Elk City Mining News (Elk City, Idaho)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
502 issues from 1903 to 1913, published in Crooked River, Idaho, digitised for Chronicling America.
Elk City was a mining town that popped up between Elk Creek and American Creek after gold was discovered in the nearby Clearwater River in 1861. The boom town quickly ballooned to 2,000 inhabitants before discoveries in nearby mines in Montana siphoned off workers. Placer mining, the mining of steam bed deposits for minerals, was lucrative in the area. James and William Galbraith established an express operation, shipping nearly a million dollars’ worth of gold dust by the end of the 1862 season. Miners leased newly-constructed mining ditches, saw mills opened to supply lumber, and Chinese miners found success placer mining in Elk City, and in the 1880s Chinese inhabitants of Elk City outnumbered whites. In 1887 white men from Coeur d’Alene entered the camp and took the best claims owned by Chinese miners. The matter went to the courts, and in 1889 Judge Sweet decided that “aliens” could not own mining ground under U.S. mining law. According to the Butte Miner, this resulted in a sharp and quick decline of the Chinese population in mining camps along the Clearwater River. In the 1890s, mining in the area continued and dredging techniques were introduced.
The Elk City Mining News was published from 1903-1913 with eight pages and six columns. The paper was published weekly on Saturdays until 1910, when the publication day changed to Thursday. George F. Hamilton published the paper. Charles Hofstetter was its first editor, followed by JLC McCaffrey in 1905. The Mining News…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Crooked River, Idaho, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress