![]() Many harbor bitter memories of stories told by their grandparents of the miners destroying villages and washing down whole hillsides with giant hydraulic nozzles to get at the gold mixed in with the quartz and serpentine that color the rocks blue-green, gray and white. When miners killed Karuk people and destroyed their villages in the 1850s, the survivors faded into the hills, where they eked out a living hunting deer, fishing for salmon and even panning a little gold to buy flour for frybread.Ī century and a half later, members of the Karuk Tribe have mixed feelings about the fight. It's going to be tough to make money at it." "For commercial activity, dredging is what gains you access to high-grade gold deposits at the bottom of the river," he said. ![]() Many are held by the 2,000 members of a gold mining club based in Happy Camp, an economically struggling, former timber town on the Klamath River in Northern California. The state this year issued 3,500 dredge mining permits to people from around the country. ![]() "They kind of had us backed into a corner. "We offered up a compromise awhile back with some of the gold-mining folks out there," said tribal member Bob Goodwin, who still fishes the Klamath with the traditional nets tied to Douglas fir poles. Fish and Game spokeswoman Kirsten Macintyre said the study should be done by summer 2011.īesides altering the shape of the river and stirring up silt, there is evidence dredging can release toxic mercury locked in the riverbed, which can harm young salmon and lamprey, a jawless eel-like fish that is food for salmon as well as the Karuk, scientists say. The legislation brings an immediate halt. An injunction revised last month ordered the department to stop selling new dredging permits until the environmental review is completed. ![]()
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