Nick Sheedy | Oregon Voices: "Dean of the Mountain": Isaac "Ike" Guker, Hard Rock Gold Miner and Proprietor of the Great Northern Mine | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 107.4

OREGON VOICES

"Dean of the Mountain"

Isaac "Ike" Guker, Hard Rock Gold Miner and Proprietor of the Great Northern Mine

by Nick Sheedy

THE FABULOUS GOLD ORE UN-earthed at the Great Northern Mine in March 1898 created a sensation and christened a new lode-mining era in eastern Oregon. Hopeful miners staged a small gold rush in the John Day Valley and the prospects looked good. On March 3, Effie Brandt of Canyon City wrote in her diary:

There is quite a bit of excitement in town about the mine on the mountain. It is owned by a German named Guger [sic]. They took out one piece worth $1,500 yesterday. A very rich mine, it makes me hungry for such good luck. Papa has a 1/2 interest in a mine in Marysville, which John is thinking of leasing and working for a while. If he does, I will be alone again this summer, but if only we could make money at it, it would be grand!¹

The Sumpter News followed the progress in its Mining Memoranda section:

C.Y. Kellogg ... says that the Great Northern mine, owned by Isaac Guker, is not being over estimated in richness ... [the vein] is almost a solid mass of gold, and ... is growing larger and richer with depth.... Mr. Guker refused an offer the other day of $3,000 for what gold was in sight.... two veins about 100 feet apart, [slope] together, so that at the point of contact there must be a deposit of gold which would put in the shade the contents of the Bank of England. And Isaac isn't stingy, either. He presents a gold nugget to everyone who visits the claim and don't work it on Sunday.²

Isaac "Ike" Guker was my maternal great-great-great-uncle, and his mines on Little Canyon Mountain in Grant County, Oregon, are among my favorite places.³ In compiling this account, I conducted primary research in newspapers and archives and used the records I found in Ike's old trunk, which was closed for fifty years and kept by his nephew J. George Sand (1900–2000), my great-grandfather. I also gathered family stories and local anecdotes and reconciled them with each other and additional documentation. While his story is much like others' who prospected gold in the West at the end of the nineteenth century — moving from mining camp to mining camp, always looking for the mother lode (or at least a better prospect), eating beans when times were lean, dining on steak after finding paydirt, and being as generous as his means allowed — Ike's distinction is that he was a success as a gold miner for nearly seventy years.

Isaac Guker, one of eastern Oregon's most successful gold miners, sits in front of his cabin near the head of Quartz Gulch on Little Canyon Mountain in about 1898.

Courtesy of the author

Like so many who sought riches in the gold fields, Ike Guker was an immigrant. He first saw the light of day on April 3, 1860, at Mössingen, Oberamt Rottenburg, Kreis Schwarzwald, Kingdom of Württemberg (the Black Forest region of Germany), the first of ten children born to Johannes and Anna (Streib) Gucker. The family immigrated to the United States in 1863 on the Bremen, landing at Baltimore. After living near relatives in Crawford County, Ohio, the Guckers took up a farm near Hartford City, Indiana, in 1876. During the 1880s, Ike borrowed money from his parents and headed for Dakota Territory. A gold rush to the Black Hills attracted many prospectors that decade, and Ike surely got a taste of the frontier in the mining boomtown of Deadwood. He evidently found work, because he sent his parents a letter and repaid his debt. The family did not hear of him again for more than forty years.

This photograph of Canyon City and Little Canyon Mountain, taken in about 1900, shows the Great Northern Mine at the crest of the ridge on the left edge. Remnants of placer mining on Canyon Creek are visible in the foreground.

