Dredging also cut off fish access to the historic floodplain and riparian zone. Dredge mining completely rechanneled about six miles of the lower Yankee Fork, left hundreds of tailings piles scattered along the river bank, widened and straightened the river channel, and left the river bottom littered with boulders and cobble – and very little gravel for salmon spawning. While the Yankee Fork was rich with gold, it also was rich with spring Chinook salmon, steelhead, bull trout, and westslope cutthroat trout. In 1966, its owners donated it to the U.S. Later, a small dredge had some success, but the dredge that became a fixture of the river, a monster at 112 feet long and 54 feet wide, was completed in 1940 and operated until 1952. The placer deposits were rich but, dug primarily by hand, soon played out. By 1879 the population had grown to 2,000. Miners swarmed into the area, and a town was platted called Bonanza City. Everyone in the party was a Yankee.įour years later, others found gold found on Jordan Creek, a Yankee Fork tributary, and soon a mining district was organized. After several fruitless weeks they left without finding gold, but they left behind a name that sticks to this day. In 1866, one year after the end of the Civil War, a group of Montana prospectors explored the upper Salmon River Basin looking for placer mining opportunities and found a likely candidate in an as-yet unnamed large tributary. The Yankee Fork holds a notable place in Idaho history. “We’ve taken a uniform channel and turned it into something that is much more complex, with the kind of features that an anadromous fish would be looking for when it comes back for spawning.”

“With the help of our partners, we are improving instream complexity with the placement of large wood and rocks to create a more complex habitat that has ripples and pools and deep runs, trying to make this into more of a natural-looking stream,” Stone said. “We are starting to see the bottom of the channel take shape with aquatic vegetation,” he said. The progress is impressive.ĭanny Stone, policy analyst for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe, told the Council that riparian vegetation is rebounding.

Representatives of a multi-disciplinary team working to rebuild spring Chinook salmon and steelhead runs in the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River reported on their progress repairing the damage done by decades of dredge mining. The Council got a history lesson at its September meeting in Eagle, Idaho.

Yankee fork dredge