The Mount Vernon Dredge

By editor

Virginia City, Madison County, Montana

Alder Gulch, in the early 1860s, was not merely a creek; it was a river of gold that drew men like moths to a flame, only to find their pockets as heavy as their hopes. In its first five years, this narrow ribbon of gravel and water yielded between thirty and sixty million dollars in gold--figures that today would sound like fairy tales at a bankers’ convention. By 1874, the population swelled to about 35,000 people, a number that would make even the most seasoned town planners scratch their heads. But, as the saying goes, all good things run out, and the easy gold did too. The gulch remained gold-bearing, but the wild days of pick-and-shovel prospecting gave way to industrial methods that promised steadier, if less romantic, returns.

Enter the dredges. These hulking machines were the new kings of the gulch. At one time, five dredges worked the stream simultaneously, ranging in size from a No. 2 dredge to a No. 16 -- the largest dredge in the world at the time. Together, these mechanical behemoths removed between 150 and 200 million dollars in gold from the gravel beds, a sum that dwarfs the initial rush. It was a transformation of the landscape and the economy, turning a patchwork of miners into organized crews run by companies with capital and machinery.

The Mount Vernon Dredge, now on display here in Virginia City, is one of these relics of a more industrial age. It’s a No. 2 dredge, built in 1937 at a cost of $37,350 -- a tidy sum in the middle of the Great Depression, when most Americans were more concerned about losing their shirts than their gold claims. This particular dredge worked the Deadwood Gulch and the Crooked River in Idaho before being donated to this museum by Harold Lynch and Joe Gray in 1985. Its bucket line consists of 65 two-cubic-foot buckets, each scooping up gravel and debris from the creek bed. This dredge could dig 2,000 cubic yards per day, plunging down to depths of 20 feet, all powered by diesel-electric generators that replaced the old steam engines.

The process was straightforward in principle, though not necessarily in practice. The buckets would scoop up the gravel and dump it into a revolving screen known as a trommel. Here, the gravel was washed, separating the finer, gold-bearing material from the oversized rocks, which were dumped behind the dredge by a conveyor belt affectionately called a stacker. The gold-bearing gravel then flowed into riffled sluice boxes, where gravity and water did their work to catch the heavy gold particles. Next came the mercury trap, an unfortunate but standard part of gold recovery at the time, where mercury amalgamated with gold to facilitate collection. On cleanup day, the sluices were scrubbed, and the amalgam collected and sent to the smelter for refining.

One can imagine the scene: crews working long hours, the dredge churning through tons of gravel daily, the gold slowly emerging from the muddy slurry of rock and water. But as the economic historian James Hamilton noted in his 1941 study of Montana mining, “The dredges were not the romantic gold seekers of the first rush, but powerful tools wielded by those with money and machinery, turning the earth without the hope of sudden fortune, but with the certainty of steady production.”

Nearby, the Chilean Wheel -- sometimes called the Chi Mill -- offers a glimpse into the technology that came before the dredges and their electric generators. This device was a superior crusher capable of being powered by water or animal power, a crucial advantage in an era when electricity was scarce in remote mining areas. Its origin traces back to the threshing floors of the ancient Middle East, a curious inheritance for a machine that would find new life crushing ore in the American West. The Chilean Wheel was not the best invention in the world, but it had one important virtue: it could be cheaply erected almost anywhere and run on whatever power source was available.

The wheels on display were donated by Lester Stiles, whose family history is woven into the early days of Alder Gulch. Nicholas Carey, Lester’s grandfather, walked to Virginia City from Denver in 1863, part of the great wave of fortune seekers chasing gold across the West. His granddaughter, Mary Stiles, who donated the wheels, descended from a grandmother who arrived by wagon train in 1864. These wheels were found several miles up Browns Gulch and represent the kind of resourcefulness that defined early mining before industrial methods took over.

The story of the Mount Vernon Dredge and the Chilean Wheel is not just about machines and gold. It is about the shifting tides of fortune and technology, the transition from individual prospectors to corporate mining, and the relentless drive to extract wealth from the earth. It is also a story of people -- men and women who packed up their lives and hopes, who walked thousands of miles on foot or wagon, and who labored under the sun and snow for the chance at a better life.

As one early Montana newspaper put it in 1874, “The days of easy gold are gone, but the gulch still whispers promise to those who can listen with patience and capital.” Indeed, the Mount Vernon Dredge is a monument to that enduring promise -- the promise that even when the gold seems gone, the earth still yields to those who know how to dig.

See also

• The Mount Vernon Dredge at Virginia City, Madison County
• Gold in Alder Gulch at Virginia City, Madison County
• Madison County Pioneers at Virginia City, Madison County