GRANTS PASS, Ore., Nov. 23.--(AP)--It was sixty years ago this Thanksgiving that Sam Herd, two-gun and one bottle gambler, was a trifle slow on the draw down at the old bar in old Browntown. It was there that the career of a characteristic bad man of the West ended in a splash of lead and blood. It was soon afterwards that the fame of the famous old mining town began to dim. Today few can find the ruins of the village.
    Back in the '50s, when gold was panned out by the tons, old Browntown was the concentration point for all metals coming out of the Walker Gulch, Sucker Creek and Bolan Creek. The gold assayed considerable higher than the morals of the adventurous men and women who frequented the saloons and gambling houses.
    It was in 1859 that a domineering miner and big-stake gambler hit the gulch. His popularity ran as high as his stakes, and for a time he ruled the outfit. But no one could control the conglomeration of human derelicts that came under the lure of gold.
    Herd, according to the story that was handed down, came into one of the favorite saloons and commanded the crowd to become quiet. Herd, it is said, always carried two guns, a bottle and a bowie knife. That night the bowie knife tangled with one of his guns as he was answering a threatening movement of a miner. The miner saw his chance and shot the leader to death. He was buried with great pomp.
    Today a few miles south of Grants Pass stand the rotting ruins of what were once old dance halls. Gone is everything but the bare foundations. Coyotes howl where once sang the miner. Mother ground owls blink now where once dance hall queens held forth.
    Old Browntown is no more. The washes and gulches no longer yield the same amount of precious metal that made the town famous. If there are ghost mining towns where the shades of characters of the past assemble as the clock strikes midnight, then it would seem they are passing an opportunity if they do not hold a nightly conference on the ruins of old Browntown.

    Nine miles west of Althouse on the old stage road to Crescent City lies the old mining town of Waldo, or Sailor Diggings, as it was formerly called. The facts connected with the history of Waldo are so interwoven with those of Browntown, on Althouse Creek, as to make each place in many respects identical with the other. Miners and gamblers went back and forth from Waldo to Althouse. Hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands, and even with a mixture of rough happenings there were rounds of pleasure and enjoyment in those prosperous times when money seemed within the reach of everyone who was industrious.
    The town of Waldo was situated in a small hollow between low hills, through which the old stage road runs. Here in early mining days there were good buildings where neat and cozy homes were made, saloons and dance halls, hotels and stores, and the hollow where the center of the little town stood and the side hills around were carpeted with a mantle of green grass, studded with peach and apple trees and grape vines.
    All this was brought about by water from mining ditches. The verdure of the little nook where the old town stood was remarkable from the fact that the low hills around the town and the surrounding country are for the most part barren, resembling in many places a desert in the midst of which the small town with its carpet of green seemed a beautiful oasis. As the writer passes over the old townsite of Waldo, where only two or three of the former buildings remain, and sees the dead orchard trees, the faded carpets of grass, where everything shows abandonment and decay, he is reminded of what the traveler says about Palestine and the Holy Land, where according to the Bible the land once flowed with milk and honey, but is now a barren waste in which he can hardly realize that he is where those great scenes which have long since passed away were enacted.
    The town was called Sailor Diggings from the fact that gold was discovered in that locality by sailors who came from the coast to Waldo in the year 1852. A store and wooden dwelling house, and a large timeworn livery stable, which served in later days also as a barn, constituted the three links which connect the faded Waldo, of the present with the Golden Waldo of the past.
