A glimpse of life a rowdy gold-mining ghost town

When mayors of incorporated cities start talking about growth, it’s hard to beat the story of Steve Smith, who until a few years ago was mayor of the historic mining town of Granite, Oregon.

When I spoke to him in 2009, Steve told me Granite’s population had shot up 2,800 percent over the previous 40 years, since 1970.

So, what was the secret of Granite’s amazing growth rate? Simple: Start with a really small number.

And it didn’t get much smaller than Granite’s population in 1970. At that time, Granite’s population’s name was Ote Ford.

Ote was Granite’s mayor, of course. Also, it's City Council president, police chief, dogcatcher, treasurer, secretary of state — you get the idea.

By 2009 Granite’s population had risen to 28, so that means it grew 2,800 percent relative to the time when Ote Ford was its only resident.

Ote liked to joke that Granite had a “Republican administration.” This was pretty funny, but also very ironic, because if Granite’s founder had heard that back when the town was new, he probably would have run down Main Street shooting into the air like Yosemite Sam.

Granite was one of the rootin’, tootin’ boomtowns that sprang up deep in the Blue Mountain wilderness in the few decades after gold was discovered at Griffin Creek in 1861 — towns like Sumpter and Bourne and, a little farther afield, Cornucopia.

In Granite’s case, what happened was, that on July 4, 1862, a prospector named Jack Long was on his way back to a mining claim he was helping work, some distance away. He was on a “beer run,” if you will, but because he had to pack it dozens of miles across Blue Mountain country, he was bringing whiskey rather than beer.

As he was crossing a mud flat along Granite Creek, his mule, Betsey, got stuck in it and, with the burden of a huge load of whiskey on her back, couldn’t get herself free.

Long helped her get out. Then, probably while washing the mud off her hocks in the creek, he discovered the mud she’d gotten stuck in was mixed with grains and flakes of gold.

The whiskey never made it to its destination. Long stopped right there, staked out a mining claim, and got busy working it.

Word spread fast. You might think Long would want to keep his strike secret, but in 1862 miners in the Blue Mountains were trespassers on Indian tribes’ lands, and it was dangerous to work alone. So, soon he had lots of company, and a town soon sprang up nearby.

Long called it Independence, because Betsey got stuck in the mud on the Fourth of July. It’s not entirely clear why this date was special to Long, because he was, like almost everyone else in town, a solid Southern Democrat and all in favor of the Confederate States of America. There’s a story about that, passed on in a 1939 WPA Oregon Folklore Studies interview with old-time Granite resident Mrs. Neil Niven:

In 1864, Long learned from government records that someone in his town had voted for Abraham Lincoln. Suitably fortified with liquor, he stormed through town with a pistol in one hand and a bowie knife in the other, accosting everyone he saw. “Did you dare vote for Abraham Lincoln?” he’d holler.

Everyone answered “no,” until a man riding by on a horse reined in. “I dared to vote for Lincoln. What are you going to do about it?”

Dead silence fell. A crowd started to gather. Finally Long broke the silence: “Well, that makes one. Where’s another?”

“I thought you were going to shoot the first Black Republican you met, Jack!” yelled someone from in the crowd.

“Well,” Long said, “you can’t shoot a man on his horse.”

This story kind of makes Long sound like a gruff but lovable frontier character, and maybe he was one; but Mrs. Niven doesn’t remember him that way.

“Jack Long, drunk or sober, was an obnoxious man,” she said. “His good qualities were usually submerged in by-gone gallons of liquor. He probably had as few friends as any man alive.”

The official Census statistics on Granite list a high-water mark of just under 500 residents, in 1870; but, throughout the 1800s at least, the real population was much higher than that. Mrs. Niven says there were about 3,000 Chinese miners, who would buy played-out mines and work the tailings over; because they had more skill and patience than European-American miners, they got quite a bit of “color” out of what the Westerners thought was worthless slag. Many a miner, chortling over the money a Chinese man had paid him for a “worthless slag heap,” found out later that the joke was on him.

There was also a community of Cornish miners living in shanties just outside town, whom the census people didn’t bother to count. Like the Chinese, the Cornishmen kept to themselves and didn’t mix with the mainstream community.

Granite was not particularly unusual for what it was — a mining town, mostly made up of temporary structures and mostly inhabited by transient bachelors who were just there to make lots of money and had no intention of sticking around after the gold ran out.