Courtesy of the Grant County Historical Museum

After leaving the Dakotas and abandoning a homestead in Montana, he crossed the Rocky Mountains and passed thorough Butte, Helena, and Anaconda, where mining had been the center of business since the 1860s. He and a partner located a silver mine in the Bitterroot Mountains, likely near Superior or De Borgia in Mineral County. When the weather turned cold, they left the mountains to winter in Missoula. Before spring, his partner contracted pneumonia and died. When Ike returned to the mine, he found that an avalanche had closed the portal and scattered his stockpiled ore down the mountain. Without means or property, he struck out again.⁴

During the next decade, Ike worked a circuit of western mining camps. It was common for a miner to work his way from Colorado to California or from Arizona to Canada as he learned about better prospects or heard rumors of a new strike.⁵ In this manner, Ike found his way to eastern Oregon. In 1906, he talked with Charles Leibenstein of the Blue Mountain American:

There have been so many versions of the Great Northern and my connection with it that I believe for the benefit of the future history of the district I had better give it to you correctly.... For some five years previous to entering the District I worked in different camps in Montana, Idaho, Colorado and California and it seemed no matter where I might be during the summer, I would meet an old-timer named McKay. He had prospected throughout the district in the early years, and every time we would meet he advised me to "try your luck" on Canyon Mountain. Finally, in 1895, I met him in a British Columbia camp and after he again brought up the matter, I decided to follow his advice. In the spring of 1896, I headed this way.⁶

MINING TERMS

GIANTS are huge water cannons that were used to wash away the overburden and send muddy placer ore down a ditch and through long sluice boxes.

GRUBSTAKING is a partnership in which one party furnishes capital and supplies — grub (food) and tools — and another party prospects and works a mine; any gold recovered is divided between them.

HARD ROCK (ALSO CALLED QUARTZ OR LODE) deposits are found in solid rock and are typically mined from surface pits, tunnels, and vertical shafts. The ore is then milled and the metals are mechanically or chemically separated from the crushed rock.

PLACER GOLD has eroded, is generally concentrated in stream channels, and is usually recovered by washing free gold from gravels using a gold pan, rocker, sluice box, hydraulic cannon, trommel, or dredge.

Canyon Creek flows south from its source in the Strawberry Range through a narrow canyon and, passes through Canyon City, and joins the John Day River at John Day. Prospectors discovered gold on Canyon Creek in June 1862, and a city soon swelled in the narrow canyon. Other mining camps grew at Marysville and Prairie Diggings a few miles to the east. Gold mining was the primary industry in Grant County for many years and was second in statewide production, behind Baker County.⁷ In 1900, geologist Waldemar Lindgren estimated that $16 million in gold had been extracted from Canyon Creek — roughly 800,000 ounces, worth $480 million today.⁸ By the 1890s, however, the easy placer gold was playing out.

Placer mines are typically the first to flourish in developing mining districts. Lode and quartz claims, often called hard rock mines, are more labor- and capital-intensive and take longer to develop than placer mines. There was little lode mining in the Canyon Mountains, and that is where Ike saw an opportunity. Recognizing that the rich placer deposits near Canyon City must have washed from initial sources, he began prospecting for the mother lode. Ike surveyed local operations, studying the characteristics of placer gold to determine how far and from what direction it may have washed. He explored the canyon south of town and prospected along Little Pine Creek to the east, which had been placer mined in the 1860s and 1870s and then worked by Chinese miners who were prohibited from owning claims.⁹

Ike soon devoted his attention to the steep north face of Little Canyon Mountain. Starting along its base, he followed the best traces in his samples as he moved up the mountainside — almost smelling the gold, he later claimed. In September 1896, on the crest of a ridge that he thought the most likely source of the extensive placer gold below, he dug a twenty-five foot discovery shaft. He named the mine the Great Northern, one of the first quartz claims in the area.¹⁰

Ike built a log cabin near the saddle between Little Canyon and Big Canyon mountains, at about five thousand feet elevation. He made a living by "high grading" — finding high-grade gold near the surface — and sometimes took other jobs on the side, including blacksmithing. Ike extracted $300 or $400 in gold from the Great Northern the first year. His efforts yielded nearly $1,400 in 1897, and he reinvested all of his resources to develop the mine.¹¹

According to local legend, one day Ike had trouble maneuvering a wheelbarrow around a boulder and decided to blast the rock. Fetching a half-stick of dynamite, he swung his pick to make a home for the powder beneath the boulder. When he looked at the pick's tip, it was golden. Ike told the story this way:

