P
PNWGuy
Guest
I moved back home to Idaho in 2013 from Prescott, AZ area and was sorely disappointed in the lack of cool old homesteads and mines in Idaho compared to AZ.
The desert tends to preserve things much better than the harsh winters in Idaho.
I used to do some prospecting in AZ and found it fascinating. Came up here and within a couple of months was researching the Strychnine creek legend...
Weird that I cannot find any of the historical documents on the net that I found a few years ago. Maybe history is being cleaned up...
Anyway, there was a gold-mining operation that the miners abandoned after they thought they had played it out. The Chinese back then would go into those areas and go over the worked over tailings and work even harder and find quite a bit of gold. They had set up such an operation at spot near the site at the bottom of a draw and next to the creek. They diverted part of the creek to use for washing and getting water for drinking and cooking.
The white miners heard how much of their gold they had left behind that the Chinese were finding and got angry. They snuck into the camp and poured a bunch of strychnine into the diverted water source and poisoned the bulk of the camp; around 21 Chinese.
That's how the creek got it's name.
I took my Tesoro Lobo metal detector up there and using accounts from local papers I found online, was able to find the spot I suspected was the site of the camp. Was looking for any artifacts that would confirm that I found the location.
The problem was that in much of the West, areas get logged every 50 years or so, so that area had been logged twice by the time I there. Logging destroys pretty much everything as far as shelters and traces of camps.
I found a bunch of stuff from the 1940's; old food containers, bottles, and a cork-soled logging boot, but nothing older than that.
The desert tends to preserve things much better than the harsh winters in Idaho.
I used to do some prospecting in AZ and found it fascinating. Came up here and within a couple of months was researching the Strychnine creek legend...
Weird that I cannot find any of the historical documents on the net that I found a few years ago. Maybe history is being cleaned up...
Anyway, there was a gold-mining operation that the miners abandoned after they thought they had played it out. The Chinese back then would go into those areas and go over the worked over tailings and work even harder and find quite a bit of gold. They had set up such an operation at spot near the site at the bottom of a draw and next to the creek. They diverted part of the creek to use for washing and getting water for drinking and cooking.
The white miners heard how much of their gold they had left behind that the Chinese were finding and got angry. They snuck into the camp and poured a bunch of strychnine into the diverted water source and poisoned the bulk of the camp; around 21 Chinese.
That's how the creek got it's name.
I took my Tesoro Lobo metal detector up there and using accounts from local papers I found online, was able to find the spot I suspected was the site of the camp. Was looking for any artifacts that would confirm that I found the location.
The problem was that in much of the West, areas get logged every 50 years or so, so that area had been logged twice by the time I there. Logging destroys pretty much everything as far as shelters and traces of camps.
I found a bunch of stuff from the 1940's; old food containers, bottles, and a cork-soled logging boot, but nothing older than that.
