Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

The pictures we conjure of gold mining are usually cartoonish – old prospectors in floppy hats, panning creeks or working away with a pickaxe. Rarely do we imagine anything like the Sumpter Valley Dredge.

For decades the massive gold mining machine tore up a patch of eastern Oregon, extracting millions of dollars worth of gold. But today it stands as a relic of the past, maintained to show tourists another face of the gold rush.

If you stop by the Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge State Heritage Area, found about 30 miles west of Baker City in the tiny town of Sumpter, you can take a tour through the big dredge, where old, rusted pulleys hang from the ceiling and twisted braids of cable still run through the floorboards.



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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

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Standing several stories tall and 120 feet long, with 72 buckets weighing one ton each, the massive piece of equipment took three people to operate, with a crew of 17 to manage a host of other duties, from maintenance to bookkeeping.

The dredge worked by using its long arm of giant buckets like teeth on a chainsaw to dig up the earth and feed it into the machine to be processed. The gold was retained and the waste – known as tailings – was spewed out the back. The whole operation took place in a shallow pond of water, which moved with the machine as it crawled across the land.

Three dredges were built in Sumpter between 1913 and 1954, each working at a rate of more than seven yards of earth per minute. Between them, the dredges traveled more than eight miles and mined as much as $12 million in gold – at today's prices, the gold would be worth nearly $455 million.



The first two dredges built in Sumpter were constructed in 1912 and 1915 by the Powder River Gold Dredging Company, and operated simultaneously until 1923 when the company shut down. In 1934, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the price of gold from $20 to $35 an ounce, the Sumpter Valley Dredging Company built a third dredge on the spot that was bigger and more efficient than its predecessors.



That machine sits at the state park site today, where it operated all day, almost every day, for 20 years. While the dredge mined a fortune, by the 1950s the operation had become unprofitable, and in 1954 it shut down for good. The dredge was abandoned, and over the next two decades it quickly began to deteriorate.

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

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In 1971, the Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and 20 years later it was purchased by a public land trust and private individuals, who restored the machine to display as a relic of eastern Oregon’s gold mining history. The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department took over management, and tourists began to show up. In 2018, the state park site attracted more than 121,000 visitors.

Just staring up at the massive machine – let alone walking through it – goes a long way toward dispelling the romantic picture of the lone gold prospector, trying to eke out a living from the land. The dredging operation that tore through the Sumpter Valley was a major undertaking and a big business. It might have failed in the end, but not before it succeeded in extracting literal tons of gold from eastern Oregon.

The Sumpter Valley Gold Dredge State Heritage Area is open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., daily from May 1 to Oct. 31.; guided tours are held on weekends; 441 South Mill St., Sumpter, OR; find more information by calling 541-894-2486, or visiting oregonstateparks.org.



--Jamie Hale | jhale@oregonian.com | @HaleJamesB



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