Finally, in January 1898, I got the tunnel to the point beneath the rich ore opened on the surface.... A few more feet of work brought me into the "glory hole" of which so much has been written and I tell you it was a pretty sight. The first ore run from $50,000 to $74,000 per ton, and a few more feet brought me into ore that run as high as $200,000 per ton, it being almost solid gold. You couldn't mine it with a pick and drill, and so I used an old pocket knife (the same one I now carry) . . . and began cutting down pieces of gold running from $20 to $1,000 in value. There was too much excitement to keep an exact record of what I did take out of the treasure chamber. I gave away at least $5,000 in specimens.¹²

Ike recovered between 2,000 and 3,500 ounces of gold, which today would be worth between $1.2 and $2.1 million as bullion and far more as specimens.¹³ The mining camp of Mountainview — or Gukorville, as it came to be known — sprang up below the Great Northern as excited prospectors started searching for other untapped lode deposits. Baker City's Morning Democrat declared Ike's strike was the beginning of the area's quartz-mining era:

The fabulous strike of Ike Guker in his Great Northern has awakened the people to the fact that the gold in their placer deposits did not fall from the heavens, and has started quartz mining in so wholesome a fashion that the Great Northern may see some competitors before the close of the century.¹⁴

By April 1898, the strike was playing out. Ike discovered that the rich seam ran for ninety feet but faulted abruptly on either end, "as if cut off by a knife."¹⁵ The rest of the vein has never been discovered. Because the find was unearthed at the top of a ridge, family members and prospectors who are intimate with local geology speculate that it probably had faulted down and the rest of the rich ore had eroded away in ancient times.

Gold from the Great Northern runs about 98 percent pure, with the major impurities being silver and platinum.¹⁶ Ike's wire gold, meshed nuggets (resembling coarse steel wool), and rare crystalline gold were among the finest in the world. The mine became famous as Ike showed specimens at the 1898 International Mining Congress in Salt Lake City, Utah, and at the Trans–Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, where he won a bronze medal. In 1901, Ike won a bronze medal at the Pan–American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, for a ten-pound specimen of "quartz on which delicate filigree design has been outlined in gold."¹⁷

LOCAL NEWSPAPERS FOLLOWED IKE'S PROGRESS AT THE GREAT NORTHERN

Sumpter News, March 19, 1898 — The Great Northern mine, Ike Guker's bank, still leads. Wednesday of last week broke their record, $1,500 being washed out. A tunnel is being driven in the ledge and a windlass erected to hoist the ore to the surface, where it is washed with melted snow water. The tunnel is 30-feet and already several rich seams of quartz have been cut.... Several other promising prospects are showing up as well, considerable tunneling and development work being in progress.

Morning Democrat, May 20, 1898 — "Ike" Guker, the discoverer of the celebrated "Great Northern" mine is a miner of considerable experience, having gained it in Colorado, Idaho and Oregon. March 28th, 1896, he began in this county, and just six months later he discovered his present property, which bids fair to make him famous.... The gold is mostly what miners call wire gold, but lately Mr. Guker has found nuggets or flat chunks of gold ... A cross-cut is being run to tap the ledge at a depth of sixty-five feet below the surface, when, if this "pocket," or rich seam is encountered, the excitement incident thereunto will rival that of the Klondike. Then will the great mineral resources of this region be properly developed and the hidden veins of quartz be made to yield their stores and add to the general wealth. This is the ideal future of Grant County.

One specimen Ike displayed was native gold in calcite, a highly unusual combination.¹⁸ One story describes how the judges, refusing to believe that gold ever naturally occurred in calcite, declared that Ike's sample must have been fabricated and excluded it from competition. Ike challenged one of the judges to come to Oregon and see it for himself. Between August and December 1900, Waldemar Lindgren visited the Great Northern and included this description of Ike's mine in his 1901 report on the Blue Mountains:

The Great Northern mine is located 2 miles southeast of Canyon [City], on a steep slope 1,540 feet above the town, at an elevation of 4,700 feet. A very fine view of John Day Valley is obtained from this point. This deposit was discovered in 1898 by Ike Guker.... The developments aggregate 2,000 feet of drifts and crosscuts. A surface pit, about 50 feet by 50 and perhaps 20 feet deep, shows decomposed rock cut by seams unusually dipping 30° to 40° east or west. The bonanza mentioned above was extracted from one of these seams. From a tunnel level 50 feet below, extensive drifting has been done in an attempt to follow these seams.... Some of the seams in the tunnel above the vein carry wire gold, with a tendency to crystallization, enclosed in calcite.¹⁹

