Things We Invent for Greed

[AlanLichty]

This isn't the sort of houseboat you would want to see show up at your favorite fishing hole - a gold dredge. This dredge is located in Sumpter Oregon just west of Baker City where dredge gold mining was active from the early 1900's until 1954. These devices could move 20 buckets of earth every minute and would effectively dig their own pond that would move along with the dredge as it made its way upstream. It is self contained for placer style sorting that could extract the gold and spit the discarded material out the back. It can pretty much terraform a whole river valley into a giant gravel pit as it did through the years they were in operation. There were three different dredges in use at Sumpter with two in operation and the last one was built mostly out of parts from the first one. The dredge spoils are easily visible on satellite images of the area. This one has been preserved as a museum piece and with a fairly new paint job looks a lot nicer than it did when it was still in active use.

C&C always welcome.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

The lure of gold. Interesting history here.

 

[AlanLichty]

The lure of gold. Interesting history here.

Thanks Jameel - this would be a good place to shoot with a drone. I shot this in 2019 before the notion of drone photography had ever entered my feeble brain. I have visited Sumpter twice now heading from Baker City over to the John Day Fossil Beds area and never did find a place to get a good shot of just how destructive these machines are for a river valley like this one since the gravel piles left behind are too tall to get an expansive view.

This is the view from Google Maps satellite imagery. The dredge is in the upper left corner and the zig zag patterns are the roughly 10 miles of dredge spoils.

 

[JimFox]

How interesting Alan, I had completely forgotten about these. It's amazing how powerful they were in destroying a river.

 

[AlanLichty]

How interesting Alan, I had completely forgotten about these. It's amazing how powerful they were in destroying a river.

Thanks Jim - not just the river - they took out the entire river valley near Sumpter. I have encountered a place where these were used before up along Warren Creek and Maloney Creek just north of Warren Idaho. Same deal there where they churned over the entire river valley between the creeks and just left the remains of the dredge right where they stopped once they had played out the gold deposits.