In December 1851, two prospectors from California discovered gold on Jackson Creek, a small tributary of the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. The two, James Cluggage and James Poole, began operating placers in January 1852. Cluggage and Poole claimed the land around the site of the discovery under the Donation Land Law of 1850. The law granted 320 acres to every unmarried white male settler over the age of 18 who was a citizen or intended to become a citizen, with the patent issued after four consecutive years of occupancy in the territory. A married couple received twice the acreage of a single man, with half of the land belonging to the wife in her own right.
The town of Jacksonville lay in the southwestern corner of Cluggage’s Donation Land Claim, at the confluence of Jackson and Daisy Creeks, where miners were already erecting tents, shanties and the first rude buildings.
In the spring of 1853, when brothers James and Henry Wilson arrived in Jacksonville arrived to work the nearby diggings. At that time, Jacksonville had just been founded on the Rich Gulch strike two years before. But Rich Gulch had been pretty shallow, and by the time the Wilson boys arrived things were already petering out. James and Henry had no interest in toiling in the dirt all day for a few dollars. They decided to strike out into the wilderness and try to find another Rich Gulch.
Problem was, in 1853 the Rogue Indians considered trespassing on their lands an act of war. Prospecting was absolutely unsafe, and there had just been a party wiped out near Table Rock, north of town. James and Henry didn’t care, and they were able to assemble a small team of miners who felt the same way.
They soon ran into a war party, which, of course, promptly attacked. They fended it off, but one of the miners was killed. After that, the miners called a council and voted to head back to Jacksonville and wait for the war to end. Henry and James Wilson, though, decided to take their chances, alone. Once into the Siskiyous mountains the brothers stumbled across a narrow valley, walled in on both sides by steep and rugged cliffs, with a little creek running through it. The valley’s defensive potential was obvious, and it had some nice little meadowlands for the horses to graze on. The boys decided to let the animals rest a few days while they built a little log cabin there.
The next day while drinking from the little creek, Henry discovered that it was loaded with gold. Scooping up a handful of gravel, he found that it was literally peppered with nuggets. They wouldn’t need a gold pan to work these diggings, he realized – they could just wade in the creek and pick the nuggets out by hand.
Soon they had a huge pile of gold heaped up on the floor of their little cabin. As the leaves of the trees started to turn colors, signaling the approach of fall, the boys dug a large hole in the middle of their log-cabin floor, and lined it with close-fitting rocks. They wrapped up their gold in raw, untanned deerskins and basically filled up the vault with it. They covered the vault with a couple of large flat rocks so that it would be easier to probe for, pushed the dirt back over it, and started getting ready for the trip back to town. Soon they were on their way – Henry in front, James bringing up the rear, each leading two horses.
They didn’t get far. They weren’t even out of sight of the cabin when a volley of shots rang out, and Henry dropped in his tracks. The horses reared and a band of Shasta Indians burst into the clearing. James promptly shot one of them with his black-powder rifle, dropped it, and pulled his Colt Navy revolver. The Indians turned and scrambled back to cover. James took advantage of this to leap onto the one remaining unwounded horse and take off, past Henry’s still and obviously dead body, galloping for the mouth of the valley and for home.
By the time he finally stumbled into a settlement in northern California he was in a terrible state of health. He took a stagecoach to San Francisco for medical treatment, but nothing seemed to help. Sensing the end, he started writing letters to his cousin, Ted Harper of Chicago, telling him the whole story of the cabin and the Indians and the death of his brother. As soon as he got well, he wrote, he would be going back and getting his gold; but if he didn’t make it, he wanted Ted to know where it was. But he hadn’t quite gotten round to telling Ted exactly how to reach the cabin when, in the fall of 1859, death came for him.
Whether this lost treasure trove is still out there, or if it ever even existed in the first place, remains a mystery. But if your back-woods travels ever bring you to a pretty little secret valley in the Siskiyous, with grassy fields and forest and a little brook running through it, hemmed in all around by forbidding mountain cliffs … you might consider spending a few days poking around in the bottomlands, just in case.