After Lindgren's statement was published, an entry of "wire gold and native gold in calcite" earned Ike a silver medal at the 1902 South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition in Charleston.²⁰

Ike Guker stands with a pick in his hands at the lower end of the open cut of the Great Northern Mine in the Spring of 1898. He is driving the tunnel that led to the mine's "glory hole." The windless erected on a platform (center) was used to hoist muck and ore in a bucket.

Courtesy of the Grant County Historical Museum

With his new wealth, Ike quickly expanded his enterprise by purchasing mining claims and grubstaking other prospectors. Between March and April 1898, he bought a dozen mines, including two hundred acres of placer claims adjacent to the Great Northern, which had ditches, pipes, and giants. In July 1898, Ike joined with investors Frank Harris, W.H. Irvine, W.W. Chisholm, Jay T. Harris, and Max E. Smith — who he had met at the International Mining Congress meeting in Salt Lake City — to incorporate the Great Northern Mining & Milling Co. The next day, Isaac Guker sold a one-fifth interest in the Great Northern Mine to his new partners for $1. They immediately sold that interest for $10,000 to the corporation they had just organized.²¹

The Great Northern soon had its own assay office, blacksmith shop, powder house, and a twenty-man bunkhouse. By April 1899, ten men were working full time.²² J.H. Beasley, acting as an agent for the company, located the Great Northern Millsite on Little Pine Creek about a half-mile from the mine.²³ The company erected a stamp mill and a steam-driven cable tram to carry suspended ore buckets down the ridge to the mill — a more convenient and safer transport than riding the brakes on a wagon load of rocks. Ike paid $5,000 to build a grade ore road to the mine and improved Marysville Road all the way to Canyon City. The Great Northern Mining & Milling Co. was capitalized at $1 million, and in December 1900 it received a patent from the United States for the Great Northern Mine.²⁴

By June 1901, the mine's "400-foot tunnel" and "110-foot air shaft" reached a hundred feet below the previous workings to gain a better survey of the faults and vein system.²⁵ While the company continued to recover merchantable ore from the mountain, workers recovered no gold that rivaled Ike's initial strike. By 1902, Ike and his partners were at an impasse. Ike stopped production at the mine, and his Utah partners cut off operating capital. At about the same time, the ore mill burned down. Rumors flew about stolen gold and scuttled prospects that were blasted shut. A few years later, Ike described the ordeal:

The richness of the exhibit attracted the attention of some Salt Lake capitalists and they asked me to set a price on the mine but I did not wish to dispose of it. Finally after much persuasion I consented to take a good cash sum and half the stock of a $1,000,000 company for a half interest. That was the beginning of Great Northern's troubles. We can't agree. They expect me to turn out millions for dividends when another "glory hole" like that one might not be found during our life time.... It would take time and lots of money to drive a long tunnel to open the vein system, which has an excellent showing on the surface but they won't do it and naturally nobody else is going to spend a big sum to develop the mine for their benefit. I suppose it will be idle for many years to come.²⁶

Ike continued prospecting. He developed at least forty different mines between 1899 and 1920, owned the mineral rights on more than twelve hundred acres, and had dozens of men working for him. He staked, bought, and entered into partnerships on lode and placer mines around Little Canyon Mountain, on Dixie Creek near Prairie City, along the Middle Fork near Susanville and Galena, and in the North Fork of the John Day River basin.

