On June 6, 1863, the rush began along a 16-mile stretch of stream in present-day Southwest Montana 5It would also become one of the richest placer gold discoveries ever recorded (if not the richest), eventually yielding nearly $3 billion in gold at today’s prices.

A party of men returning to the Grasshopper Creek gold country at Bannack from the Yellowstone River country had found the first evidence of gold in Alder Gulch on May 26. The men became known as the Fairweather Party, after Bill Fairweather, whose gold pan brought up the first nuggets in the creek running through the Gulch. The men continued on to Bannack, where they bought supplies and prepared to return to Alder Gulch. They tried to keep their discovery a secret, but were followed out of town by other miners who had heard of the find. After a miner’s meeting, the Fairweather Mining District was established in the Gulch. The miners agreed that the five men of the Fairweather Party would receive first choice and two claims each in the district. 

Within three months,10,000 people were living and working in the Alder Gulch area, and towns including Nevada City, Virginia City, Adobetown, Junction, Highland, Pine Grove, Beartown, Frenchtown, Hungry Hollow and Summit stretched into what was really one long settlement dubbed “the 14-mile city.” 

                                                                                                                             photo by William Henry Jackson

The gold mining efforts in Alder Gulch followed a familiar pattern. Placer deposits consist of loose particles of gold mixed into topsoil, sand, and gravel. Men searched the streambeds, washing gravel and searching for “colors,” gold dust, flakes or small nuggets, with their gold pans. Panning was slow and tedious work, so a system of rockers and sluice boxes was utilized. Rockers and sluice boxes are really innovative versions of the gold pan; rockers are long wooden “cradles” in which the gravel and dirt was “rocked” during the washing process, allowing the gold to sink to the bottom. Sluice boxes are essentially “waterslides,” with bottom cleats that catch the gold during washing. The key word in these processes is “wash,” because they all require the use of water to aid in the acquisition of gold.   

The use of pans, rockers, and sluice boxes barely scratched the surface, but the use of water in these gold mining operations soon led to more innovations, and the changes to the ecosystem that followed can still be seen in Alder Gulch today. Drainage ditches were constructed to divert water away from deep channels, and the gravel was carried to the surface to be “sluiced and cleaned.” Drift mines, tunnels into streambanks, were also used to get the gravel to the surface for washing. The ultimate “washing” method of gold extraction was hydraulic mining, which involved the use of giant hoses (often referred to as “little giants”) to simply hose away streambanks.

Miners also began exploring the hills around Virginia City for “lodes,” veins and pockets of gold- and silver-laden rock which was sometimes present in outcrops above the surface. Prospect holes located in such areas soon grew into mine shafts with timber-supported sides. In July 1863, hard rock gold was discovered nearly eight miles above Virginia City, and towns like Summit soon grew around these lode deposits.

Successful lode mining eventually required the building of a mill to process the ore. Lode gold was usually recovered by “grinding or stamping” the rock. Stamping methods ranged from the Spanish arrastre, which utilized old-fashioned horsepower (the kind with hooves) to crush the rock, to water or steam-pressure-driven stamp mills, which pulverized the rock and utilized mercury, to which gold adheres, for recovery. Several hardrock mines operated such stamp mills in the upper reaches of Alder Gulch, including four Chilean mills brought over the Bozeman Trail which operated at Union City.

                                                                                                                              photo by William Henry Jackson

Within a few decades, even with methods like hydraulicking, the placer deposits in Alder Gulch became depleted... on the surface. But dredges came on the scene in Alder Gulch in the 1890s. Floating dredges reached gravel at deep ground depths. Large artificial ponds floated the “gold boats,” which often utilized chains of steel buckets, powered with electricity or steam (requiring up to 20 cords of wood per day for fuel), to bring gravel to a gold-washing and recovery system. The waste rock was simply strewn across the landscape.

The first dredging operations in the Alder Gulch-Ruby Valley area, built and operated by the German Bar Placer Mining Company in 1896-97, began four miles below Virginia City. The operation was small compared to outfits like the Conrey Placer Mining Company, which operated vessels like the Maggie A. Gibson, one of the “gold boats” that added to the ecological rearrangement of the Ruby Valley around and upstream of the present-day town of Alder. This steam-powered dredge, built and initially in operation at Bannack, was moved to the Ruby and rebuilt during 1897-98. The Gibson worked the Ruby Valley ponds for five years. Four huge dredges were eventually built, and high voltage power lines were constructed to power the vessels; the huge piles of gravel left behind by these dredging operations remain to this day.

By the 1930s dredging operations wound down in lower Alder Gulch, and more gold mining in the area ceased when World War II broke out and the U.S. government declared gold a “non-essential mineral” in the war effort. But small mining operations persist even today in and around Alder Gulch, although more money is made these days through the tourism generated by the old historic mining district.

And as for William Fairweather, the man who made the initial gold discovery at Alder Gulch and for whom the mining district was named? He died 12 years after his find, with nary a gold nugget to his name.