Gold Bluffs beach gold

Gold Bluffs rush of 1850

Gold Bluffs Beach runs below a wall of bluffs several miles long and several hundred feet high on the Humboldt County coast, north of Orick, in what is now Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. In 1850 it set off one of the strangest stampedes of the California gold rush.

That spring J. K. Johnson and some companions, walking north from the new town of Trinidad to find the mouth of the Trinity, saw glittering grains in the beach sand. They went back for provisions and returned to find only gravel; the surf had buried it. That autumn J. W. Maxwell and a partner named Richardson began working the beach, waiting for the waves to bring the grains up, scooping sand into buckskin bags and saving only a small share of the gold.

Word reached San Francisco. In December the Pacific Mining Company was organised with $150,000 in capital and chartered the steamer Chesapeake. In January 1851 its secretary, John G. Collins, told the stockholders that after a spell of spring calms the entire beach was covered with bright yellow gold, and that one patch he had measured would give each member of the company forty-three million dollars. General John Wilson said thousands of men could not exhaust it in a thousand years. Shares sold at a premium, ships sailed north, and by February Trinidad was overrun; a 1946 Humboldt Times account put the crowd at an estimated 5,000 men. The gold was real, but far too fine to separate profitably. Most pushed on up the Klamath to the Salmon River mines, and the Pacific Mining Company spent far more than the $25,000 or so it took out.

The beach would not let go. When Lieutenant George Crook camped there in 1853, miners were leading mules out at low tide to shovel streaks of pay sand into panniers. The premium on gold during the Civil War brought another revival, with a beach-watch posted to call out black spots in the sand and men and mules racing the breakers. In 1873 the Gold Bluffs Submarine Mining Company, chasing a captain's claim of offshore sand assaying $23,000 a ton, pumped up more than 100 tons and found scarcely any colour and no gold. The next year the scientist A. W. Chase told the California Academy of Science that the gold came from the bluffs themselves and never reached paying quantities beyond the first two or three lines of breakers. By 1920 mining at Gold Bluffs had stopped.

Now the beach has a campground and the trailhead for Fern Canyon, reached by Davison Road, and a day-use permit is required from May 15 to September 15.