In August 1901, Ike Guker and his partner R.B. Clayton sold three of their claims on Dixie Creek to Zoeth Houser of the Standard Mining Co. for $3,500.²⁷ Within two years, numerous other mines were being developed near Ike's claims. In addition to gold, deposits of silver, antimony, nickel, copper, and cobalt were being exploited. On August 9, 1904, Ike located the Oro Grande Mine and built a frame cabin there at the base of Little Canyon Mountain, where he would live for the rest of his life.²⁸

Ike continued to be plagued by problems with the Great Northern Mining & Milling Co., which had borrowed $3,000 from the Utah Savings & Trust Co. using the Great Northern mine as collateral. By February 1905, the delinquent note was sold to Benner X. Smith of Salt Lake City, who filed suit in the Oregon Circuit Court of Grant County. In August 1905, the judge ordered the sale of the mine and millsite to satisfy the debt.²⁹ Notices were printed in the Blue Mountain Eagle and hung on the Elkhorn Hotel in Canyon City, and Sheriff John W. Ambrose executed the auction on the courthouse steps that October. With a high bid of $1,000, Smith became the new owner of the Great Northern. The Great Northern Mining & Milling Co. was dissolved. Smith owned the property until July 1909, when he and his wife sold the mine and millsite to the Utah Savings & Trust Co. for $2.³⁰

On March 21, 1913, the Blue Mountain Eagle reported: "another rich strike has been made ... where Ike Guker is employed." Ike had been working near the head of Quartz Gulch on Little Canyon Mountain with D.J. O'Shea. Miner Carl Hentz later gave this account:

The Irishman, unable to entertain a placid nature, soon convinced Ike that their mutual piece of property was not large enough to hold both of them. This fellow Shay was a tenderfoot and a blowhard. [Ike] figured he would give the fellow a lesson in mining. With Ike's face straight he told the Irishman to go work on some other property.³¹

The "other property" proved to be a profitable prospect. O'Shea quickly found a trace. The next pan was worth $205, and three feet of digging yielded $1,100. The two men sunk a shaft to follow the free gold, locating what prospectors call a "chimney" or "vent" of oxidized porphyry, and recovered an estimated $2,500.³²

In May 1915, Ike took on new partners from Salt Lake City and formed the Oro Grande Mining & Milling Co.³³ The new enterprise purchased several mining claims from Guker and Swan and bought the Great Northern Mine and Millsite from the Utah Savings & Trust Co. for $1,500. The new concern, capitalized at $20,000, failed to file its license fees by 1917.³⁴

During World War I, mineral exploration in Grant County expanded to include chrome — a necessity for ball bearings — stainless steel, and other strategic applications. Ike briefly joined the effort to exploit the deposits in Canyon Mountain.

Ike Guker, Canyon Mountain's veteran prospector, has been working in chrome all summer. Mining chrome does not sit very well with a man who has mined gold for as long as Mr. Guker and he is anxious to get back to gold mining. He will devote the winter to prospecting the big bull quartz ledge that cuts the mountain and which many believe to be the mother of all the rich and extensive placer ground below.³⁵

Ike was sixty-five years old in the spring of 1925 when the Blue Mountain Eagle reported that he was

... doing a little court work this week. He was drawn on the grand jury and for the week had to lay down his pick and pan. During the last few months he has single-handed and alone sunk a shaft 40 feet. He has a ten-quart bucket which he fills with muck, climbs the ladder and draws it up with a windlass and then down and repeats the operation. But "she's panning good," says Ike, "and I will tap the vein where she freezes solid with yellow metal." And Ike Guker knows for he has made a living on Canyon Mountain for 30 years and took out one bunch of high grade with $50,000 in it. "And there are more in the mountain," says Ike.³⁶

Ike Guker (center) takes a break from pushing his ore car at the Golden West Mine on Little Canyon Mountain to visit with John Eusey (left) and Dan Gucker in 1935.

Courtesy of the author

In 1938, Ike decided to clear up the title to the Great Northern and brought a suit against the stockholders of the Oro Grand Mining Co. Attorney Roy Kilpatrick argued that Ike had been "in actual, open, exclusive, notorious, visible, hostile, adverse continuous and uninterrupted possession" of the property for more than twenty years. He had paid all property taxes, constructed buildings, maintained a home, operated the mine, removed and sold minerals, cut a portion of the timber and, "at no time, did any of the defendants receive any rents or profits, or retain any control over the property." Grant County Sheriff I.B. Hazeltine exercised due diligence to deliver notices, but the defendants did not respond, and the judge found them in default. On January 7, 1939, he found that Isaac Guker owned the Great Northern Mine in fee simple.³⁷ It had been forty years since he gave up sole ownership of the property that made him famous.