What made the town special and memorable was Mrs. Niven — a truly witty chronicler of the madness of her time. Years after Granite’s heyday, she remembered and recorded the flavor of the place.

She originally came to Granite to serve as a schoolteacher and became one of three eligible single girls living in a town bursting with young bachelors there to work in the mines.

“We three girls ... had a glorious time,” Mrs. Niven wrote. “Every bachelor there at one time or another asked us for a date.”

Granite was a hard-rock mining town, so mining operations were mostly hydraulic operations and sometimes involved stamp mills; the owner of a claim usually couldn’t work it alone. So the claim owners would hire crews of young men to dig ore, run sluices, and so forth. The hired hands would participate in most parts of the operation, but the cleaning of the sluice boxes — retrieving the gold from them — was typically done by the mine owner himself. Even so, lots of gold got stolen by hired hands, who would slip it into their socks or special hollowed-out handles on their picks.

All of them, owners and workers alike, were there for a good time rather than a long time. Then as now, Granite is tolerable in the late spring and early summer, glorious in late summer and early fall, and horrible for the rest of the year. Nobody wanted to put down roots and raise a family there. So, except for the ones who were seriously trying to impress one of the three or four available maidens, most of the lads partied hard and often, especially in the winter when the whole community was cut off from the outside world and there was nothing else to do but shovel snow.

“They would get hell-roaring drunk and gamble their hard-earned money away as if it were water,” Mrs. Niven said. “Usually when someone got liquored up he would march up and down the streets shooting off his guns. ... One fellow who was normally rather a quiet chap would occasionally go off on a big spree. When he did this we could always plan on some fancy buckarooing and hollering. He would mount his horse and ride up and down the streets hollering, making his horse buck, and shooting his gun in the air. He never hurt anyone, and it certainly was amusing to watch. I suppose you could class it as just good clean fun.”

What she didn’t class as “good clean fun” was when liquored-up miners would waylay a Chinese miner and make him “dance” in the stereotypical Western manner by cracking pistols close by his feet.

“We girls used to wish sometimes that the Chinese would get hold of a white man and make him dance to the tune of their knives,” she said. “All of the Orientals packed knives for protection, but they only used them among themselves, and not that very often.”

When one of the miners would hit a big strike, he sometimes would treat the whole town to a big drunken party. “I remember one time a miner had just made a big strike,” Mrs. Niven said. “When he brought his bag of (gold) dust in he walked up to the saloon and, while standing at the door, he threw his bag of gold dust across the room and it lit on the bar, breaking the bag and making a big dent in the bar. He yelled ... ‘Come on, you mud sluckers, the drink is on me.’ It was one of the wildest, wooliest nights Granite ever had.”

Mrs. Niven was 67 years old when she sat down with WPA writer William C. Haight in 1939 for the oral history interview I’ve been quoting so liberally from. By then she was living in Canyon City with her husband, Neil. Writer Haight doesn’t give us a lot to go on; he seems not to have liked her very much. He describes her as a “short, round, dark-haired, slow-moving little lady,” and doesn’t even tell us her real name — no first name, no maiden name, just “Mrs. Neil Niven.” But he did his oral history job like the professional he was, and her wry, witty, occasionally ironic voice comes through clearly to us. If you’re at all interested in frontier mining life, it’s well worth looking up.

Neither of them could have known it, but Granite as she knew it had less than three years left. In 1942, with the U.S. involved in World War II, the federal government’s War Production Board decided gold mining was non-essential to the war effort, and shut down all gold mining in the country to free up the labor of the miners to do other work.

The order was lifted after the war ended, but by then the mines had all lain fallow for four years; timbers had shifted and become dangerously waterlogged, some mines had filled with water, and the mines had been playing out anyway. Nobody bothered trying to reopen them; everyone just moved on. And Granite became a ghost town, more or less.

But never completely. And today, it’s still growing. It’s a gorgeous little mountain town, about 4,500 feet above sea level; vacationers and elk hunters from other parts of the state come and see it, and fall in love with it.

Consequently, Granite is no longer the smallest incorporated city in Oregon. That honor now goes to nearby Greenhorn — whose year-round population is zero.

(Sources: “Occupational and Social life of Granite,” an oral history account obtained and transcribed by William C. Haight of the WPA Federal Writers Project in 1939, https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001942/; Ghost Towns of the Northwest, a book by Norman Weis published in 1971 by Caxton Press; correspondence with Mayor Steve Smith in August 2009.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon was published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.