Whiskey Run, Oregon gold cache

[Tuberale]

I can't find any references to this cache on TNet so am starting this thread.

About 1851 Jean Baptiste and Joe Groulois found gold-laden black sands just above the high-water line at Whiskey Run, Oregon. They are said to have buried "four hundred pounds of gold dust", near the roots of a huge Western Redcedar tree, somewhere between Empire and Whiskey Run on the Southern Oregon coast. The cache was said to be 2 mule loads of flour gold taken out of where the Eagle and Pioneer mines took out millions of dollars worth of gold dust.

Source of this information was an article in Gold! Annual, 1969 by Francis E. Sell, entitled "The Golden Sands of Whiskey Run." Ruby El Hult also included the information in "Lost Mines and Treasures of the Pacific Northwest."

Western Redcedar is an extremely long-lived tree. Based on growth-rings, a 1600 years old Western Redcedar stump which survived several major forest fires, can be walked-through at a rest area south of Bremerton, Washington. Like Coastal Redwood (Sequoia sempirvirens), Western Redcedar (Thuja plicata) could reasonably be expected to survive for centuries.

BTW, the site of Whiskey Run is also noted for alluvial platinum deposits, a rarity in the United States. A quart jar containing a quantity of platinum, which the early miners cursed because it was heavier than the gold they were trying to recover, was taken to Portland. Later this jar of platinum was sold for $2,350, but contained several ounces of platinum.

Nor is platinum restricted to just the beach sands. In 1976 with Robert Fox I found a small platinum nugget near Powers, Oregon, about the size of a head of a pin.

 

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[Cynangyl]

Very interesting.....also interesting you were with Robert Fox as I have a cousin with that name. I am sure there are plenty of them tho. I really love reading the Oregon tales....just makes it fun having them be in the same state I guess.

 

[Jeffro]

There are three separate sites for Whiskey Run, as I'm sure you have found out by now. The likelihood of the Groulois brothers carrying that much gold out as they sold their claims is unlikely. I have heard many different variations of this story over the years, all have inconsistencies which are deal breakers for me. Toss it into the stack of "legends".....

 

[Tuberale]

There are three separate sites for Whiskey Run, as I'm sure you have found out by now. The likelihood of the Groulois brothers carrying that much gold out as they sold their claims is unlikely. I have heard many different variations of this story over the years, all have inconsistencies which are deal breakers for me. Toss it into the stack of "legends".....

They did not sell their claim, Jeffro. They were booted off. They left their claim to get supplies from Eureka. While in Eureka, one of the brothers divulged the general location of their claim to a woman of questionable integrity. By the time the brothers returned to the site of their claim, it had already been filed on by "whites", who laughed when they said they had been mining there first.

Previously the Groulois had worked for Hudson Bay Company in Astoria.

While there may be three different sites for Whiskey Run, the original site was located on the sites of the Eagle and Pioneer mines. Should be simple enough to find if you've any mining experience in Oregon.

You state you found "inconsistencies" in the story, but don't give any data on them. Since you didn't know the original Groulois workings included parts of both the Eagle and Pioneer mines, perhaps you needed to go further. However, I agree that many of the "stories" written about this over the years were, at best, worthless and "legendary"... That's why it's important to stick with fact and citations. Earlier citations may be more reliable, since the story probably hadn't been re-told as often.