On July 29, 2010, we started heading east towards Yellowstone National Park, where we had a reservation at the Fishing Bridge RV Park. Our first camping stop along the way was May Creek Campground in Montana.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
December 2010
Searching a hillside across the Yankee Fork, three prospectors stumbled upon what would become the most famous mine on the Yankee Fork. Named after the popular military general, George Armstrong Custer, the General Custer Mine was a rich vein of ore, exposed by a snowslide. The discovery of the Custer Mine in 1876 transformed this small mining camp into a lively community and the site of the region’s most significant mining activity.
Founded in 1879, Custer flourished and what began as a tent community rapidly became a town of over 100 building lining both sides of it’s narrow main street. For 30 years, Custer experienced frenzied activity and growth as well as periods of uncertainty and decline until its final bust in 1911.
Charles Alexander Pfeiffer purchased this family home after his marriage to Ellen Louise Olson in 1890. Charles managed the Pfeiffer Store for his uncle and later worked as a gold and cleanup man at the General Custer Mill. As the family increased in size, a kitchen and bedroom were added to the family home. The roof shingles are made of flattened cans. Families in Custer were not an oddity, but certainly weren’t the norm either, as most miners and the supporting merchants were single men.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
These vintage bottles were in the windows of an old school house in the ghost town of Custer, Idaho. The building now serves as a museum.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The Yankee Fork gold dredge is one of the mining attractions along Idaho’s Yankee Fork River, between Bonanza City and Custer. When we first visited the area in the 1970s, it was a closed relic. Today, it has been restored to the point that tours are available for those who are interested.
Beginning in 1872, the valley floor of the Yankee Fork River was hand placered in the search for gold. Years later, tests showed that gold still remained in the deep gravels of the stream bed. In 1939, a gold dredge was purchased by the Snake River Mining Company and hauled to the Yankee Fork for assembly. Before it was shutdown in 1952, the dredge recovered more than $1,200,000 in gold from about 6,000,000 cubic yards of gravel.
Today, the dredge still sits where it stopped operation after all of the claims owned by the company had been dredged. The path taken by the dredge up the stream bed left large piles of gravel on which little grows. In a satellite image showing the dredge, the piles form rows where the dredge’s stacker belt deposited the gravel after processing.
In operation, small particles of gold and silver from naturally disintegrated ore were scooped up by the bucketline (see image on left for scale).
The dredge has a chain of 71 buckets, each wighing just over a ton. Each pin holding the chain together weighs 195 lbs. The bucket mechanism can be raised and lowered and moved left and right. It can dig 37 feet deep.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