The gold that Guker mined won a bronze medal (left) at the Trans–Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1898 , and a silver medal (right) at the West Indian Exposition in Charleston, North Carolina, in 1902.

Courtesy of the author

OVER THE DECADES, MINERS congregated in Ike's cabin on the Oro Grande to discuss work, solicit advice, and tell stories. In 1939, Carl Hentz remembered:

My home is on part of the location grounds of Fizzle No. 13, a mine located near the foot of Little Canyon Mountain ... about a mile from a group of shacks the miners call Gukorville. The name comes from the fellow that lives in the largest house, Ike Gukor. Ike is Mayor of Gukorville, and Dean of the Mountain. He is as much a part of the diggings in that part as the ore we muck out.
In the evenings we grubbers, pocket hunters, hard-rockers, and placer miners hunch around the stove in Ike's house and do the best part of our mining. Say, we have panned out more millions in gold than there is in the whole durn mountain, while sitting around that stove....
One day my friend Ike dynamited a tunnel he was working. For months he had been working this property but the gold was not there. In sheer disgust Ike loaded the tunnel with dynamite and watched her boom! Boom she did, too. You know Ike always leaves his ground in good shape. After blowing her sky-high he decided to clean up. While wheeling some dirt in a wheelbarrow from what was left of the tunnel to the dumping ground, he noticed a piece of gold. Ike grabbed a shovel fill of dirt and panned her. The first panning showed five dollars. The wheelbarrow load contained $300. Ike made a good cleanup on that job. His life has been filled with many similar experiences.³⁸

After over forty years, Ike was reunited with his family. In 1934, Mary Grove, a minister in John Day, saw Ike's name in the newspaper. She knew his brother and sister in Ohio and dispatched letters to them. Daniel Gucker, then in Washington State, drove to Canyon City to find his brother. Many other relatives visited over the decades, including Ike's sister Rose (Guker) Sand, who was my great-great-grandmother. My family lived in Ike's cabin at the base of Little Canyon Mountain through the mid 1980s, and I spent my childhood summers there.

During the 1930s, gold miners saw their industry dramatically change. In April 1933, to prevent gold-hoarding during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared it illegal to possess gold bullion. Small miners were required to ship their weekly clean-up to Federal Reserve depositories, cutting into their profits. But there was good news as well. In January 1934, the gold content of the dollar was increased from $20.67 to $35 an ounce, an increase of nearly 70 percent.³⁹

Because of the increased value of gold and the soft labor market during the Depression, Oregon gold production increased to an average of 100,000 ounces a year between 1935 and 1940 — levels not seen since the 1860s. In 1941, Oregon had the highest lode-gold production in its history, yielding nearly 150,000 ounces worth $4.5 million at the time. But on October 8, 1942, President Roosevelt and the War Labor Board imposed Limitation Order L-208, prohibiting gold mining as a "non-essential" activity. It also became illegal to purchase or operate gold-mining equipment, and the federal government confiscated all equipment in transit. Some towns near the gold fields were literally abandoned, and local infrastructures fell into disrepair or were dismantled for scrap metal.

The federally regulated value of gold was kept artificially low for decades after World War II, and Oregon's mining industry never recovered. Despite L-208, Ike continued prospecting. In 1944, when he was eighty-four years old, the Blue Mountain Eagle announced that he was "still on the job and very active for his advanced years."⁴⁰

Ike Guker died at age eighty-seven on June 4, 1947 — the same weekend as '62 Days, the annual celebration of the discovery of gold at Canyon City. Like so many bachelor miners, Ike did not have enough money in his estate to cover his funeral expenses.

Examples of Ike's gold are on display at the Grant County Historical Museum in Canyon City and at the U.S. Bank in Baker City. Ike's generosity was well-known, and many people say they have gold samples from the Great Northern. Mabel Muldrick (1886–1975), a longtime schoolteacher in Canyon City, remembered visits to Ike's cabin when he would pass around a plate of gold ore and encourage people to take a souvenir. The whereabouts of his finest specimens of coarse wire, meshed nuggets, and crystalline gold are unknown.⁴¹

Isaac Guker's adventures made him a rich man, even without color in his pan. A man of good humor and a great storyteller, he acquired and lost fortunes and gave away a great deal of gold. For half a century, he mined in Grant County, Oregon, a place where he was at home in the heart of the mountain.

