Placer gold deposits were discovered in 1870 by Sylvester Jordan and Captain Dudley B. Varney along a tributary of the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River. (Captain Varney is only the second person with my surname that I have found in my ghost town travels.) That small tributary, later known as Jordan Creek in Sylvester Jordan’s honor, enticed a stream of prospectors to descend upon the remote diggings. Securing necessary supplies became an immediate problem. In 1876, the town of Challis was built as a center for the distribution of goods to the Yankee Fork mines. A toll road from Challis to the Yankee Fork area, completed in 1879, provided a link to the outside world.
BONANZA was the first mining camp along the Yankee Fork, founded in 1877 by Charles Franklin to serve the prospectors and miners who had rushed to the area. A town of more than six hundred people, the community had refinements not often found in placer mining camps: baseball and croquet fields, a watchmaker’s shop, an actual street grid, and community wells with a piped water system for drinking and fire protection. That system, however, was not sufficient to protect Bonanza from major fires in 1889 and 1897. After the second conflagration, most people moved to neighboring Custer. When the final mine closed near Bonanza, the town was moribund.
WALKING AND DRIVING AROUND BONANZA
Bonanza today is a minor site with a few standing, leaning, and tumbling cabins. If you follow Forest Service Road 074 to the west, in one-half mile you’ll arrive at the Bonanza Cemetery. This graveyard features an informative sign that relates how different ethnic groups contributed to the Idaho mining boom. Large numbers of Canadians, Germans, Englishmen, Irishmen, and Swedes worked the area. Cornish miners were employed by English bosses at the General Custer Mine. Austrians were imported for their road-building skills. Italians were preferred anywhere there were kilns, as they were experts at the controlled-heat process of turning wood to charcoal. The Chinese comprised the largest single group, reworking picked-over placer claims, running family-owned laundries, and working as clerks in various businesses. There are, however, no graves of Chinese in this cemetery: Their remains were temporarily buried but then later disinterred for transportation back to China. Large organizations existed for this cultural service, especially during the California Gold Rush.
Bonanza’s tumbling buildings sit right along the main road, which may partially account for why they are deteriorating so rapidly.
One of those buried in the cemetery is Captain Dudley Varney. He originally came to the West in 1864 with one of Jim Bridger’s expeditions before making the claim on the Yankee Fork with partner Jordan.
Many replacement wooden markers, along with approximately a dozen head-stones, are in the cemetery. One child’s grave is marked with a “cradle” fence and an arch, from which flower baskets were suspended.
A second cemetery, Boot Hill, is .9 of a mile beyond the first. It contains only three graves and a sign telling of a grisly mystery: Realtor Richard King died in an argument with his business partner. His wife, Lizzie, and a friend, Charles Franklin, bought three burial plots. It was assumed they were for Richard and, eventually, the two of them. Lizzie, despite rumors of an impending wedding to Franklin, married Bonanza newcomer Robert Hawthorne. The two subsequently were found dead. Charles Franklin left the area and was eventually found dead in his cabin clutching a locket containing a picture of Lizzie King. Was he a double murderer and then a suicide victim? Or were, perhaps, the newly married couple’s deaths a murder-suicide? Whatever the answer, people in Bonanza did not wish to bury their loved ones near such tainted ground, and the graves of Richard King, Lizzie King, and Robert Hawthorne are the only ones at Boot Hill. The name of the cemetery, like many such notorious gravesites throughout the American West, comes from the expression “they died with their boots on,” meaning violently. In this case, the term applies to all three people residing there.
The Yankee Fork Dredge is a rarity in the American West. Since it was not salvaged, it sits virtually intact in a pond of its own making.
THE YANKEE FORK DREDGE stands north of the townsite of Bonanza very near the spot of Varney and Jordan’s original find at the confluence of Jordan Creek and the Yankee Fork.
The dredge was constructed about five miles downstream at Pole Flat in 1940. It worked its way north, creating its own standing pond in the Yankee Fork, chewing through the river bottom and upturning the bed into huge piles of river rock, which you drove through on your way to Bonanza. The dredge operated until 1952, with a hiatus during World War II, when Law 208 made mining of non-war-related minerals illegal. First, the good news: The dredge recovered more than a million dollars’ worth of gold and silver. Next, the bad news: It cost slightly more than it recovered to run the dredge. The huge operation, which lasted about eight years, was essentially a wash. But in its day, according to local author-historian Howard A. Packard Jr., it was quite a sight: “The Yankee Fork gold dredge looked like a well-lighted four-story hotel, lost in the mountains.”
The schoolhouse at Custer would likely have disappeared were it not for Tuff and Edna McGown, who saved it and turned it into a museum in 1960.
A self-guided tour of the Yankee Fork Dredge is well worth the modest admission, and, because it is self-guided, you may take as little or as much time as you like. Parents with small children may appreciate that option.
CUSTER was founded in 1879, two years after Bonanza. The town was named for the area’s principal mine, the General Custer, which had been discovered in 1876, not long after the famous Battle of Little Bighorn in that same year in which Custer made his last stand.
The town was founded by Samuel L. Holman, a graduate of Harvard Law School who headed to the West shortly after the death of his fiancée. He became the first justice of the peace in the recently created community of Bonanza, but he also worked claims along the Yankee Fork. As the General Custer Mine prospered, Holman saw that his claims would be more profitable as city lots, so in 1879, he laid out the town of Custer, which eventually surpassed Bonanza in importance. That occurred after a thirty-stamp mill was constructed north of town to process the estimated nine hundred tons of ore per month that were yielding about a million dollars’ worth of gold annually.
The Yankee Fork’s mineral wealth played out in the early years of the twentieth century, and both Bonanza and Custer eventually emptied. Only the Yankee Fork Dredge brought the area back to life beginning in 1940.
WALKING AND DRIVING AROUND CUSTER
Now a state park (donations are accepted, but there is no admission charge), Custer contains several buildings of interest, including one of the more photogenic false-front buildings in Idaho, the Empire Saloon. The structure was built sometime before 1903 and is now used as the park’s headquarters. Across the street from the saloon is the 1900 former schoolhouse, now a very worthwhile museum. A walking tour brochure will increase your enjoyment of the town.
As you leave Custer heading north, on your right you’ll see the stepped-down hillside marking the location of the General Custer Mine’s mill, which, like several other buildings, burned in 1986 as the result of a fire caused by a carelessly discarded cigarette.
The Custer Cemetery is a mile north of town on the west side of the road. Seven marked graves are at the site, including one of antiquity. It is for Julian Riley Thompson, and his is a story of true pathos: As an infant, Julian suffered from convulsions, so his mother bathed the child in warm water to ease the symptoms. To be certain the water would always be ready, a kettleful was kept on the stove. On one fateful occasion, Julian’s mother retrieved the kettle only to find it empty; a houseguest had used the water to wash dishes. The frantic mother rushed to a nearby saloon and returned with hot water, only to find that she was too late. Julian Thompson died in 1881 at seven months of age.
WHEN YOU GO
From Clayton, drive west on Idaho Highway 75 for 19.7 miles to Sunbeam. Turn north on Yankee Fork Road (Forest Service Road 013) and proceed 7.8 miles north to Bonanza. Where the road turns from pavement to dirt, you will see extensive evidence of the tailings of dredging operations extending north to Bonanza. In fact, you’ll be driving on a smoothed portion of it.