by Gary Dielman

RESEARCH FILES

Discovering Gold in Baker County Library's Photograph Collection

HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHS CAN draw us into the past like Alice through the looking glass, but, like Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, we have to be curious and the photograph has to invite that curiosity. One such photograph archived at the Baker County Library in Baker City shows an emigrant family, its covered wagon, and its collection of animals as they passed through Baker City in 1884. When the trailers passed through Boise, Idaho, in October 1884, the Boise Democrat reported: "The wheelers were oxen, succeeded by the donkey mated also with an ox, which in turn was preceded by a horse led by a man. The oxen were no larger than the Burmese cow of traveling menageries. The jack was about the size of a Newfoundland dog. The horse was also diminutive and seemed to be a collection of equine bones articulated for the occasion." The article reported that the group was from Texas and headed for the Willamette Valley.

Let me draw you further into the photograph. The setting is the southwest corner of what is known today as Old Post Office Square at the intersection of Main and Auburn streets in downtown Baker City. In the far distance is the sagebrush-covered hill that forms the city's southwest skyline. A line of small, frame buildings forms the immediate backdrop. Signboards jutting out over the boardwalk advertise "Singer Sewing Machines" and "Sam Sing Washing & Ironing." Twenty-four local men and boys pose behind the main subjects of the photograph: two adults, four children, their wagon, and their diverse collection of animals. The photographer had everyone's frozen attention, with the exception of the horse, whose ears have a double image.

The emigrant family is as diverse as its wagon team. A thin, warmly dressed, possibly toothless elderly woman holds the horse's reins. Her expression is at the same time grim and sad. In contrast, front and center in the photograph is a young boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, striking a nonchalant one-legged pose with a hand resting on the donkey's rump. A slightly older boy, with his face obscured by a hat made for a bigger head, stands shyly by the wagon's rear wheel. Seated on the wagon is a bearded old man who holds a whip that appears to be made of willow branch and rawhide. Beside him sits a concerned-looking girl of about six, and behind them, standing in the bed of the wagon, is a younger, tousle-headed boy who looks intently at the camera from under his eyebrows. Presumably the four children are siblings, but are the adults the children's parents or their grandparents? If they are grandparents, where are the parents? I find myself drawn not only into the photograph but also into the lives of these strangers, and I want to learn more about this intriguing slice of time on the Oregon Trail. The Boise Democrat reported, "A liberal purse was made up for them by our citizens, and they moved on westward no doubt carrying with them a tolerable fair opinion of Boise City."

Martin Mason Hazeltine captured this image of a family as it passed through Baker City in 1884 with its covered wagon and diverse assortment of draft animals. Martin (1827–1903) and his younger brother George "Irving" Hazeltine (1836–1918) learned photography in New York City in 1852. A year later, they were operating a photography business in San Francisco. After making his reputation as a scenic photographer all over the West and Alaska, Martin established a photography studio in Baker City. In 1862, his brother joined the gold rush to what became Grant County, Oregon, where he mined as one of the first residents of Canyon City; he was later elected county judge of Grant County.

All photographs courtesy of Baker County Library

What you cannot see in the photograph is the photographer's studio, just off the right edge of the photograph, where one of the West's most famous early photographers, Martin Mason Hazeltine (1827–1903), had recently set up shop. Hazeltine wandered the West for several decades, taking photographs from California to Yellowstone Park to Alaska and throughout the Northwest, and finally settled in Baker City in 1884. He died in Baker City at age seventy-five after teaching his craft to his daughter Viola Hazeltine Parker, who operated a photography studio in Baker City with her husband Roland well into the 1900s.

Martin Hazeltine's photography studio, established in 1884, was located on the southwest corner of Main and Auburn streets in Baker City. The front (east) end of the building was used for sales; the middle portion with a large window and skylight on the north side was Hazeltine's portrait studio; and the rear of the building served as living quarters for Hazeltine and his wife Barbara. In this Hazeltine image from about 1900, his studio provides backdrop to William H. "Dollar Bill" Ellis's transfer wagon. The sign on the wagon reads: "W.H. Ellis Piano and Furniture Moving." Ellis (1873 to about 1960) earned the nickname "Dollar Bill" in the early 1900s, when he solicited funds to establish Baker City's first public library with the plea: "Anyone can afford a dollar bill."

