A6 The SpokeSman • TueSday, may 10, 2022
OFFBEAT OREGON HISTORY
Forgotten gold still likely buried in forest
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
offbeat oregon
Imagine you’re a gold pros-
pector from the Willamette
Valley, on your way to the Cal-
ifornia gold fields in the first
year of the 1848 gold rush.
You’re a little late to the party,
and you’ve chosen to try to reach
the gold fields in a somewhat
unusual way: By going over the
Coast Range to the beach, and
traveling south along the coast.
As you make your way
southward by the great ocean,
you reach a broad expanse of
black sand. And when the sun
hits it just right, you can see it’s
actually glittering … with tiny
flakes and grains of gold.
You’re all alone on the beach.
There aren’t even any other
footprints. Apparently nobody
else was crazy enough to try to
travel to the gold fields via Coos
Bay. Everyone else in the area,
such as there are, has decamped
inland to the gold fields.
It’s just you, on the unin-
habited edge of a continent,
crunching a trillion dollars’
worth of gold under your feet.
Such was the situation in
which the Grouleaux brothers,
Charles and Peter, found them-
selves in in the spring of 1849,
near the mouth of the Coquille
River in what today is Douglas
County.
(By the way, the Grou-
leaux brothers are called “John
and Peter Groslius” in some
sources.)
Naturally, the brothers aban-
doned all ideas of going to Cali-
fornia now. They settled in and
got busy separating the yellow
gold from the black sand —
pounds and pounds of it.
They had brought plenty of
provisions with them for the
journey, and the hunting was
good; so they were able to live all
summer without leaving their
diggings. As their flour sacks
were emptied of food, they were
promptly filled with “flour gold”
from the beach. And at the end
of the summer, they returned
home to the Willamette Valley,
postcard
An aerial photo of the town of Gold Beach, at the mouth of the Rogue River, probably made sometime
before the Second World War. The Rogue is the source of the gold-bearing black sands on the nearby
beaches, after which the town was named.
their pack animals creaking un-
der the weight of hundreds of
pounds of pure gold. They were
now both rich men.
Lots of miners had come
back from California with gold,
so the brothers’ sudden wealth
didn’t attract much attention.
Nor did their calculated vague-
ness when telling friends and
neighbors where they’d spent
their summer arouse any sus-
picions. All miners were like
that. Nobody wanted to tell a
bunch of potential claim jump-
ers where they had their stakes
planted. Possession was nine
tenths of the law, and anyway
plenty of people in 1849 were
perfectly willing to commit
a secret murder on a lonely
stretch of trail to seize control of
a lucrative claim.
So when the next spring
came, the brothers were easily
able to slip away from any pry-
ing eyes and hurry back to the
beach to spend another season
making themselves richer.
And the same thing hap-
pened again the next year. In
fact, it wasn’t until 1853 that
someone got wise and figured
out where the brothers were
going.
Whoever it was that figured
that out was much less discreet
than the Grouleaux brothers
had been. The word was out
almost at once, and a colossal
gold rush ensued as miners
flocked to the beaches.
“Soon a thousand men
milled about on the black
sands, staking claims for miles
up and down the beach,” Ruby
El Hult writes in her book.
“Cabins, stores, saloons and
gambling houses were hastily
erected, becoming the boom
town of Randolph. Whiskey
flowed so freely that the stream
along which the best diggings
were located became known as
Whiskey Run.”
Very quickly after that, the
Grouleaux brothers sold their
claims to two of the newcom-
ers, the McNamara brothers.
They cheerfully remarked that
they had made enough money
off the beach in their first four
undisturbed years to last a life-
time.
(They didn’t mention any fig-
ures, but the McNamara broth-
ers pulled $80,000 worth out
the first year after they bought
the claims, and that was after
the Grouleaux boys had spent
five years skimming the cream.)
