Mining Prospects in the Boise Basin are Depopulating Oregon Gold Camps

On May 25, 1863, an “Occasional Correspondent” in Auburn, Oregon wrote a letter to the Evening Bulletin in San Francisco, California. Auburn was a short-lived gold town located about eight miles southwest of today’s Baker City. (Founded in the spring of 1862, the town boomed to over five thousand people, but had dwindled to a couple hundred by the end of 1864).

The writer noted that men along the Pacific Coast were “rushing to Boise, and fast developing the mineral resources of the new Territ...