Martin Hazeltine, photographer

Many of the Hazeltine and Parker photographs are represented in the Baker County Library's collection, along with 8,000 other photographs, most of which date from the late 1800s. The collection had its beginning in 1981, when Neva McCord donated about 2,000 photographs collected by her late father-in-law, O.H.P. McCord, a Baker City businessman. Ten years later, the collection grew by another 2,500 photographs, which were bequeathed to the library by Sumpter-area historian Brooks Hawley. Over the years, more than fifty other generous donors have added to the collection.

The greatest asset of the library's photograph collection is the visible face it puts on Baker County's early history. The county was established by the Oregon legislature in the fall of 1862, after the previous fall's discovery of gold in the area. Gold miners, merchants, and farmers flooded in during the summer of 1862, boosting the non-Indian population from zero to around five thousand, most of whom resided in a tent city called Auburn, which became the county seat in October 1862. Before the discovery of gold, what became Baker County — traversed from southeast to northwest by the Oregon Trail — was just a wilderness to be crossed on the way to a promised Eden in the Willamette Valley. Baker City was platted in 1864, and its residents wrested the county seat from Auburn in 1866. The collection's oldest photographs include a few rare ones taken in Baker City during its infancy and in Auburn, which rapidly lost population as the nearby placer mines played out.

Hazeltine's October 1884 covered wagon photograph coincides with a significant milestone in the history of Baker County. That fall, a railroad, following the route of the Oregon Trail, quickly supplanted covered wagons as the preferred mode of travel in the continuing cross-country migration. In August of that year, the rails of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company (OR&N Co.) reached Baker City, and in November, just a mile west of Huntington — a small town in the southeastern corner of Baker County, a few miles west of the famous Farewell Bend of the Snake River on the Oregon Trail — the final spike was driven, connecting the OR&N Co. rails coming from the northwest with the Oregon Short Line rails coming from the east. Thus, Baker County and Oregon were for the first time connected by rail all the way to the East Coast. With the advent of cross-country railway travel and shipping, Baker City rapidly developed into the biggest city between Salt Lake City and Portland.

Baker County Library's roots go back to 1900, when a group of wives of prominent professional and businessmen founded the Alpha Literary Club. Club founders, including Lulu Eppinger, Edith Flynn, Grace Goodwin, Ida Sage, Maude Palmer, and others, persuaded the city fathers to allow them to set up a library in city hall. In 1910, the city built a large stone library, which was largely funded by a $17,500 grant from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The library moved into a new home on the west bank of Powder River adjacent to Geiser-Pollman Park in 1970, and the Carnegie Library Building is undergoing remodeling as a cultural arts center today. In 1983, Baker County Library District was formed and has operated as a public entity with its own tax base under the direction of an elected board of directors since 1985.

The library's photograph collection contains thousands of fascinating images: 1,000 photographs of Baker City, mostly of six blocks of the Main Street business district; 750 photographs of Baker County's small towns and ghost towns; 1,300 photographs of about 120 different mines and gold dredges; plus thousands of photographs in subject matter areas such as Sumpter Valley Railway, people, nature, organizations, schools, logging, farming, and ranching. A dedicated group of volunteers has worked with the collection for over twenty-five years.

John W. Cowden took this photograph of Mammoth Mine on June 24, 1902. Located high in the Elkhorn Mountains six miles northwest of Sumpter, Mammoth Mine was one of the earliest large-scale hard rock mining operations in Eastern Oregon. Piles of cordwood in the foreground were used to power compressors that powered the heavy machinery. Wood-burning inside buildings constructed with wooden shingles made fire-prevention and fire-fighting important aspects of infrastructure protection. At the Mammoth's hoist plant, at left, ladders led to rooftop platforms at all levels of the structure. Pre-positioned on the platforms on the four roof peaks were nine large barrels containing water that workers could use to douse errant embers that might ignite the roof.