The brothers packed their an-
imals up and set out northward
on the Randolph Trail, a beaten
path along the Coast Range
foothills to Coos Bay that fol-
lowed roughly the same route as
Seven Devils Road today.
But they had $40,000 worth
of gold in their saddlebags, and
the two of them were almost
celebrities in Randolph. Both of
them were very nervous about
the possibility that they might
be robbed on the trail. Highway
robbery was common there,
since the bad guys knew that
successful miners had to use
the trail to carry their gold out.
So the boys scouted a good
spot that they thought they
could find again, and cached
the gold in two gunpowder
cans under a cedar stump.
Then they continued on
their way.
Well, you probably have al-
ready guessed what happened
next. In fine buried-treasure
style, they lost track of where
they stashed the two cans. Nei-
ther of them returned for many
years — they already had five
years’ worth on which to live,
and it just didn’t seem worth
the trouble.
It wasn’t until 20 years later,
in 1873, that Peter, by then the
only surviving brother (Charles
had died in England), came
back to the Coquille to “with-
draw” his gold.
Peter found the entire land-
scape so utterly changed that
he had no idea where to even
start looking for the distinctive
cedar-tree stump under which
he’d stashed the cans. There
were places where the Ran-
dolph Trail had changed com-
pletely, with old sections over-
grown and barely discernible;
there were other parts that had
been burned over by a forest
fire, which had destroyed all
the snags, stumps, and other
dry wood in its path.
Peter got some friends to
help him, promising to split the
gold with them, but their efforts
were in vain. Other members
of the Randolph community
joined in as well. But, nobody
found the gold, and after a de-
cade or so, the whole thing sim-
mered down into one of those
little bits of local legend.
Fifty more years went by.
Then, in 1922, Peter Grou-
leaux’s granddaughter, Lillie
Tully, came to town. She had a
try for the gold as well, enlist-
ing the help of a local timber
cruiser. But after a year or so
of hunting, they too were dis-
appointed.
A few years later, in 1931, a
rumor started circulating — a
very credible one, later given
added weight by an article in
the Portland Oregonian news-
paper — that the treasure
had been found. According
to the rumor, a young couple
out prospecting had spotted a
rusty gun barrel sticking out
from under an old stump and
investigated. They’d found two
old gunpowder cans contain-
ing 150 pounds of fine gold.
After that, the two had left
the area as quickly as possi-
ble, because the gold had been
on private land and they were
afraid if anyone knew where
they’d gotten it, the landowner
and possibly Lillie Tully would
try to claim it.
So, was this rumor true?
Maybe. The amount of gold
found doesn’t quite line up —
150 pounds of gold at 1853
prices was worth $51,000, not
$40,000. But even if the rumor
was true, it likely wasn’t the
same gold. Painted metal cans
of the type gunpowder was
sold in don’t last 75 years in
the Coast Range; the contain-
ers would have rusted to noth-
ing in just a few decades.
In any case, it remains pos-
sible, if not particularly likely,
that the contents of the origi-
nal powder cans are still there,
buried under the forest duff in
a random spot in the middle
of the forest — a cache of fine
flour gold that would be worth
$3.7 million today.
But rather than tromping
through the forest looking for
this bonanza, modern-day
gold miners would probably
be better advised to head for
the beach from which it origi-
nally came. The black sands of
Oregon’s beaches are still full
of fine flour gold, especially in
places that are far away from
streams and creeks that sup-
ply the water needed to pan
or sluice them. It’s hard work,
and not very remunerative;
but you can still get gold out of
black-sand layers all along the
South Coast today, especially
in the more southerly, out-of-
the-way beaches near Ophir,
Pistol River, Port Orford, and
— of course — Gold Beach.
█
Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon
State University and writes about odd
tidbits of Oregon history. His book,
Heroes and Rascals of Old Oregon, was
recently published by Ouragan House
Publishers. To contact him or suggest
a topic: finn@offbeatoregon.com or
541-357-2222.