MPR: The Minnesota Gold Rush

The Minnesota Gold Rush
By Bob Kelleher, Minnesota Public Radio
July 16, 2001

Gold fever struck Minnesota in the turbulent years following the Civil War. The state Legislature commissioned a mineral survey of the lands north of Duluth. Geologist Henry Eames completed the survey in 1865.

According to historian Dana Miller of Hibbing, the payoff was "high quantities of gold, gold encased in quartz. The governor got the samples, the news got out, and the gold rush ensued; people feeling that gold was there for the taking, and it really wasn't," Miller says.

What gold was there was trapped, locked in hard quartz rock and surrounded by another hard rock, greenstone. Yet hundreds of miners made the 80-mile trip from Duluth to Lake Vermilion - many during the winter of 1865-66 - ready to stake a claim before the snow melted. They travelled over snow-packed forests and swamps.

"It's called the Vermilion Trail," says Miller. "Essentially it's Highway 4 today. Eventually it comes into Biwabik, although it's not the original trail anymore, but it roughly parallels that right up to Lake Vermilion. And that was the basic way during the wintertime, when - because there was a lot of swamps in there - the land was frozen. In the summertime, until that was completed as a road, a lot of times it was easier to go by canoe. It was 80-miles of mosquito-infested terrain."

More than 400 miners made the trip, fanning out across Lake Vermilion, swinging their pickaxes on the large lake's pine-studded islands, and around its forested shoreline. A town was formed nearby.

"The Mutual Protection Company settled there, and plotted out a town," according to Miller. "They called it Winston City, in honor of their general manager. They had a boarding house, some houses and a couple of saloons. They had to have that. But then when they left, the people who were left over, changed the name to Vermilion City. You can still see that site along Highway 169, where the original Winston City plot was."

Winston City lasted just a little longer than the gold rush. Miners found it impossible to recover what specks of gold they could locate in the hard rock. By the following winter, disappointed prospectors were heading back out, with little record of any sticking around for the next year. It was Minnesota's first gold rush, and it was a bust.

"It became a regular fiasco. And, of course, the bottom line was, there's gold there, basically we didn't have the technology or the capitalism. They didn't find anything," Miller says.

History recorded another gold rush late in the century, in what's now Voyageurs National Park. The 1894 gold rush helped develop the border town of International Falls. The Little American Mine actually recovered a modest quantity of gold from under an island, but the vein ran out, and so did the miners by about 1897.

Since then, many attempts have been made to find a promising, and recoverable body of gold, but so far, none's been uncovered.

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