John W. Cowden, photographer

Perhaps the most important component of the library's collection is its images of local gold mines, dredges, and related activities. Especially valuable to researchers are the ten annotated photograph albums bequeathed to the library by Brooks Hawley. Many of the photographs show the three gold dredges that chewed up and spat out the bucolic surface of the Sumpter Valley of Hawley's youth, right up to the edge of his parents' ranch. Hawley hated those dredges for turning Sumpter Valley pasture land into long piles of rocks that snake back and forth across the valley floor. On the back of a photograph of the first Sumpter Valley dredge, he referred to it as "that dredge that tore up Sumpter Valley," and Hawley summed up his opinion of dredges on the gloss in another album: "There isn't much that can be said in their defense." Nevertheless, he diligently collected every dredge photograph he could lay his hands on, pasted them into albums, and wrote their history in the margins.

In 1941, gold dredge #3 floats in a pool of Powder River water at the edge of the Hawley ranch in Sumpter Valley. Dredge #3 was the last of three gold dredges that operated in the Sumpter area. A bucket-line pulled sediment into the main structure, where it went through sorting stages to filter out the gold. Unwanted material traveled along a conveyor belt out of a stacker at the opposite end of the dredge. Dredge #1 worked Powder River below Sumpter from 1913 to 1924; dredge #2 operated above Sumpter on Cracker Creek, a tributary of Powder River, from 1915 to 1923; and dredge #3, using much of the machinery from dredge #1, operated on Powder River below Sumpter from 1935 to 1954. Today, dredge #3 is a centerpiece of the Sumpter Valley Dredge State Heritage Area on the south edge of Sumpter. During the years of dredge operations, a thirty-mile stretch of Powder River — from Sumpter Valley to below Baker City — was so sediment-laden that fish could not live in it. Before dams were constructed on the Columbia, Snake, and Powder rivers, salmon migrated from the Pacific Ocean to spawn upstream of Sumpter. Today, stocked trout inhabit the waters of Powder River.

Over two miles of tailings snake back and forth across Sumpter Valley in this 1954 aerial photograph. The Hawley ranch is on the north side (above) of the dredge tailings. The dredges that created these rows of rock piles floated in a pool of water anchored in the back by a heavy spud, which was driven into the pond's bottom by its own weight and by bowlines anchored to the shore. When the dredge was ready to be moved, a winch operator lifted the spud and then pulled on the bowlines. Having lain undisturbed for over half a century, the tailings now support sparse growth of bushes and a few trees; still, the surface of the piles remains composed of large river rocks. The nascent flora and many small ponds lying between dredge piles provide excellent habitat for birds and water fowl.

Hawley's albums also contain hundreds of annotated photographs of hard rock (quartz) mines in Baker and Grant counties. Those images document the millions of dollars invested in gold mining ventures, mainly during the decades immediately after the coming of the railroad in 1884, which facilitated transport of the heavy machinery necessary to pump out water-filled tunnels, lift ore from deep in the earth, and crush it in huge stamp mills. A photograph of the Mammoth Mine — located high in the Elkhorn Mountains six miles northwest of Sumpter, Oregon, and one of the earliest large-scale hard rock mining operations in Eastern Oregon — illustrates the tremendous amount of necessary infrastructure. In the album margin, Hawley gives some history of the mine. "The Mammoth is the first quartz claim in the Sumpter district being staked out in 1866.... [A] 5 stamp mill was built at the Mammoth in 1879," he wrote, then added, "The trestle, center of picture, leading to [the] mill was still standing when I was there in 1960."

The Mammoth Mine was typical of mining operations in the Elkhorns that used gravity to move ore from the mine down the mountain slope to a processing mill below. The large structure at the left was the hoist plant, which sat over the mine shaft and contained heavy equipment and cables that lowered men sometimes a thousand feet or more into the mine and then lifted them and ore to the surface. The hoist plant was connected to the processing mill at lower right by a covered tramway. In winter, the tram cover kept snow off rails along which miners pushed loaded ore cars, which they dumped down the chute at the right end of the tram. The chute directed the ore into the upper part of a multi-level mill, where it was crushed and refined to varying degrees, depending on the sophistication of the milling operation. The refined ore either went to the mine's laboratory for melting into gold bars or, more often, was freighted by wagon to the nearest railroad for shipment to Tacoma, Washington, refinery four hundred miles away for final processing. On the opposite slope, at the right, were the mine superintendent's house, boarding house, and various outbuildings.