    The store is a good-sized building, made of concrete brick manufactured by hand, the whole covered with plaster or stucco, the building resting on a stone wall foundation. It was built by A. B. McIlwain in the year 1863. This date is marked above the recessed front entrance. Heavy iron doors and shutters were provided for further protection when needed. Under the store is a stone basement or a cellar seven to eight feet deep. Over the front entrance near the date marking the building's erection there is a noticeable crack about three feet in length. This was caused by a violent earthquake in the year 1873. About 80 feet east of the store is the house built by Mr. McIlwain in 1853, in which he and his family lived. It is a wooden structure consisting of four or five rooms, and is still in a fair state of preservation. The old barn in the west end of town dates so far back that it is impossible to fix with any degree of certainty the time of its erection. It was originally papered with a brilliant wallpaper of the period previous to the Civil War, but was "done over" with sheets of the less brilliant newspaper. These were all of the period of the Civil War, and one was disclosed to be the Weekly National Republican, a Washington, D.C. organ dated January 29, 1864. This relic of bygone days contains many pertinent references to events of the civil conflict. An item tells of the gunship Kennebec capturing a vessel laden with 10,000 rifles from Europe--supposedly for the rebels. Another item makes the people aware that France sympathizes with the cause of the North.
    McIlwain was a large man and was very passionate and hot-tempered. There were many Chinese miners in the country in the later days, and those Chinamen as customers sorely tried the patience of storekeepers. When purchasing goods they would, even for small amounts, try everlastingly to "jew" the storekeeper down to the cheapest prices, and when buying an article of any kind they would require everything of a like sort in the store shown for their examination. These Chinamen used to buy a great many pairs of gum boots, and sometimes when they would make McIlwain put every gum boot in the store on the counter to be examined before they would buy, McIlwain would lose all self-control and taking a gum boot by the leg with both hands he would strike the Chinaman with the boot over the head as hard as he was able to hit. McIlwain occupied this brick store until about 1877, when he sold out and left the country, and the store passed into the hands of the Wimer brothers, who occupied it until 1888, when Charles Decker became the owner. With his son-in-law, Thomas Gilmore, Decker conducted the store business for several years, and after his death it came into the hands of the late George Elder. McIlwain was justice of the peace while keeping store at Waldo.
    On the site of the present hotel at Waldo there stood the former Waldo Hotel, which was burned about 22 years ago, while under the proprietorship of Mrs. Mary Peacock. This hotel, which was burned, was a truly historical monument. It was built in early mining days. The building had been used as a hotel at times and then at other dates as a store. In this older hotel, Judge H. K. Hanna, the self-made judge of Jackson County, washed dishes in his younger days. He also hauled wood and mined in the vicinity of Waldo before he rose to distinction as a lawyer and judge in Jacksonville, and later as circuit judge, holding court in Jacksonville and Grants Pass. In this old hotel building Messrs. Logan & Thompson kept a store and did a large mercantile business with the people of the entire country in the early '60s.
    A man named Crandal and another named Guthrie also kept stores in Waldo in the early mining days. Long pack trains of mules laden with merchandise wended their course over the mountains from Crescent City to Waldo and Happy Camp. In the later '50s a packer named Sam Brannan drove a pack train along the above-named route, and there was a Chinese packer on the same road who owed Brannan a sum of money. The latter repeatedly asked the Chinaman to pay what he owed, but the Chinaman laughed and mockingly refused. Brannan drew a knife and, seizing the Chinaman by the queue, he cut off that appendage. The Chinaman then pulled out a pistol and shot Brannan dead in his tracks. In court the act was termed self-defense and the Chinaman was acquitted.
    Waldo, like Browntown, had its fights and tragedies. A tale is told of an old miner named Collins, who mined on Frenchtown Bar on Althouse. Collins was gambling in Waldo and while at the gaming table some players at his table began shooting and two or three were seriously wounded and fell sprawling on the floor. Collins remained sitting in his chair, unmoved, during the fracas, and laughingly remarked, "This is just as good as a Fourth of July celebration." The writer once saw several miners at Waldo, many of whom were drunk, fighting in the street in front of Frank Bryan's saloon. Some were destitute of shirts.
    Next to Althouse, in its great field of gold, is the Waldo district within a radius of three miles of the town. It is estimated that 1500 miners here worked in the year 1853. Millions of dollars of the precious metal were taken from the flats, and such streams as Allen Gulch, Scotch Gulch, Fry Gulch, Butcher Gulch, and Sailor Gulch.
