The Discovery at Alder Gulch

May 26, 2013, marks an important anniversary. On that date in 1863, Barney Hughes, Thomas Cover, Henry Rodgers, William Fairweather, Henry Edgar, and Bill Sweeney discovered gold along a stream fringed with alder trees. Word soon leaked out, and two hundred miners trampled the ground to the discovery site; many others quickly followed. Within two weeks, dwellings lined a crude road connecting numerous settlements, dubbed the “Fourteen-mile City.” Of these settlements scattered along the gulch...