It’s a slow, difficult process, made much more complex by the Lower Four Dams on the Snake River, and the barrier those dams present to both out-migrating juvenile fish and returning spawners. Yet it is the Shoshone-Bannock who have undertaken to recover, to the extent it may be possible, the Yankee Fork as a salmon-spawning habitat. Obliteration of the valley was another in a depressingly long list of Anglo treaty violations. and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, who had reserved to themselves under those treaties the right to use and fish in the valley.

The mistreatment of the Yankee Fork was arguably a violation of the Indian treaties between the U.S. We love the Yankee Fork and enjoy all the outdoor activities from snow machines to summer hikes and time with friends around the outdoor fire pit especially church in the great. Please be careful when driving through our neighborhood kids and adults are normally at play. But the gravel beds and structure the fish need for their redds, their spawning beds, were destroyed when the river was channelized and straightened. The Dredge, Sunbeam Store, White Otter Rafting, and Custer City. The Yankee Fork used to be an important salmon spawning habitat for Chinook and Sockeye Salmon. Restoration is going to take decades, can only approximate what was there before, and is going to cost multiples of the value of the gold recovered. Fifty years on, it’s a landscape of windrows of cobbles and gravel, sterile looking and sparsely vegetated where there’s any vegetation at all.

It is close to the historical Yankee Fork Gold Dredge, Bonanza, Custer Mining Town, and the Salmon River. The valley in which the dredge operated is pretty much a ruin. Almost every summer and winter activity you can think of is available on the Yankee Fork. The heirs of the men who ran the dredge are weirdly proud WC, in their position, would be embarrassed. The parts were shipped by train to Mackay, then. The results were good enough that the company contracted with Bucyrus-Erie Company to build a dredge. The dredge is an historic monument now, open for tours during the summer. In 1939 the Snake River Mining Company, part of Silas Mason Company, tested the Yankee Fork for gold dredging. Approximately six miles of stream habitat on private land on the YFSR have been severely altered by dredge -mining (1938-1952), eliminating much of the natural meander pattern of the stream and. Effectively, the valley floor was turned upside down chasing gold. The Yankee Fork Restoration Project is working to improve floodplain/riparian zones along the dredge sections of the Yankee Fork Salmon River (YFSR). Google Earth image of a portion of the Yankee Fork valley floor, showing dredge tailings and re-channelization of the riverĪ gold mining dredge operated along 5.5 miles of the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River from 52.

Yankee fork dredge