    A great deal of this original mining around Waldo was done as in other localities by primitive methods, shoveling into sluice boxes, by hand. They merely skimmed in a shallow way over the surface. In many places in the flats and on the hills around Waldo there is a reddish clay intermixed with boulders, which served as a bedrock or a bottom for the workings of the oldtimers. There seems to have been but little gold found by the pioneer miners in this boulder formation, as it was called, but were are informed that this boulder formation in the Esterly Mine has been penetrated with shafts, and that good values have been found underneath in later years.
    The writer, when only a boy in his teens, worked in Scotch Gulch for wages in the summers of 1876 and 1877 and well remembers what a hard place it was to work in a deep pit at the mouth of the gulch, the bottom of which was lower than the surface of the Illinois River. The gravel was very hard to pick, something like cement, and was pitched with shovels by hand high up into a flume. Jim Connell and Batheese Decell, a French-Canadian, were the owners of the mine.
    The above-named gulch lies two miles south of Waldo.
    About one mile and a half east of Waldo and looking down on Takilma is the high mountain in which the Queen of Bronze and the Waldo copper mines are located, which have been worked at intervals for 70 years.
    Immediately over the hill south of the Elder store in Waldo is the famous Allen Gulch, noted for the great amount of gold it produced. This gulch heads on the south side of the hill and close to the summit, and runs in a southerly direction for about a mile and a quarter until it empties into Illinois River. The hill at the source of the gulch is about 1000 feet in height, and from the base of the hill to the mouth of the gulch the grade is not steep, and the form of the ground on the east side of the gulch is in broad flats approaching a level. Here on one of those flats a Catholic church was built in the early '60s, which was a source of much attraction in those days. Connected with the site of this church there is a Catholic cemetery in which several of the oldtimers--men and women--are buried.
    The priest who officiated at the church was Father F. X. Blanchard. He was a French-Canadian and a nephew of the late Bishop Blanchard of Oregon. This pioneer priest resided in Jacksonville and came down at certain dates to officiate and hold services at the Catholic church in Allen Gulch.
    Father Blanchard was a large and jolly, good-natured man and was very popular among the pioneer miners, irrespective of creed or denomination.
    When Father Blanchard came down from Jacksonville to Waldo he always carried a large bottle of whiskey along with him, and treated the miners when he met them. The roughest miners said that Father Blanchard was good fellow. They seemed to like him because he never asked any who were not Christians to join his church. He merely told them that the quicker they would identify themselves with some one of the different churches the better it would be. When he came down from Jacksonville the miners came to his church from all parts of the country the same as to a social entertainment, and he received bigger donations from miners of other creeds and non-church people than he did from members of his own church.
    Blanchard was a well-read man, a good conversationalist, and a good storyteller. He smoked a large pipe when he mingled with the miners and entertained them with his stories. He sometimes took guns away from the miners when they made war on each other.
    Father Blanchard died at St. Vincent's Hospital in Portland. The old Catholic church in Allen Gulch has disappeared long ago, and the old cemetery is covered with a growth of trees, and a few broken headstones and moss-covered graves are solemn reminders of a dead past.
    In those pioneer days an old Irishman named Coyle kept a saloon in Allen Gulch. He was the stepfather of Mike Ryder, who was afterwards sheriff of Josephine County. Coyle's saloon, like Bill Evans' store in Browntown, was the scene of innumerable combats and queer antics of wild men. Old Coyle delighted to try his muscle on those inebriated and refractory miners. When a miner who had imbibed too freely was making fierce motions and declaring war on all mankind, Old Coyle would quietly roll up his shirtsleeves and slipping gently around would watch for an opening and then land a blow with all of his ability to deliver it, which would knock the boisterous disturber topsy-turvy.
Grants Pass Daily Courier, April 3, 1935, section 3, page 7