Grant County Gold Rush

In the summer of eighteen sixty-two, Canyon Creek in what is now Grant County was carrying something beyond water. In June of that year, prospecting parties struck gold along a stretch called Hog Point. Within ten days, an estimated thousand miners had lined two miles of the creek, and a new city was staking itself out of the Oregon wilderness.

At its peak, Canyon City held somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand people , more than Portland at the time. It was the largest populated place in Oregon for two full years. The men who flooded in came overland from California, up the Columbia from the coast, and across the Idaho territories. They came chasing a strike that would ultimately yield more than twenty-six million dollars in gold from Canyon Creek and the surrounding mountains over the next forty years.

The poet Joaquin Miller , who called himself the Poet of the Sierras , spent part of this era in Canyon City, and the writer Bret Harte drew on tales from this country. Grant County was carved out of the immense Wasco and Umatilla Counties in eighteen sixty-four, named for Ulysses Grant, whose star was rising in the East as the Civil War moved toward its conclusion.

The mining economy built a network of supply towns across the Blue Mountains. Sumpter, Granite, Greenhorn, and a dozen smaller camps each had their moment of density and noise before the ore thinned and the miners moved on. Dredges replaced the placer pans in the early twentieth century, reworking old gravel beds for whatever the hand-miners had left behind.

Canyon City, population just over seven hundred today, remains the county seat , a small, deeply quiet place surrounded by ponderosa pine and juniper, sitting in a canyon that once held ten thousand people and their ambitions. The Grant County Courthouse, the Joaquin Miller cabin, and the Kam Wah Chung building nearby all survive as evidence of the world that gold briefly built out here in the high desert of eastern Oregon.