First published on Oct. 6, 2011, in the Quincy Valley Post Register - Quincy, WA
Trinidad, Washington 1876 – John Welch and a party of gold miners, including Welch’s wife, young daughter, two nephews and part-Indian guide, passed through Trinidad on their way from the goldfields of British Columbia to their home in Portland, Ore. When they left, approximately 200 pounds of gold remained. The gold would have fetched around $250 per pound. Today, the gold would be valued at over $5 million.
Gold had been discovered along the Clearwater River in Idaho in 1860, and also along the Caribou Trail located north of Omak into Canada. Many left their homes and headed north in search of riches. Around the time John Welch and his party passed through Trinidad, some of the gold seekers had given up and settled down to farm the land. Those who settled in Eastern Washington had peaceful relationships with the Indians.
The Chinese miners along the Columbia River had a different experience.
“Chinese who had escaped the railroad chain gangs of California to seek gold along the river were being driven out or massacred, probably because the Chinese had taken Indian girls into their camps,” wrote Faye Morris in the book They Claimed a Desert.
“The 1870 census of eastern Washington listed only two Chinese women in the region at the time,” said Tom Hackenmiller in the book, Wapato Heritage. “Loneliness and necessity brought Chinese men and Indian maidens together in marriage or other fleeting unions. The Indians resented that their young women cavorted with these unwanted Oriental interlopers.”
The conflict between the Chinese miners and the Indians started in the late 1850s and came to a boiling point in 1875 when Indians in the Chelan area killed over 300 Chinese miners.
Welch and his party had stopped just south of Trinidad on the first bench above the river when he learned of the Chinese/Indian conflicts and that Indians were on the warpath. The Indian guide suggested the miners hide the gold, then resigned as guide. The party decided to hide the gold they were carrying, along with other items they thought would help lighten their load and make them less vulnerable to Indian attacks. After drawing a map of the area and the hidden items, they crossed the river and headed for Ellensburg and their homes in the Portland area.
When they reached Portland, they tried to get a military escort back to Trinidad to retrieve the gold. The request was denied. Some of the facts of this visit to Trinidad are sketchy. As some stories go, the party knew they were being watched by Indians. Other stories say that they were searched by Indians after hiding the gold. Some wonder if there were only three men in the party and two died shortly after arriving in Portland. Others report at least four men in the party.
For the next 40 years, the record is silent. It appears that no one from the party came back to claim the hidden gold. After the turn of the 19th century, numerous attempts were made to find the gold. Each attempt and claimed success is shrouded by mystery and uncertainty. Some of the facts are uncertain and vary with each storyteller.
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The Columbia River at Trinidad and Crescent Bar as it looked in 1918.
Courtesy of the Quincy Valley Historical Society |
The first attempt to recover the hidden gold was made in the fall of 1906. The Quincy Quill mentioned that two men, one a Mr. Stevenson, came to Trinidad. Mr. Stevenson claimed to have been in the Welch party. Some say the second man was Mr. Welch himself.
As the story goes, the two men hired two Trinidad teenage boys to act as guides. The men searched for a week before leaving. Stevenson returned some time later, hired a wagon and was seen loading boxes onto the train when he left. It is unsure if he found the gold or not.
In an article by Rufus Woods, originally published in the Wenatchee Daily World on July 11, 1932, he wrote about a conversation he had with W. D. Van Slyke, the former Trinidad hotel keeper. Van Slyke related some of what a visiting old man had told him 25 to 30 years prior.
“He was one of the men who had left it there in 1876,” Van Slyke told Woods. “His story was that the party of miners had found it necessary to separate during the night. They left in parties of twos. He and his partner headed north along the Columbia, hiding in the day time and traveling at night. They crossed the dry canyon north of Trinidad, went over the hill and made their way across Rock Island Canyon, and later they crossed the Columbia. The man told me that the party was to meet in a certain hotel on a certain date in Portland but they never met.”
The visiting man searched the area, along with the help of one of the local teenage boys, for three weeks before leaving. The man would search the area, then return to one certain spot every evening, appearing to be regaining his bearings. Van Slyke said that two weeks after the man left, he and the boy went back to the search area. They found tracks from a team and buggy and holes where they assumed he had dug. The man had previously told Van Slyke the cache was impossible to find. But Van Slyke believed the tracks and holes indicated the man had found the gold after all. It is not certain if Van Slyke’s man was Stevenson on his return trip to the area or not. However, the two stories seem to fit together, making the possibility look probable.