Notes

^1. The journals of Effie (Dustin) Brandt (1876–1943) are in the possession of Edie Komning, her great-granddaughter.

^2. Sumpter (Oregon) News, March 12, 1898.

^3. Isaac Guker's sister Rose (Gucker) Sand (1871–1945) was my great-great-grandmother. She married John Sand, and they were the parents of J. George Sand (1900–2000), who was my great-grandfather and a source of much family lore. J. George Sand married Lola Eusy and their daughter Rosella (Sand) Houpt Spahn currently owns the Great Northern Mine. Ike spelled his name without a "c," unlike the rest of the family, who spelled it "Gucker."

^4. From family stories told by Ike's nephew, J. George Sand of John Day, Oregon. See also J. George Sand, "Ike Guker, the Last Sourdough" in Pioneer Life in Eastern Oregon (John Day, Ore.: Bob Watson, 1980).

^5. See Rodman W. Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1880, rev. Elliott West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001); Idem., The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition, 1859–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); Charles Howard Shinn, Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); and Duane A. Smith, Rocky Mountain Mining Camps (Niwot: University of Colorado, 1992).

^6. Blue Mountain American (Sumpter, Oregon), February 17, 1906. Attempts to identify McKay were not successful. A wealth of information on mining in eastern Oregon can be found in the mining memoranda (typically, weekly reports on each mining district in the region) printed in newspapers in Sumpter, Baker City, and elsewhere, which are well-indexed in the "Hendryx File," Baker County Library, Baker, Oregon. The file was compiled by longtime newspaper man and mining entrepreneur, H.E. "Ed" Hendryx (1875–1954).

^7. See An Illustrated History of Baker, Grant, Malheur and Harney Counties (Chicago: Western Historical Publishing, 1902); Herman Oliver, Gold and Cattle Country (Portland, Ore.: Binfords & Mort, 1961); and Miles Potter, Oregon's Golden Years: Bonanza of the West (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1976).

^8. Waldemar Lindgren, "The Gold Belt of the Blue Mountains of Oregon," in U.S. Department of the Interior 22nd Annual Report to the U.S. Congress (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 30, 1901), 715–16.

^9. J. George Sand stories.

^10. The Great Northern was discovered on September 24, located on September 26, and recorded on October 2, 1896. Grant Co. Mining Claim Records, vol. G, 321, County Clerk, Grant County Courthouse, Canyon City, Oregon [hereafter Grant Co. Mining Claim Records].

^11. Blue Mountain American, February 17, 1906. Ike's yield — $1,400 — was nearly double the average annual wages for a mine laborer. See Edith Abbott, "The Wages of Unskilled Labor in the United States 1850–1900" in Journal of Political Economy 13:3 (June 1905): 321–67.

^12. Blue Mountain American, February 17, 1906.

^13. Estimates of the value of the gold Ike recovered range widely. In his 1901 report, for example, Waldemar Lindgren stated that Ike recovered $40,000 worth of gold, but a photograph caption at the Grant County Historical Museum in Canyon City declares that the gold was worth $72,000. See Potter, Oregon's Golden Years, 75.

^14. Baker City Morning Democrat, May 20, 1898, 24. This "Souvenir Edition" gives extensive descriptions of the gold fields, economy, and communities of eastern Oregon.

^15. J. George Sand stories.

^16. Smelter returns and U.S. Mint records of Ike Guker are in possession of Rosella Spahn, Isaac Guker's great-niece and the author's maternal grandmother.

^17. Baker City Herald, July 20, 1901. The 1898 and 1901 medals are in the possession of Rosella Spahn.

^18. In conversation, geologists and mineral collectors have told me that gold-bearing calcite is found in association with extinct geothermal seams and would have been extremely rare at the time. I have located only a few other places where native gold in calcite has been found: San Pedro mine, New Mexico; Hope's Nose, Torquay, Devon, U.K.; and Mt. McClure mine, Leinster, Western Australia. A single specimen was found in the tailings below the Yuma dredge at Chicken, Alaska, in 1973.

