Cold Springs Mountain Pack Trail, 1852

The Oregon gold rush lifeline to the coast

Stories from the heart of the Siskiyou Mountains, Cave Junction, Oregon

Hundreds of prospectors rushed into Illinois Valley during the gold rush of 1851 and the last thing that seemed to be on anyone's mind was where they were going to get food and other necessities of life. Any type of commodity, tool, medicine, or other things you can imagine was in demand at a mining camp and had to be brought in from hundreds of miles away, mostly from supply centers in Willamette Valley to the north or Sacramento Valley to the south.

Some entrepreneurs in Illinois Valley realized that supplies could be brought in more quickly and at less expense if a port could be established on the coast. Other mining camps in the region were also thinking about the same thing and it wasn't long before the development of a port began at a place called Paragon Bay, a name that was adopted from a ship that had wrecked there. The community that was established in 1852 was later called Crescent City.

By 1853, a pack route called the Cold Springs Mountain Trail had been established from the coast to Illinois Valley. This trail went inland from Crescent City following the Smith River to Gasquet where it climbed to Cold Springs Mountain and followed ridge tops to Oregon Mountain. At this point it dropped down the west fork of the Illinois River to a fork in the trail near the site of present day O'Brien. The fork to the east went to mines in Illinois Valley. The fork to the north went to Jacksonville, another thriving mining town in the early 1850s.

Cold Springs Mountain and Elk Camp Ridge Trail, Gasquet, Highway 199, northwest California Klamath Mountains.
Cold Springs Mountain is the high prominence in the distant center left. The trail climbed up from Gasquet on the other side of the mountain and followed the ridge in the center front toward Oregon, to the right of this picture. The white band of ocean fog just above the ridge on the right is the approximate location of Crescent City, California.

The demand for supplies intensified as prospectors poured into the area and this, in turn, caused an increase in the number of pack trains going over the Cold Springs Mountain trail. By 1855, less than five years after the first gold was discovered in Illinois Valley, it was estimated that more than a hundred pack mules may have traversed the route every day.

China Bow was a supply packer who brought supplies on long strings of pack mules from Crescent City to the gold rush camps of Oregon in 1852. One of the most memorable packers to have packed supplies in our area was a Chinese man named China Bow (right). One could hear him and his pack train coming from a long way off by his yelling - part of the time at his mules and part of the time for fun. He came to Oregon after the Civil War and lived in the Illinois Valley for over 50 years.

Pack trains began to see their decline when the first road to Crescent City was built in 1857. However, wagons were not entirely able to replace the pack mule. Winter rains turned early roads to a quagmire of mud that wagons struggled to navigate. For this reason, supplies continued to be brought over pack trails on the backs of mules, the only reliable transportation for supplies to southwest Oregon for more than 25 years.

Story by Roger Brandt

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