Around 1909 or 1913, a lady named Mrs. Eliza Turtle or Anna Tuttle (The name varies depending on the story. Eliza Turtle seems to be a more likely name.) visited Trinidad, claiming to have been the small girl from the Welch party, and the only survivor. She had a map her father had made of the hidden gold and said the party hid the gold and personal items in two holes close to each other. She thought she might be able to find the gold if she could find the right area. Her attempts were unsuccessful. She returned multiple times, but found nothing.
“At first the people in the vicinity showed a keen interest in the quest for the gold and many of them instituted searching parties of their own,” wrote Rufus Woods in a Wenatchee Daily World article originally published on July 8, 1932, “but as no trace was ever found of the object of the quest, it became a tradition in and around Quincy that the entire story was a myth, and anyone who wasted any time looking for this gold which never existed was regarded as being slightly ‘off.’”
Somewhere between 1909 and 1912, Ted Williams and Harry Webley found some articles believed to have been hidden from the Welsh party. In an article entitled, "The Trinidad Gold: Fact or Fiction?," Faye Morris, author of They Claimed a Desert, told about this sighting.
"About 1912, Harry Webley reported that while setting traps in a cave, he and his father discovered two old pack saddles, several old cow bells and a small box containing a pair of eye glasses, some beads, several small bottles and a piece of silk cloth. According to Harry, they took the box but left the saddles. I have a letter written by Harry in which he relates his story. The Webleys had heard of the story of the lost gold and so spent some time searching the area before trying to locate Mrs. Tuttle. She had left her address at the Van Slack store in Trinidad, but the store had burned and her address lost. The stories don’t match, for she was not supposed to have visited the area until 1913. Other rumors say that Harry recovered the saddles and put them in the Ellensburg museum. However, the museum has no record of this."
In another article by Rufus Woods, originally published on July 9, 1932, relates seeing the items first hand during a a fact-finding trip to Quincy in which he and three men from Quincy visited the Webley home.
"There we saw some of the material – a piece of old dress goods, two pairs of old fashioned spectacles, comb, brush, jewel case and other small articles," wrote Woods. "The articles bore the unmistakable evidence of their long rest underground. Ted Williams and his sister each have at their homes other articles found."
In a July 8, 1932 article, Rufus Woods said that the saddles were found prior to Mrs. Turtle’s last visit. She was shown where they had been found and dug around the area for some time, but turned up empty.
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The Columbia River as it looks today. The construction of Wanapum Dam
made the river behind the dam wider. |
It was also reported that two men, claiming to have been hired to search for the gold, built a cabin in the Ancient Lakes area. They searched for several years before for one man mysteriously died. The other man stayed for year and disappeared.
Another gold seeker was Lynn Cramer of Vancouver. Cramer purchased a metal detector and began searching for the gold. When he wanted to get a better detector later on, he was told by the company that the owner, a Mr. Lincoln, had found 60 pounds of the hidden gold. His partner, Mr. Garret, confirmed the story some time later.
"Lynn theorized that this was probably the gold belonging to Welch’s two nephews," said Faye Morris in "Trinidad Gold". "This gold wasn’t buried as everyone had supposed, but was found three feet above the ground, stuck in a crevice in a large rock and covered with a flat rock. The description was so precise that I visited the area and found the spot where the dirt had sifted around the saddlebags to leave their print, so I feel that the story was true."
One other story tells of a homesteader who built his cabin close to the spot where some of the gold was supposedly found. He gave up his homestead after only a few years and embarked on a trip around the United States, stopping at the World’s Fair in St. Louis. He later bought a house in Quincy, where he lived the rest of his life. It is unclear if he found any of the gold.
The hidden gold at Trinidad is still a mystery today. No one is sure who actually found the gold or if it has really been found. Did Mr. Stevenson find most of the gold and Mr. Lincoln find the rest? Or did the Indian guide perhaps see where the Welch party hid the gold and come back to claim it for himself? Did the waters of Wanapum Dam cover whatever gold may still be hidden?
No one will ever know.