^19. Lindgren, Gold Belt, 715–16.

^20. The 1902 medal and a large framed certificate describing the entry are in the possession of Rosella Spahn.

^21. Articles of incorporation of the Great Northern Mining and Milling Co., July 27, 1898, Utah State Archives and Records, Salt Lake City. The warrantee deed from Guker to his partners is dated July 28, 1898, notarized by George Gatrell at Salt Lake City, and recorded on August 2, 1898. See Grant Co. Deed Book P, 28–29. The quit-claim deed from the partners to the corporation is dated July 28, 1898, notarized by Samuel C. Park at Salt Lake City, and recorded on August 2, 1898, Grant Co. Deed Book P, 30–31.

^22. Sumpter News, April 1, 1899.

^23. Recorded January 2, 1901, Grant Co. Mining records, vol. L, 41.

^24. Great Northern Mine Prospectus in the possession of Rosella Spahn. This undated document was probably printed between 1898 and 1901 for one of the world's fairs. The property was "Entered and paid for December 14, 1900 at the General Land Office in Burns, Harney Co., Oregon," signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, (proxy) by F.M. McKean, Secretary, vol. 360, 13–15, General Land Office No. 35597, Mineral Certificate No. 8. The certificate was recorded on April 18, 1903, Grant Co. Deed Book V, 99–100. The original patent is in the possession of Rosella Spahn.

^25. Long Creek Eagle, June 16, 1901.

^26. Blue Mountain American, February 17, 1906.

^27. Grant Co. Mining records, vol. C, 444. The Sumpter Miner, October 22, 1901, referred to the mines as the "Freemont Group" and indicated that the purchaser was the Standard Mining Co.

^28. Grant Co. Mining records, vol. O, 109.

^29. Benner X. Smith vs. Great Northern Mining and Milling Co., 1905, Oregon Circuit Court of Grant County, Book E, case no. 2156, Oregon State Archives, Salem.

^30. The sheriff deed to Smith was signed by Geo. D. Brierly, deputy sheriff, dated and recorded on June 9, 1906, Grant Co. Deed Book W, 279–80. The bargain and sale deed to the Utah Savings & Trust Co. is dated July 27, 1909, notarized by G.L. Summers of Salt Lake City, Utah, recorded August 16, 1909, Grant Co. Deed Book 27, 226.

^31. Carl Hentz, interviewed by William E. Haight for the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, January 19, 1939, Portland, Oregon. Available at http://memory.loc.gov/cqi-bin/query by searching "Carl Hentz" (accessed November 24, 2006).

^32. See Blue Mountain Eagle, March and April issues, 1913.

^33. Articles of incorporation of the Oro Grand Mining and Milling Co. were signed May 27, 1915, Utah State Archives and Records, Salt Lake City. Partners included Douglas A. Swan, Frank D. Higginbotham, Frank E. Higginbotham (Jr.), F.H. Say, Harry Leonard, and Harry Shepherd.

^34. Dated August 5, 1915, notarized by William Vorkink of Salt Lake City, and recorded on August 20, 1915. Grant Co. Deed Book 31, 176, instrument #17449. Stock certificate of the Oro Grand Mining and Milling Co. issued to Isaac Guker, in possession of Rosella Spahn.

^35. Blue Mountain Eagle, September 14, 1917.

^36. Blue Mountain Eagle, May 15, 1925.

^37. The defendants were Frank D. Higgenbotham, Frank E. Higgenbotham Jr., Douglas A. Swan, A.D. Swan, L.G. Burton, and unknown heirs of L.G. Burton. Records of the Circuit Court for the State of Oregon, County of Grant, case no. 6572-JR13.

^38. Hentz interview.

^39. See Lord William Rees-Mogg, ed., Case for Gold (London : Pickering & Chatto, 2002), and Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman, Case for Gold: A Minority Report of the United States Gold Commission (Washington, D.C. : Cato Institute, 1982).

^40. Blue Mountain Eagle, February 14, 1944.

^41. Stories of J. George Sand and Rosella Spahn.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.