yards of gravel a day. That
is $4,000 tons. The dredge has a
system of sluice boxes with water
running thru them to wash the
gravel away from the gold so that
this $4,000 tons of gravel is sep
arated from the gold it contains. A
ton of gravel at Trinity Center con-
tains only 3 cents of gold, or more
correctly stating, it runs as low as
cents to the cubic yard. Their an
nual,report forvthe year 1919 shows
that after paying all expenses for the
year, the company operating the
dredge had 100000 in dividends.
They operate the dredge day and
night, twelve months in the year.
Some Idaho Operations
In the year 1854 gold was dis
covered in what we now call Stanley
Basin, on the headwaters of Salmon
river. A little over 200 miles nearly
west from Blackfoot-a little north
of west, several gulches in Stanley
Basin were so rich in gold that vast
fortunes were taken out by panning
and by sluicing, using the crudest
methods in sluicing. At point
about seven miles northwest of the
Stanley Basin townsite is spot of
about five acres, called Buckley Bar,
from which the miners away back in
the COS and 70's took out about a
million dollars in gold. They worked
that five acres practically all over
and dumped the refuse out as tail
ings or waste, in which there was not
much gold left. When dredges were
developed so that they could wash
gravel profitably, that contained only
q dollar or two per yard, prospectors
tested the gravel in hundreds Of
acres in Stanley Basin and found
that it could be washed profitably
by the dredging system. About the
year 1900 Harry Wilson promoted
a mining company and furnished
them with plans for building a
dredge which he proposed to operate
in the Stanley Basin on strip of
meadow land extending down the
creek below Buckley Bar. and to
work up to and include Buckley
Bar. The whole belt contained
about 50 yard in gold and he
thought he could save enough to
make a dollar a yard profit. If re-
member correctly the dredge was
built In Pittsburg and was shipped
to Ketchum, Idaho, was hauled in by
freight teams over the Galena Sum-
NIT, which is about 10000 feet above |
the sea, and was hauled down to |
Bar and unloaded and there
the dredge was assembled and built,
and put to work in the year 1902.
In August 1908 l visited the dredge |
and spent several hours with Mr..
Wilson studying the dredge and its
operation. They had simply scooped
out a hole in the meadows, built a
in it without any propell-
Ing apparatus, built the dredging ma
chinery on the, boat, turned the
creek into the hole they had scooped
out, foated the boat, set it to SCOOP
Ing up gravel, washed the gravel on
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