An on-going, four-year-old scanning project is making many of the library's photographs available to anyone in the world with access to the internet. Using archiving software, 2,250 select photographs may be viewed by visiting the library's website, www.bakerlib.org, and clicking on the "Historic Photos" button. The library provides the software, computer, and scanner, and volunteers do all the scanning and data input. Close to six thousand records of photographs have been created, and we anticipate that it will take another two to four years to digitally archive the rest of the collection. With new donated photographs coming in every year, however, there will be no end to the collection's growth and, therefore, scanning work for volunteers. Staff and volunteers also assist researchers and process their requests for copies of photographs. Oregon Public Broadcasting used photographs from the library's collection in its September 2007 documentary, "Oregon at War," and will use more in an upcoming documentary of the life of Baker City businessman and philanthropist Leo Adler. In the past several years, collection photographs have made up the majority of images used in four publications, and for most of the past decade, the Baker City Herald has been publishing local historical photographs weekly, most of which come from the library's collection.^*

From the 1870s to the 1930s, Baker City's Chinatown was located at the southeastern edge of the downtown business district, at the bottom right of this image from around 1898. The large building (1) with a flagpole, at the southeast corner of Chinatown on Auburn Street next to Powder River, contained a statue of a Chinese idol on the second floor and was called a "joss house." The block of Chinatown extending west (left) from the joss house to Resort Street was composed almost entirely of one-story wooden buildings. One block further west was Baker City's Main Street. The 1880 federal census recorded 120 Chinese in Baker City, including sixty-five miners, twelve prostitutes, six each of sawyers and washer men, five cooks, four gamblers, two physicians, and one minister. Today, none of the Chinese structures remains. Many other major structures documented in this photograph no longer exist, including: in Old Post Office Square (2) at the intersection of Main and Auburn streets, Spaulding and Vaughn's livery stable (3), later site of nine-story Hotel Baker; Baker City's first city hall (4); architect A.A. Houston's eight-sided house (5); a three-story brick brothel (7); Heilner Building on Main Street (8), which has lost its third story and distinctive cupola; Sagamore Hotel (9); Old Central School (10); a Presbyterian Church (11); and a Methodist Church (12). The brothel (6) is still standing.

detail; numbers added to original by the author

Besides the Archive Room, in which the photograph collection is securely stored, the library has two other rooms that cater to researchers. The Genealogy Room, with its many genealogical reference volumes, also contains microfilm of local newspapers dating back to 1870, plus microfilm and microfiche readers. The Oregon Room houses in one convenient location all of the library's books and reference works pertaining to local and Oregon history. All three rooms look out onto scenic Powder River and Geiser-Pollman Park.

When I venture up four-wheel-drive roads high into the Elkhorns in search of mine sites, I become aware of the value of photographs to the history of mining in Eastern Oregon. It is a rare mine site that offers even a hint of the huge structures that once stood there. When the mine played out or the market made the operation no longer profitable, the machinery was removed and the timber salvaged for other uses. Count yourself lucky if you can find the mine entrance, even when the tailings piles show you right where to look. The same value can be found in the library's other photographs of people, buildings, and even whole towns that no longer exist except in precious old images of the way things were.

Notes

^*�Isaac Hiatt, Thirty-One Years in Baker City, ed. Eloise Dielman, 3d ed. (Baker City: Baker County Historical Society, 1997); Eloise Dielman, ed., Baker County: Links to the Past (Baker City: Baker County Historical Society, 2001); Eloise Dielman, ed., Historic Baker City, Oregon "Images of America" series (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing Company, 2002); and Howard Brooks, A Pictorial History of Gold Mining in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon (Baker City: Baker County Historical Society, 2007).

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